We are incapable of ruminating on a set of related subjects.
Especially if our busy minds are worrying about the opportunity costs. "All the knowledge I could be packing in while I waste my time here captured by this one guy, getting emotionally involved in the fate of Anna and Vronsky, who aren't even real!"
This seems very wrong to me. When I read the best of old writing, it is always super wordy and has worse arguments than the best of modern writing. I will cite The Emergence of Probability by Ian Hacking as a great analysis of an aspect of this phenomena. What sorts of old books are you reading which make you think this?
I'm not gonna reach into Antiquity or anything, but compare e.g. The Federalist Papers to ... anything written today of a political nature. How one could do this and not despair is beyond me.
I mean I feel like if you compare the federalist papers to political speeches, then sure, but if you compare them to like the best of modern economic analysis or social commentary, then I think our modern economists win that fight? I’m not certain, since I haven’t gone in depth with either.
To be clear, the emergence of probability looks at the predecessors to the modern mathematical notion of probability, and a big theme is, it turns out, that the idea of 'evidence' as we understand it was actually really difficult to figure out. It doesn't look at why previous generations were so wordy.
This wordiness is actually very confusing to me, because you'd think they'd be less wordy since they spent more resources per letter they sent, and that the evolution of language should be mostly stable. Maybe the problem was that during at least the Enlightenment, lots of the important concepts used were recent inventions, so colloquial language didn't have the time to adapt around them, and so you had to use a bunch of clumsy phrases, or maybe its because everyone of import who was writing was a lawyer, and the legal profession optimizes against brevity for some reason (legal documents seem to read more anachronistically than other modern documents)?
In most writing you can assume the reader will make a good faith attempt to understand the intended meaning of the writer. Legal documents are different, since they will be interpreted based on the literal meaning, by adversarial readers (lawyers) whose job is often to try and take advantage of the writer and exploit any loopholes and lack of clarity.
I would add textbooks to the list of books that are worth reading. Not always, but often its the best way to learn a complex new field. Open to suggestions of alternative formats, like reading papers--though if you want an intro & problems, textbooks are still great.
When I was half-dropped-out of high school circa 2000 I was so into my mother's old uni chemistry textbooks, as an alternative to whatever I was supposed to be using in chemistry class, that later on when I was all the way dropped out of school circa 2005 I remember searching thrift stores for old 70s era textbooks in subjects I wanted, even 70s high school textbooks. They were not only cheaper and more abundant than anything modern, but the way they treated you like a somewhat abstracted ideal learner instead of an HR manager's idea of a 90s teen at risk of dropping out of school was actually far superior even for me as a specific exemplar of the audience the bad 90s textbooks wanted to reach.
The boomers got all kinds of sweet deals, but getting to go through a version of the old WASPy prewar education system before it got ruined by boomers might have been the sweetest deal of all.
Interesting. I’ve never read a textbook which gave me that vibe, though I entered the textbook buyer market at a time when essentially all textbooks were purchasable (or even free if you pirated them). Probably the textbooks I read are not stocked in any bookstores.
I mean for the most part they were just math textbooks but they would have weird shit in them that didn't seem like what the actual math textbook author likely would have put in there. Professional stock photos of generic classroom scenes with no content other than forced happiness and an unrealistically "perfect" level of diversity that clearly, unintentionally, indicated a kind of hierarchy among various demographics, all reckoned in terms of their relationship to a default white boy, for example. Besides the bizarre post-1970s identity politics of it, you could just tell that it wasn't done by a guy (or girl, or computer from Alpha Centauri) whose mind was primarily concerned with actually teaching math. Only a committeeman could have put it there. It was offensive even to a small child.
Yeah, those textbooks suck. The artifice is so transparent too - I remember making fun of the forced-diversity photos with my friends in elementary school.
