Spinposiumef
Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
21–30 of 205 posts
Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
#22The idea that only 4+ star rating books are worth reading is laughable. Reading only very popular books is a recipe to read only books that fit into your own preconceived worldview.
It's always worth checking the distribution. A 3 star rating with a normal-ish curve is very different than a 3 star rating with a lot of 5s and 1s -- and in that case the reviews will tell you clearly whose preconceived worldview the content fits.
Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
#23It’s when you start noticing the differences between multiple Shawdow banned but unbounded accounts that you start to question Djikstra‘a motives. And Robinhood. And I capitalized that `S’ on purpose. Spinposium.ed
Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
#24Rules restrict the diversity of your learning and restricts your knowledge.
You don't have time for everything, so it's good to have rules. But always remember that on occasion you need to break your own rules otherwise your knowledge becomes biased.
My extra rule to overcome this bias is. Anyone who recommends me their favorite book I will read it no matter how stupid I believe the recommendation is, no matter how many rules it violates.
I found the DaVinci code this way. That book was a huge mistake, but still I now have actually read the book and have the definitive knowledge to know it's a mistake.
Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
#25The idea that only 4+ star rating books are worth reading is laughable. Reading only very popular books is a recipe to read only books that fit into your own preconceived worldview.
Quality assessment is not necessarily the same as popularity, surely.
In an online forum like goodreads (ditto imdb, etc) it most defnitely is.
Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
#26Like the article's #3, I have my own silly rule, but it's a good one. No books with the author's name written in a larger font than the title. This eliminates books who's main merit is the author's fame. It's especially good at filtering out crappy New York Times best sellers and it works for fiction too.
100% agree when dealing with non-fiction. It shows a lack of respect for the book as an art form or information resource. It shows the author is writing for exposure and money and not to produce something of true value.
> it works for fiction too.
Nonfiction authors usually write on a small handful of subjects, and chances are you're looking for a book on a particular subject and will compile a list of contenders, then do some light research on each author to gauge their authority on a subject.
But with fiction, you aren't likely to know the general contents of a book before you read it. You may be looking for a particular genre, but not a particular story. If someone like Stephen King or Isaac Asimov have proven that they are capable writers within their genres, it's actually beneficial sales-wise for these names to stand out in a book rack. If I see a bunch of books on a rack and one of them says Asimov then I'm honing in on that book first.
Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
#27A trick I use to "read" books much faster is to feed them through Google's TTS but set a much higher than normal read speed. I call it robotting a book. It takes some getting used to and requires more focus but it's very efficient in terms of information dump. I've been able to increase the speed over time. My wife thinks I'm crazy. I use headphones.
I do this with informational youtube videos. I crank the speed to 1.5-2x depending on how fast the presenter is talking, but I push it to the point where I feel like I'm just barely keeping up and I try to get faster over time where I'm setting more and more videos to 2x rather than 1.5x.
Use youtube-dl and you can train yourself to go past 2x pretty easily as well.
Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
#28It’s also a good idea to read some of the lowest-rated reviews first, to see what the main complaints about the book are, and whether they would put you off reading it.
This goes for basically anything you purchase online. Read a couple highly positive reviews, read a couple highly negative reviews, then read some somewhat positive and somewhat negative reviews. Get the entire spectrum.
Emotions or lack of consideration cause some people to leave inaccurate ratings but still give useful information in the reviews themselves. Therefore you should never trust a 5-star or 1-star rating, but you should still consider why the reviewer felt compelled to leave such a rating.
At the same time, less extreme ratings might provide a fair and comprehensive assessment but the reviewer might have overlooked a particular edge case or issue.
Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
#29The idea that only 4+ star rating books are worth reading is laughable. Reading only very popular books is a recipe to read only books that fit into your own preconceived worldview.
Especially since one of the books he mentions, Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, has a 3.97 - which just barely misses the criteria, and yet has a big fat red X. He gave rated it 2 stars, so this seems to be confirmation bias more than anything.
Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
#30I pick the shortest one on the shelf for the subject. That’s how I found Einstein’s Relativity and Feynman’s QED. Omit needless words!