211–220 of 513 posts
I have read countless self help books where I complained about fluffy filler material and the book should have been fifty pages instead of two hundred. Not a surprise to me that a topic distilled through an LLM is a better experience.
Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.
I work for a large online news publisher, one of the oldest in the US. Our traffic is down 50% in year. We likely won’t survive for much longer.
People use LLMs for news?
Also, I think we have oversold the concept of story-telling. Many news articles start with story telling and take a while before coming to the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share an easy-to-understand example for someone who is similarly highly sceptical of self-help products?
1. Fact vs interpretation. Many things we think of as facts are really our narrative interpretations that are incomplete. A few self help books talk about the story of 4 blind men that are asked to interact with an object: one says it’s a snake, one says it’s a tree, one says it’s a wall, one says it’s a flag. Their interpretations are all wrong, it’s an elephant trunk, leg, body and ear. So when someone says my boss…
#1 sounds a lot like stoicism.
Something not mentioned that links to both LLM training AND drop in book sales... Anna's Archive
Looking at the author's books, they're full of healthy living and optimistic narratives. In my view, maybe the problem isn't the old approach itself, but that we need to answer new questions. Like, 'How do I survive in an era where AI takes away jobs?'
And I think the most critical point in this post is this passage:
'What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.'
We use AI for things we don't consider important. If that's the case, I think the key is to convince the public that what I do is something AI cannot replace.
This stat is limited to print-books only. He talks about all sorts of other forms of content, but seems to mysteriously miss audio books. If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since 2022. So, by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience). [0] - https://electro…
> But what about ebooks and audio? Looking at all formats (print + ebook + audio) for the catalog in 2025, the second half of the year was down ~45% versus the first half.
This compares to 46% on print only
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share an easy-to-understand example for someone who is similarly highly sceptical of self-help products?
How to Win Friends and Influence People helped my career a ton. I stopped having to job search and started getting pulled up as people I knew from work advanced they would bring me with them. I haven't had to job hunt in 9 years and it's solely because that book made me more likable and personable. It made me enjoy life more too, because I have a diaspora of cool and interesting connections who would go to bat for me…
This is the part that gets me to have an almost allergic reaction. It feels like an almost homogenization of people's personalities. In my mind I picture it like this: business man A reads How to Win Friends and Influence People. Businessman B also reads it. Business man A meets B and see that they're doing the psychological tricks of the book and think "wow this guy sure knows how to win friends and influence people like I do" so they get along fantastically.
It's similar to my aversion to books like "The Game" where some men seem to have the idea there's a surefire way to pick up women. Humans are diverse and should have differences in how they treat others and react. "Remember their name, smile, talk about the other person" and all the other tricks often gets me in the mindset of "this person is media trained / inauthentic".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard disagree. I have read lots of books, participated in events and training seminars and had profound results in my life. My marriage is better because of what I learned, I am a better father and leader because of what I learned. And the fact that people sell things as part of that growth journey is how they support their ability to share the lessons and techniques.
"because of what I learned." Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Like what? I always figured they were more about coaching, persuasion, convincing. To the extent I've scanned them, I never saw any kind of new fact, definitely not about something like being married.
I'm as skeptical as you are, but teaching you something you didn't know before ain't the only channel they could conceivable help through.
Eg reading their bible can help a devout christian, even though there's nothing in there they didn't already know.