If you think about it, the entire diversity hierarchy we have today - some people used to miscall it The Progressive Stack, because of a weird incident at OWS - is almost literally just built out from those old 80s and 90s school textbooks, and similar sources. Any time you were assembling a group of kids for one of those stupid diversity photos, you couldn't just sample the population randomly, or even sample the population randomly with a very vague and legitimate bias towards rarer or more exceptional members. You had to conform to a very specific diversity hierarchy. Two people? It's a black man and a white woman, because women and blacks seem to be making the most noise but we don't want to have to adjudicate between them. Three people? It's a white man, a black man, and an Asian woman, unless it's a later textbook where this became too obvious and you had to switch it around for only that reason.
Five kids? Probably no wheelchair. Eight kids? Yeah, somewhere between kid five and kid nine is about where you get the wheelchair kid. But you're trying to cover multiple bases at once here, so chances are he's not just a wheelchair kid, he's like an extra-white wheelchair kid, with red hair, who vaguely stands in for white ethnics that used to be important in the 1950s before they were fully integrated and still have lobby groups.
It's all this fucking stupid and I don't think adults ever realized how incredibly literally kids were taking it, even without being explicitly told.
The last time I saw a textbook like that, it was like elementary or middle school level, maybe early high school civics class. Generally those are not worth reading, since lots of the time (I assume) they’re covering very basic stuff or just ideology. I usually look up online (or nowadays ask chatgpt) “what are the best textbooks on x?” (chatgpt will say “best” is subjective, but if you ask for the 5 best textbooks it’ll get more comfortable giving you an answer).
Many fields also have universally recognized bibles, like convex optimization or rocket science, and you can ask someone in that field for that field’s bible to get a pretty great rec. Though there’s often much to be said about little known wonky textbooks on subjects. Math has a lot of these, possibly because its the subject for which its hardest to go insane about, so people can dance the edge of sanity more without falling off.
Never heard of it! But I don't see the thesis as a challenge because I don't think that the 70s-era education quality decline was caused by the textbooks getting worse; if anything, they got worse in a misguided effort to fix the decline.
I might look into some textbooks from this era for future homeschooling. I also try to get certain reference works from Oxford UP, though the tricky part is getting works that are not out of date ... but no too up to date either.
In a modern digital context where you can pick the best from among some large selection, I wouldn't assume that textbooks from the 70s are actually systematically better. Nor would I assume that modern textbooks are good or bad in proportion to how much committeeman nonsense they include. All I can say is that in my specific context, old textbooks from the 70s were much more useful to me, and one aspect that stood out was the more abstracted and remote approach devoid of patronizing appeals to unrelated adult social concerns reframed as if they were legitimate obstacles to the learner rather than just stuff the adults felt like talking about as much as possible. To the extent that clumsy attempts at solving real-world social problems intervened at all, they would be problems like "we need more solid-state physics aces to keep up with the Soviet chip industry" or whatever. It looks legitimate even in retrospect even to people who fundamentally disagree with the actual political agenda behind it, because even if you think the Soviet Union should win, we are still gonna need the exact same kind of solid-state physics aces to implement digial communism or whatever it is they're gonna do. But we've lost that ideology. Things are valued now specifically for their ability to divide people and smoke out the secret traitors.
A real problem here is that no matter what demographic you're trying to teach, parents and society will demand simplistic apologetics on behalf of at least some existing institutions as part of the curriculum, whether it's Columbus or the Communist Party. It tends to promote a naive butterfly-collecting mentality in which we have to either take institutions at absolute face value, or else denounce them simplistically in terms of some theory we are obviously just applying mindlessly to every institution we see. The "third, secret thing" position will be understood by everyone as better overall, *except* in the one area they care about, which they will demand be changed; so it's not sustainable at an institutional level, they have to just pick between the two ways of being dumb case-by-case, off the menu.
So, I had to suffer through Plato in college and when I tried reading Thucydides a couple years ago, I gave up because it was so dry, but a couple minor defenses of reading old thinkers:
1. The analogy with the lost Amazon tribe I would say is off. The Greeks invented Western Civilization. Amazonian tribes haven't invented much of anything; odds are the best minds of ancient Greece were a little higher caliber, and probably less remote from the modern world, just because Greek city states are more similar to modern nation states than any hunter gatherer tribe.
