Why books don't work (2019)

Related: sometimes the content of the book itself ends up being totally diluted into what other people quote the book for. The best example is probably Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: a good third of the book is almost socialist, arguing against land ownership and rent seeking. Yet most people talking about Smith in an argument seem to be completely oblivious about it.

Couldn't get through the whole article to be honest. Started kicking open doors. That made me scroll to the conclusion. Which was also underwhelming.

Reading the books he mentioned, I'm reading them not to know everything word by word. I'm reading them to get a map of that topic. One that would guide me to a narrower source if needed.

To even get more Meta, let's be honest. Blog like this are not really written for the readers. They are written because the author likes that topic. I remember writing my thesis, how I had to use the books in anger to create structure, internalise it and combine them to extract conclusions.

That is also why I like all those shitty blogs about "what is a monad" or "how to deploy a nodeJS app to Heroku". Not because they are the best reads written by the people who knows most about the subject. It's the opposite, I read it and I'm proud of the writers, because I know they are the people that learned something. I'm only there to check what command-line command I need, or what library combination they use.

Looking at books like "thinking fast and slow" I also couldn't get through that book. Needed to pay too much attention that I would rather put on something else. But I think I did learn something. I've learned about trying to be more conscious about instinct and reasoning. I think that still holds up, even though not everything in that book held up to scrutiny.

With this explosion of access to information, it's become very clear that Information is the not bottleneck. It is the balance between intention, grit, pain and pleasure. Go to any writing class, you will learn to think about the goals of the text and your audience.

I will never forget of an example of someone who did Jiu-Jitsu. He talked about the fact that if you play that sport, you'll end up finding the limits of your bones, how much they can take before breaking. Everyone that does Jiu-Jitsu will see it, but seeing is just seeing. You have to experience it. I think the HN readers like to go broad, but I don't think the amount of theoretical knowledge you'll get from your 10.000 cards thick anki Library. As diving deep and using something in anger day in and day out.

Brilliant article,but I'll give a simpler factor as well - people read too many damn books! Not reading too much per se but just too many books! That combined with the fact that most books are bloated crap (because the author is incentivized to make a book out of what should be a New Yorker article at best), means that most people can't even see the point because they've been ricocheted around a concept by a single opinionated person for way too long.

For this reason I avoid reading books for the most part, and probably read one book a year at best. My to-read list is short and highly scrutinized - I probably spend days making sure a book is worth the time and memory investment. Once I apply that logic, every book I've read has been extremely rewarding and I can at least write a few thousand word summary of each. I also constantly find instances in real life when I can use anecdotes from these books and people are surprised that I remember them. It also helps that for almost every book I deliberately sought out the best tome in the topic I wanted to learn more from.

My reading list from the past 5 years or so:

1. Making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes 2. Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman 3. On Writing by Stephen King 4. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaccson 5. The Logic of Chance by Eugene Koonin 6. GEB (gave up on this one though)

Growing up, I've pretty much never learned anything from lectures or textbooks in school. In math/science you prepared by doing the exam review questions and the "humanities" type courses, to be honest, I still don't know.

As an adult I took some Coursera courses and it was much much better. There are problem sets that test your knowledge after 10 minute chunks of lecture, but the biggest difference for me was being able to 2X speed and rewind infinitely.

The ability to speed through the filler and replay parts I didn't understand makes me think that all lectures should be taught like this instead, and professors should just be available for questions and help with problem sets.

What a terrible take. If anything I'm convinced that reading blogs with pumped up titles and nothing important to say are the things that don't work.

Did anyone get the point behind the title in all that text? But sure, let's bring down the thing that has been the pillar of human knowledge for thousands of years because it's "static". Amazing...