LLMs can chew through all the latest in medical research papers, psychological research papers etc. and output better more targeted info for users.
Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
311–320 of 513 posts
Re: Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
#312Humans already know what's good for them. Self-help books rarely contain new information. All they contain is motivation, depending on how well it's written. People could substitute it with chatGPT, but its unlikely to provide the same motivation. That's why you could ask chatGPT for the 10 most important lessons in the 4 day workweek, but that won't get you anywhere.
I've read a bunch of what could be considered "self help" and while they often have a lot of fluff, they do have interesting points. Many of them reference actual research studies to back those points.
I just skip the motivational fluff and dig out the useful bits. Makes them very fast reads when you can skip majority of it.
Re: Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 view self help books in a similar light as management books. They're usually not going to teach me anything new. What they will do is present something I already know, in potentially new ways and new contexts that allow me to contemplate them and keep them more front of mind. I tend to think of it almost like right thought right action. It's also worth noting that sometimes you just need to be at the right moment i…
Exactly that.
I also think of reading self-help books (or management books) as giving myself time to engage with the subject. Even if there is no groundbreaking new information, it gives me time to think about the topic. If you couldn't tell yet, I'm a slow reader.
Re: Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
#314Personally, 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.
Every time someone has said some goofy thing will go away because people are getting smarter or realizing something, it's absolutely not the case. A large number of people will always want someone to tell them that they have everything figured out and others just don't see how great they are, that they'll wake up rich and famous one day, that they're powerful, that they're beautiful, etc. Many will pay to be told thi…
I went down a rabbit hole of reading some of the "pickup artist" material many years ago, and it was fascinating because there was a whole range from the really ridiculous "one trick" peddlers who in some cases probably were proto-Andre Tates - isogynists who looked for all kinds of underhanded tactics to trick women and saw it as justified because they saw things as stacked against men - to people who were just a hair shy of more mainstream selfhelp of making yourself better to be more attractive. On the extreme end you'd see NLP, hypnosis and in some cases coaches trying to legitimise things that'd easily cross into assault. On the "near mainstream" end you'd see people pushing meditation, exercise, and mainstream authors on getting better at social situations (e.g. Dale Carnegie).
The former imploded in the aftermath of Neil Strauss' The Game, which made some of the popular techniques well known and/or mocked (e.g. you had Howard on Big Bang Theory who in the beginning "demonstrated" several of the more ridiculous methods) and a lot of the field pivoted towards closer to regular self-help because the weirder stuff would get them called out.
I wonder to what extent that contributed to channeling the people who didn't want to put in the work towards people like Andrew Tate, with the mockery that followed and the less extreme coaches in that field moving away from it leaving a whole bunch of angry young men ripe for the picking, now with one more bone to pick.
Re: Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
#315As I understood it, they were only a US thing anyway. Because of healthcare issues etc.
Re: Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
#316Most of these non-fiction, non-technical self-help books are just trash.
I say non-technical because the ones about specific subjects like "What to expect in the first year" etc. can be pretty good, but the more general "improve your life" ones are usually awful.
Re: Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Never Split the Difference”, which is a book about how to successfully communicate with terrorists. Very suitable for talking with kids! I’ve even read aloud a few chapters to my kids, because it’s very suitable for communication with parents as well
I mean this with the purest intentions. I've read Never Split the Difference, Never Eat Alone, Getting More, How to Win Friends and Influence People, etc. How do you get it to feel like it's not manipulation? I get all of these books advertise not to lie, but at the end of the day, I'm reshaping my speech to achieve a certain goal, rather than to convey facts. The best line I've come up with is something like: am I s…
Many people, especially in the tech field, have false perceptions about the inner workings of the human brain. We aren't rational automatons receiving exactly the data that has been sent out by the other automatons. That's for a multitude of reasons, the most obvious of that is the fact that only a very miniscule part of our thought is conscious (about 2% is the last number I've read about it). Even the fundamental inner workings of the brain differ from the idea you alluded to. Our brain isn't just a parser interpreting the data we receive - instead it is a black box constantly predicting what happens next, and only uses sensory input, both from the outside and from the inside of the body, to validate or falsify the prediction [1]. One of the obvious side effects if this is for example our tendency to ignore facts that don't fit to our current worldview.
So if I know that these things are as they are, and use them to communicate more successfully, is that manipulation? Then it would also be learning manipulation if kids are sent to school to learn how to write well, or how to do a presentation.
I had a situation with my kid a while ago. They were already tired, but had to take a shower. When I proposed that verbally, they denied. Then I showed them the warm water coming out of the showerhead, and they instantly agreed. So I got what I wanted (the kid getting clean), because I knew how to communicate successfully. But that isn't manipulation: I didn't lie, I didn't have a personal advantage at their cost etc. I just made it easier for them to anticipate what taking a shower would feel like.
So perhaps the distinction should be: If I can honestly and wholeheartedly argue to myself that my intentions are to the best of all participants, then that is communication. If I only care about my outcome, or even want to have adverserial outcome for the others, then that is manipulation.
But we can't use "not noticing" some mode of communication as part of the definition of manipulation simply because we all notice almost nothing consciously, compared to the sensory input we get every second of our lifes.
[1] A pretty approachable book about that, written from a researcher: How emotions are made, from Lisa Feldman Barret
Re: Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
#318unfortunately, as a reader, I am not buying any books post-ChatGPT era. Author maybe did their best, but it anyways feels like I will be buying ChatGPT's opinion
How can you read LLM generated text, it makes me feel nausious ? The same phrases and patterns repeated over and over again, blech.
> How can you read LLM generated text
I am not reading most things post-ChatGPT era (books, articles, and even Jira tickets), by habit I am looking at the dates (hopefully they are correct) and then adjusting my effort level accordingly, anything post-ChatGPT depending on the blog author I send to summarization, if I really trust and know the author then I read their article.
Re: Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
#319Good riddance, that genre was the slop in literature before AI slop even existed.
Re: Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
#320Couple of other anecdotal data points: 1. Guy I know who is an exec coach says that a chatbot can do a lot of what he does. 2. I am absolutely seeing lots of people asking ChatGPT a question and treating its answer as the truth. So I can well believe that, in an age where you can get a quick answer to anything for free, that the market for books is collapsing. Having said that, I also suspect that many of these self-…
> I also suspect that many of these self-help books are effectively a blog post stretched out over hundreds of pages, so maybe a decline in their sales is no bad thing.
You suspect right. I usually compare them to a pamphlet, but a blog post works too. They’re mostly one core idea padded with interminable stories to illustrate the point. Instead of wasting your money and time on the book, search YouTube for a talk the author has given about it (the more popular the book, the more of the same talk there will be) and watch that. It’ll hit all of the major points.