2. You learn intellectual history reading old books, which can be just as interesting as reading modern history books. Think of it like reading the source material for a history book on the evolution of Western philosophy or what have you.
3. Revered old books usually have some good lines or famous quotes you might otherwise remain ignorant of. "Only the dead have seen the end of war." "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." The funeral oration of Pericles, etc.
This is a supremely silly post. Not everyone reads books in order to optimise their life and/or compress as much knowledge into as little room as possible. For me, reading is a pleasure in itself, and reading a well-written, well-structured and well-thought-out text has intrinsic value, regardless of whether its ideas could've been expressed more succinctly.
When I want to learn about a particular topic, I'd rather read three hundred pages with examples and detail and even repetition, than a five page essay that I'll surely forget within a few weeks. The longer form aids memory and makes points and ideas stick; you spend way more time with the material at hand.
Also, why use such a contemptuous and morally bankrupt character as Bankman-Fried to make your case?
I do agree that many books are mostly fluff and it's a known fact that getting a short book published is a lot harder than a long one, because of how publishing works, but this does not make a case "against most books". Not even close. Many books are not worth reading and they contain little value in them, but this is an entirely different matter, and the wild generalization made in the post strikes me as lazy, more than anything.
I think you're missing at least two important categories of worthwhile books:
(1) famous books by old-to-ancient authors on subjects that don't change much over time. And nothing is more fixed than human nature. The reason to read Sophocles or Dante or Shakespeare isn't to get the benefit of an understanding of the modern world, but by absorbing the themes of how people behave and what sorts of narratives shape them, a lot becomes clear. For the same reason that anyone seeking to understand New York City needs to read The Power Broker (surely in your category #1), anyone who wishes to understand people can find plenty of value in timeless works which don't depend on any recent innovation. I think Tolkien and Freud are worth reading because they *invented an entire field or genre*, and so it's useful to understand them even if we'd discard almost all of their contemporaries' works.
(2) foundational pillars of thought in a discipline, which are necessary or at least valuable background for *any educated person*. For the same reason that someone who plans to live in the West should read parts of the Bible, or someone who wants to understand biology would benefit from 1-2 works by Darwin, by the same token, someone who wishes to live in a democracy should read Locke (even if we have later political philosophy that maybe refines some of it), and probably Hobbes too. Someone who wishes to meet a standard of "educated" in our society probably needs a baseline of works we all agree are timeless parts of the canon of western literature and philosophy and science. Is the Stanford Prison Experiment the latest and greatest in behavioral psychology? No, but you need to know about it before you could call yourself knowledgeable in it. Most works in this category have stood the test of centuries if not millennia, and while some might fit your category #3, some are distinct but still essential.
Would reading good modern books about Locke’s, Hobbes’ Dante’s works serve just as well or an even better purpose, in your opinion, or does one need to read the original works to get the full benefit?
It's an interesting question. I'm not positive on it.
I found Richard's description of most modern social science and policy books - "this book could be a blog post" - to be moderately persuasive. Some could probably be distilled down, if not by their own authors then at least by bloggers summarizing them, or (eventually) AI. That said, I can think of a number of books even in that category of his expertise where the full book really did hold up and the increased length was to build out further examples and document what happened and why, etc. (e.g. Richard Rothstein's "The Color of Law").
There are probably a lot of works where you can get 80% of the benefit of reading the whole thing by looking at a summary that takes 10-20% of the time required. Now, 80% is not 100%, but that does go to his diminishing-returns / opportunity cost argument. Suppose that were true of great works of political philosophy or literature, that there exist cliff notes getting you 80% of the understanding in 20% of the time. Would that suffice to really grok what's valuable about, I dunno, Shakespeare? Or Montesquieu? Is there not some poetry to it that can't be summarized, or some insights that can't be delivered if you dilute the delivery? That's beyond my level to say. But my instinct is that different people might have different utility curves on their marginal time vs marginal understanding, so there's no one right answer.
