31–40 of 205 posts
This is especially true for business/self-improvement type books, where I've found its almost never really time efficient when I'm really just looking for the list of 5 things I should be doing and skipping the extraneous pages of anecdotes.
John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much! I don't think these are very good rules. I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believ…
My rule: no index, no sale. If the author didn't care enough to generate an index, what else did they not care enough about? A surprising number of books, especially "pop sci" books, don't include an index.
A 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.
John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much! I don't think these are very good rules. I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believ…
Ever since YC had an RFS about replacing Wikipedia I’ve thought about how it needs to change. There are many shortcomings including the fact that it is hard to edit for a number of reasons, but most importantly going to a Wikipedia page at one point in time only captures that information which may be right at the time or wildly off or as you point out full of omissions. Information shouldn’t be deleted but instead we should see meta information like how other experts weigh in. If someone points to the Wait But Why article on AI it will be backed by the author and Elon Musk (who are both dilettantes), and maybe we can see some experts gave it a low rating.
Part of the problem I see is that often so called experts are just those who are rabidly vocal while the actual experts are heads down becoming better experts. So while we might see hand waving about killer AI from several “experts” we only have a few people who occasionally interject like Rodney Brooks. (This is a bit why I’m not very optimistic about several of these startups trying to show consumers “the truth;” indeed, the Dijkstra amnesia effect.)
Here's a rule: read stuff that you think is interesting.
John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much! I don't think these are very good rules. I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believ…
So yes, mistakes are expected initially. But the job of the author is to get enough outside eyes to fix it. Historians go to great lengths to ensure they aren’t just repeating a single view of an event. Most authors do not seem to make any similar effort.
John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much! I don't think these are very good rules. I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believ…
Making an error in my field doesn’t fundamentally misrepresent another field to the general public though. So yes, mistakes are expected initially. But the job of the author is to get enough outside eyes to fix it. Historians go to great lengths to ensure they aren’t just repeating a single view of an event. Most authors do not seem to make any similar effort.
Also, the idea that the errors software developers make don't have a broad impact on society is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser for me, but that might be a function of the subfield of software that I happen to work in.
My rule: no index, no sale. If the author didn't care enough to generate an index, what else did they not care enough about? A surprising number of books, especially "pop sci" books, don't include an index.
What percentage of "good" books include an index?