51–60 of 205 posts
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?
Fiction, of course, rarely gets one.
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.
Blind people do this as a matter of course. With practice one can understand absurdly fast reading.
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.
With e-books though, why do you even need an index when you can just search?
In recent years I've switched a lot to watching a non-fiction author's 30 minute talk on youtube about their book rather than reading the book entirely. 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.
Perhaps there is a dimension about how rigorous the thinking is behind the book. I struggle to imagine a YouTube video that could effectively and convincingly unpack ideas from The Intelligent Investor, The Sovereign Individual, Sapiens, etc. Other topics like "How to get rich with x" or pop-sci covered by the likes of Kurzgesagt are simplistic enough for a video essay, but those are seldom worth consuming regardless of medium.
The 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.
On a related note, for binary (good/bad) reviews, we can the temper the results by assuming a beta(1,1)-distributed prior and then updating [1]. The expectation (which can thought of as an "adjusted average rating") ends up being:
E[x] = (good + 1)/(good + bad + 2)
This adjusts for situations where the number of reviews is small, in which a good average rating can be misleading.
[1] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/27/bayesian-amazon/
The 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.
There are so many books available to me that I do use Goodreads ratings as one heuristic for choosing what to read. It would take a lot for me to read a 2 star book (like a very strong recommendation from someone I trust), not because I am sure it wouldn't be worth my time, but because there are plenty of more highly rated books that are more likely to be worth it.
The author even qualifies the rule: "Unfortunately, Goodreads ratings are often not unbiased.."
I would add #4: books that are at least 10 years old. I feel like knowledge has to pass the test of time. This rule would rule out "Why We Sleep" for instance, but you'll be able to read it in 10 years if the science behind it still stands.
I think it's a combination of "contemporary books will be from the swirl of life around you that already know, old books will be from a different culture and time and that difference is important" and "knowledge lost, from people who are no longer living".
It would also have the test of time - Darwinian natural selection of information. Something we're missing when we want the internet to keep data forever, we should be letting data rot and be lost, taking ongoing action to keep it in the present is a vote for its importance, setting up a system which preserves information without effort is cheating the system and leaving us swimming in e-waste.
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, imagine if even professionals/experts in their fields are prone to mistakes, then what can we expect from people who know little about a foreign subject? Then there are things like economics where even the experts in their field can’t agree on either theory or in data interpretation. If they can’t reach consensus being informed and all, imagine someone in a different field like journalism trying to write expertly…
As we can obviously see, even professionals in medical sciences were wrong about Theranos. How did John Carreyrou, a WSJ reporter, do such a good job reporting on them?
[EDIT: the post says "Prefer books by experts in the field" and says these are people who have spent their lives researching that field. It gives GEB as an example of such a book. That claim is factually incorrect and calls into question the idea of requiring books to meet that criteria. Does anyone of the many people who've downvoted my comment care to explain why you find it objectionable?] > The best nonfiction bo…
That doesn't refute the fact that he spent his life researching the content in GEB.
Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...