I think I agree that one should get a sense for how an important figure of the past thought and wrote by reading at least some portion of one of their books if time doesn’t permit to read the whole thing.
As far as reading books about, for instance, Aristotle’s thought, instead of Aristotle himself, I do find that I get a lot of value out of that. Was curious whether others felt similarly or if they preferred reading Aristotle proper. I’m in the former camp, but that could just be do to the fact that my formal education in general is extremely limited.
I got the benefit of a highly-opinionated "core curriculum" in college, focused on the great works of western literature and of philosophy / political thought. Some of them I very much didn't enjoy (hi, Dostoevsky), but I will grudgingly say that I felt there was value to me actually reading the Odyssey and not just some synopsis, or reading John Stuart Mill and not someone's attempt to abbreviate it. The author's way of thinking seeps into you in very subtle ways, the way their own words convey a worldview, an attitude, a morality, an insight. Some of the value was being able to draw lines of commonality through a lot of the works that borrowed from, or echoed, major works of "the canon" that came before.
Some of it was brilliant all the way through, and would easily clear Richard's bar for Category #3. Augustine. Plato. Toni Morrison. The Prince. Some of them, though, could've really used an editor, e.g. Don Quixote, Aquinas, Virgil... not to mention Charles "paid by the word" Dickens standing in defiance of any concept of brevity. Aristotle might well benefit from being filtered through someone's attempt at distillation. All I'm saying is, the *category* of things Richard meant by referring to "Aristotle", I'd argue, are more often valuable to read at full length.
I think probably so. Someone else pointed out that reading textbooks is often worthwhile and I think this is why. A textbook can take a philosopher's most important points and sum them up more succinctly, with the added benefit of comparisons and criticisms that have been made since.
Spot on! Hanania's brilliance amazes me, but the idea that the cannon is outdated calls to mind both the liar's paradox and Aristotle's (hysterical) quip that "almost everything has been found out." We are just as blinkered and timebound as the great thinkers—the major difference being, of course, that we are intellectual knuckle-draggers compared to them. I do agree that the vast majority of today's books are a waste of trees and time.
You wouldn't read Darwin to first become acquainted with the concept of evolution by natural selection. In a summary or intro biology class, you'd get the basics of what he did, generally *after* you've gone through biochemistry and genetics and all the other predecessor layers, and then the theory of evolution ties it all together. You'll get Gould's punctuated equilibrium, you might get some Dawkins, but if you're taking Bio 101 it won't be much Darwin. Much like how in physics, you first study mechanics, and later on get the generalized theory of gravity, once you're ready to put it into a mental framework.
No, instead, you'd read Darwin as a canonical example of the scientific method, as he tirelessly lays out his evidence collected over a decade, develops his theory from basic reasoning, *picks holes in his own argument*, and does his best to address them. Not only is Origin of Species a seminal work that changed the world, it is also one of the most persuasive works of science ever written. No fair-minded person could read that and come away unconvinced, even if he does not at that point know all of the "how" (which we have filled-in in the 150 years since).
The Descent of Man is not far behind in quality, but I think the argument to read a second work by him is a lot worse than the argument to read the first - just as a matter of exposure to scientific excellence. Unless, that is, you're reading it as a work of *history*, and want the context to see how that inspired religious pseudo-crusades (to this day), the Social Darwinism movement, eugenics, and other social issues relevant to understanding the times. There's an argument to do that, falling under Richard's Category #1, but I think I would only put Origin of Species into my own Bucket #2, not others.
