The Need to Read

I've been reading books -- lots of books, some recent, many not. Most not what you'll find on the shelves of your local bookstore (if you're lucky enough to have one) or even at a reasonably well-stocked library, but books I've specifically sought out, often through references in other books.

Libraries have been useful, inter-library loan even more so. But most especially, it's been services, some not fully above-board, though others are, which provide direct access to material, often only of limited availability. In the case of The Internet Archive, these can include a great many public-domain works. For any materials published after the copyright blackout year of 1924 -- and a great deal of what I'm interested in falls betwen 1924 and 1958, which is to say, is material which under the copyright laws extant at the time would now be public domain -- Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are tremendously useful. The ability to carry around what amounts to a considerable library in my hand is also quite powerful (though the tools for organising, managing, accessing, and annotating such a library on Android are entirely insufficient).

But yes: read books. Real books. Good books. Get the fuck off the Web and away from the idiots. Myself included.

Yes, it's hard. Yes, I struggle with that all the time (and rather particularly over the past few weeks what with a Recent Very Bad Collective Decision).

A book, a book worth writing, a book well-considered, well-conceived, well-planned, well-researched, and well-written, is an absolute gem. This is not an obsolete data format by any means.

> a bit black on white on the difference between low/high value content

Agreed. I was simplifying - it was long enough as is! And it is already so speculative (it's almost embarrassing - ironically low-value) that I would hesitate to try to add nuance.

> Why do you think it is that 'low' value content is so prevalent - and we fail to refer to refer to actually high value content?

My personal hypotheses:

1) Few people care enough about the world to even consider making an effort to be better informed

2) Of those who care, few even consider that low-value content is so unreliable and high-value content exists (as I said in #2 in my original post)

3) Of those who care and know what they are missing, few want to make an effort to find and read the high-value content. People are lazy (me too!)

4) The low-value content establishes the norms: People read it and believe it, and therefore anything that contradicts it - especially from a whole different perspective - seems wrong, ridiculous, and at best challenges their worldview - not something many people will accept. If everyone thinks the Sun orbits the Earth, the person telling the truth is ridiculed.

> Do you think a service like a distilled wikipedia would be value

Absolutely, but it takes time and skilled labor. I've often thought about how to get the high-value content into the public conversation.

But there are good online resources: Try Encyclopedia Britannica, for example. It's what you describe, though necessarily smaller than Wikipedia.

It's crazy isn't it? I wrote a math & physics textbook[1] that condenses nearly 2000+ pages of precalculus, mechanics, and calculus, in very few pages. I think I could make it even shorter, but I wanted to include lots of exercises/problems because those are important.

[1] https://minireference.com/ see extended preview here https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSguide_v5_previ...

I wonder if a research library offers a course on efficient research using modern tools.