Ask HN: Are books worth it?

Awards are a great place to start. National Book Awards, Man Booker Prize, Pulitzer, etc.

>Publishers of philosophy, literature, history and science books are also trying to make a buck, eh?

The parent however, we can presume, is neither of those things. And even if they were, they don't suggest you buy any particular work they sell in their comment, so the point still stands.

>I don't understand this sentence.

You asked the parent "How do you know?". This to be implies "where is your hard proof" - so I read it that way.

So, my point is, in this, and other cases, one does not "know" because they have some hard irrefutable hard proofs or statistics.

What would those be? Some official study cited as saying "94.2% of self-help books are inaccurate and bogus"? There can't be such a thing.

So, there's no point in asking how the parent knows, if by that you mean what's their objective, measurable basis of knowing that.

It's one of the many cases where people can only think and decide for themselves whether what the other says is valid, matches their own observations, makes sense, has some hidden intention/profit motive behind it or not, and so on.

>Right, and it seems to me that the way forward is to share our experiences in good faith to try to find the mutually true union of our worldviews, eh?

Yes.

>FFS, If you can't solve your problems by reading books we should just burn the libraries?

I don't think anybody said that we can't solve problems by reading books. E.g. we can certainly solve math problems, or a medical student learn how to fix diseases through books.

What's said is that self-helf books (and we could qualify it by saying most self-helf books), are mostly profit-driven, platitudes, silver-bullet formulas, that don't work, and don't solve problems for the majority of people who cling to them (which tend to accumulate such books, and run from guru to guru, and method to method over the years).

Of course there's also solid advice in some of those books. Usually of the kind that everybody knows already -- but have trouble following. Much akin the Christian "be kind" etc.

>You haven't read "99% of the self help shelves" have you?

No, but I've fully read over 30 over the years, and skimmed over 100s.

Technically speaking, you don't need to "read 99%" you just need to read a decent number, and assume a normal distribution of quality. In fact if you find out that the most celebrated/succesful are already crap, this makes it even easier.

And unlike literature, science, or deep non-fiction, actually skimming self-help books to distill the 5 solid paragraphs that they've turned into a 200+ page book is the best way of reading it. And for most books, even those 5 paragraphs are mostly platitudes.

Regarding the technical writing, that is indeed one of the very best examples when conveying an idea with a mindset or process on how that came to be (to varying degrees). It's not just a summary of facts or a list of tasks, but when well written it contains the core, the context, and how the core out of that context came to be. If the reader then reads it, they will not only learn the subject, but often also how that information was obtained in the first place and get a sense as to how the information was optimised for the subject, what was dismissed (and why) and often gives you a transfer of thought that allows you to continue to build on that instead of having to do the same exact learning process over again to get (and this is a lucky pun) on the same page.

Conveying an idea is hard enough as it is with the languages we have, but writing it down and having to think ahead of time what the reader might think, might already know, and might want to do afterwards, or ponder about upon finishing the work, that is a very underestimated specialism. It enables not only knowledge transfer but practically brings the level of understanding of the reader(s) to a new minimum level (being a higher level than before but not everyone might get the same out of it).

I work with a group of people in tech with varying backgrounds, ages and plans for the future, but when we need to make sure everyone has at least some equal foundation to start off from, we have at least one technical writeup (some chapters in a book, or a series of well written articles) combined with exercises to make sure that that base layer is there. You cannot really do that effectively if you were to try that with... tweets. Or just videos. Or a simple workshop. Getting somewhere still requires real work and real (time/attention) investment. Well written and researched information is at the center of this.

Every now and then I read a technical book on a subject I am not familiar with or never had a real-life purpose for. For example, a lot of projects never had to use a custom data format with custom parsers, or a new domain-specific language. Yet reading a well written book on GNU Bison can be fantastic. (i.e. the Flex & Bison one from O'Reilly) Even if you end up never writing a .y file or having a need for a custom syntax parsing system. Strangely enough, while the subject is different, and the goal is different, it can be just as entertaining or maybe even enriching as reading The Gargoyle (by Andrew Davidson) 15 years ago. No relation in content or context except that both are books.

_12 Rules for Life_ by Jordan Peterson is quite eye opening, he has an insightful view on many things.