A fundamental part of your case against (non fiction) Great Books is "But anything intelligent or insightful they said you’ve probably absorbed already through run-of-the-mill blogs and self-help books, shorn of all the stupid things that inevitably made their way into their writings." This means, among other things:
a) You're relying on other people to read them
b) You're relying on these readers (and the readers of readers, and so on) collectively to convey the ideas _better_ than the original. Even under the doubtful premise they could, it's a very likely massive loss in opportunity cost. Do more "stupid things" make it into Marcus Aurelius or the vast industry that rehashes the Stoics? You're telling people to join the worst game of (multithreading!) Telephone ever, clearly a massive packet loss.
c) You've foreclosed the ability to draw particular lessons from a work that this transmitting crowd might have missed, forgotten, or misinterpreted. Let's take at random something I doubt has been transmitted in Plato. Maybe it's just trivia that the Theatetus ends dramatically where the Euthyphro begins. Maybe it's a waste of time to try to figure out if that is meaningful in his theory of knowledge, and if his theory has anything to teach us today. Even the act of wrestling with a deep work will make your mind stronger at finding connections in other material than scrolling through a slipstream of tweets and blog posts from a bunch of UCLA philosophy grad students.
In short, you're frustrated with David Sinclair's book padding, but are fundamentally reliant on LOTS of writings like that collectively to have absorbed and transmitted all the good ideas of the past. I won't read Thucydides to decide whether to take rapamycin, just as you shouldn't read Sinclair on politics.
A good litmus test of whether a book - or any piece of information or literature including fiction - is great is: Can you draw different lessons from it on a second or more reading, or even just thinking about it longer. Few books and fewer tweets, substacks, whatever meet that threshold.
I'll read a book by you over some random forgotten Church father that might get assigned at St. John's, but over 99.99% of stuff that will show up on Amazon? A much safer bet. And I do hope people are reading Hanania in a century in whatever form ;)
I have read David Sinclair’s Lifespan. It is an easy read, quite well written book. As you say David could have written an essay in NYT to convey his ideas, but it would not have been well known. You can read an article within a few minutes, but you need to spend a few hours reading through the book. You are right that many ideas are repeated in the book, but it is tool of persuasion rather than knowledge. By presenting the core ideas and arguments again and again, the book tries to persuade you to agree with him.
A good example of this is Milton Friedman's book - Capitalism and Freedom. His core thesis could be just a 4 page article, but he would not have the cultural cache if he just wrote a paper or article in NYT. When someone buys a book, given its an investment, they normally try to finish the book, and successful books like that of Friedman normally focus on few simple ideas and repeatedly argue for them and hopes a reader would be persuaded. And once persuaded they recommend it to others, which does not happen with news articles as you spend too little time on it. I would argue for this reason, such books are good. A person with an idea could persuade a large number of people to agree with him with a book, which is not possible even with a well written article.
ironically, Friedman's most well-known piece - "the social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits" - was in fact a blog-length piece, a few thousand words in a major newspaper if I recall correctly. They now teach it in the ethics classes at major MBA programs, framed like "what is wrong and misguided about this?"
Many ideas can be concisely stated and sound convincing, but we don't know how good they really are until they're applied to lots of situations.
Communism can sound somewhat reasonable in a short essay. When you start reading the book form, where all the ludicrous ideas are mismatched up to reality, you see that it doesn't work.
On the other hand, if you read something like Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments or The Wealth of Nations, it's dry and tedious, but you get a complex and detailed explication of the theory in many situations.
In short, books provide evidence. For and against an idea. They're a tool for the writer to build out the idea and see how sound it is. And for the writer to evaluate it.
Friedman is a nincompoop. Like most of today's narcissistic intelligence festishists, he worships IQ and thinks he's smart enough to know all the details or they just don't matter. Events have shown that to be a less than optimal path.
I say, don't be like Friedman. Don't assume your special intelligence and then think that because you're smart, your silly Jerry McGuire thought bubble must be something important. Prove it through the hard work of supporting it with evidence. If you can't, your idea probably isn't so great and you probably aren't so smart.
People retain little information when they read non-fiction books and articles. It’s worthwhile to use spaced repetition software to remember the important points.
I can't believe it's 2023 and I'm posting a startup idea, but honestly, someone needs to fork and redo the basic concept of Anki. A sprinkling of sensible UI and ecosystem tweaks and a handful of organized, well-chosen employees actively working to maintain the overall system would increase adoption and cultural impact by like a hundred times, easy. Then you could start thinking about features that Anki can't dream of even with existing plugins, like highly intuitive AI-driven cell phone apps that turn normal everyday incidents from diverse fields of experience into new cards almost exactly the way you want with zero effort almost every time... if there was even 1/100th as much interest in this as in fake crypto nonsense, we could genuinely revolutionize large swathes of learning.
Interesting idea, but spaced repetition takes work. Lots of work. People, even readers, prefer to keep the illusion that are actually retaining something by simply reading the book (some even highlight to reinforce their delusion)
Spaced Repetition, even with your revamped Anki, will never go mainstream
While the actual practice will always be a hurdle, I think people would actually do much more of the practice if they didn't have to effectively build and self-maintain large parts of the practice system just to make it be usable for their learning tasks, never really being quite sure that they've gotten it right.
I can easily imagine someone who plays guitar pretty well, or at the very least has the calluses to prove they practice, but would never use something like Anki because it just makes their head hurt and something seems to go wrong every time they've tried. I think we need to be realistic about the fact that on some level that is all Anki users because the software is just a mess. The ones who stay with it have just learned to suffer with all the flaws because the basic concept is so gob-smackingly effective.
It should be pretty easy to improve the UI, things like allowing you to hold the mouse in one place and just click to go through cards without veering off tiny buttons or seeing an annoying text pop up; or having multiple cards be displayed in one screen so the user doesn't have to wait a mental processing time every time a new card pops up.
Also, Richard, I don't know if this is a function of neuroatypicality or what, but you have this sort of all-encompassing credulity that pops up a lot that I find very strange. Which of these two possibilities seems more likely to you?
1. Sam Bankman-Fried actually has a principled stance against reading
2. Sam Bankman-Fried is a pseud who wanted to be this kind of celebrity intellectual and coming out against books was a provocative means of separating himself from his peers.
Also, why do you think people like this argument - because they agree with it on the merits, or because they've always resented book readers and this gives them credibility in opposing them?
this is mostly fair - especially the last paragraph - but I don't think it's fair to characterize this as being "against reading". It's about preferring time to be spent on articles, posts, essays, shorter-form, higher-density stuff, rather than *books* as a particular medium and delivery vehicle for ideas.
You can still disagree (I'm on the fence myself), but the argument isn't against reading, it's for preferring breadth over depth with respect to one's reading.
"When I wrote my piece on Enlightened Centrism, some took issue with me saying that I don’t believe in Great Books. After thinking about the topic a bit, I’m more certain that I’m correct."
"I’m not mad at people who want to read old books. The problem is that I get the sense from some of them that they think they gain more wisdom than others by doing so. Last month, there was a tweet going around that showed how absurd this worship of the past can get."
I'm sorry, Richard but there is so much wrong with this essay and with your perspective, it's almost comical. First is your title. "The Case Against Most Books." Really? In your lifetime, you will not read even a small percentage of the books in the world, you're aware of that, right? So what percentage of the 129,864,880 books in the world are you referencing? Just curious.
Other people reading "old books" is not something you should concern yourself with, nor should you presume that books only represent history, and/or nonfiction books. Moreover, why would you be "mad at people who want to read books" and why would you even phrase it that way? Do you realize how self-absorbed you sound? Your preference with regard to reading and/or encouraging others not to read is not "correct" It's just your preference, as in an opinion and as you know opinions are like --------, everyone's got one.
And then there's this gem... "I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."
The fact that you use profanity in that snippet of content, and think that a book should only be a six paragraph post tells me a great deal about how much you have not read and how much you don't know about writing and reading, and education.
Do you realize how much this short essay makes you seem, hmm, how shall I put it? Not "smart" perhaps? Please keep reading, because if anyone needs to read, a lot, YOU do.
You read it well enough to realize that he was quoting Bankman-Fried, right? You can quote people without agreeing with every single word or the exact nature of the point they're making.
The basic points this very young and inexperienced man is making are clear, and extremely naive. I had no idea who this person was, then yesterday I Googled him for 5 minutes and saw how young he was, and then it clicked. Only an uneducated Millennial would have made his absurd claims. My analysis stands. In 5 years or less, Richard, whoever he is, will cringe when he rereads this hilariously un-insightful short essay which only confirms his own mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the vast majority of his generation. 😊
I think the point about older thinkers is correct with one notable exception. That exception are books/essays which allow (or more often force) you to reinterpret a large amount of data in a more simplified and probably framework. Socrates, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Pareto, etc. are all good examples of this. Imo the Straussian interpretation is pretty much correct:
1) there are truths most people deny
2) people who plainly tell the truth can be persecuted
3) "Lindy" texts are preserved precisely because they have some interesting hidden truth which people continue to deny
That being said I think there is an overcorrection in conservative circles where they don't actually test whether their interpretations line up with observed reality. I'd be interested to know what you think of people who try to test older philosophy with modern empirics, like Brett Andersen (https://brettandersen.substack.com/).
in short: "the expected timespan of a non-perishable thing, like a technology or an idea, is often proportional to the time it has already existed". In other words, new things are likely to be brief, but stuff that's been around a while is likely to persist for a while yet.
I dunno about classic, canonical works being "hidden truths that most people deny". I think, say, Shakespeare is probably still widely read (and produced, and copied) because he had a brilliant sense of how people think and behave, and the kinds of human problems that are timeless and engaging. Not because the undercurrents of his plays were taboo or something. But the Lindy Effect... I like that theory.
I know a human who became a Latin teacher in 1961, on the grounds that Latin was regularly taught for centuries, so they probably weren't about to stop now.
I guess that's why they call it the "Lindy Effect" and not "Lindy's Law".
Is Nietzsche really an “old” thinker? To me, philosophers can be divided into two camps: those who were aware of Darwin and those who weren’t. Kant was really smart, but his view of human nature is cartoonish because he didn’t know that we are just smart primates and wasted much ink exalting human rationality. Nietzsche broke hard from that crap spectacularly, though he was needlessly prolix and opaque
This was excellent but too brief -- you should contact your publisher about a book deal.
I never read books because as a class they're not lindy. The traditional way to digest information is to have it spoken aloud, which is why we have audible now. Substack represents the longest-form that I can commit to reading with my own eyes, like some kind of pleb who has no lector.
Finally, the thinkers of the past weren't better at thinking than we are, but they had frittered away a smaller portion of evolved human wisdom than we have now. Socrates isn't interesting because of what he said that was cutting-edge when he said it, but because of the things he says that his own newfangledness hadn't infected. I'm not just talking about (via Henrich) to prepare manioc. Little glimpses of the sanity of the past can be deeply unscientific but remind us of true things we're tempted to forget. Consider St. John Chrysostom assuming that adipose tissue is undigestible because people who eat a lot of fattened-up animals appear to collect this tissue in themselves. Utterly wrong, of course, but it's good to see a direct reminder that people have always found the obese disturbing to look at, to the point of spontaneously generating bogus theories about them.
Just to see if I understand your argument: You are assuming that individuals read books because they want to obtain information or insight; and, with time, wisdom. Then, you rightly point out that if you want to maximize the amount of information you obtain, you are better-off reading a blog post or a summary -- or anything that is short and potentially comes from several sources.
I would pushback on this. People who like books read them for the experience of going through a long, cohesive text. This includes, of course, obtaining insight, but also includes entering a deeper state of reflexion that is impossible to achieve when you are reading a blog post. A state that requires a long engagement (maybe days) with the text. And I claim that deep reflexion probably generates more important insight than light reflexion. Moreover, because of the way the brain works, it also makes you happy.
I agree with categories 1 and 3. Those make up most of my reading (esp category 1). I’d add that good fictional novels are worth reading, but it’s something I really only enjoyed when younger.
Jeff Bezos famously said that knowing what won't change in 10 years is important, because you can build a business model around things that you know won't change.
Just so, I tell all kids who are going to college that if they can learn what won't change in their lifetimes, they can build a life plan around that. And what won't change in their lifetimes? The same thing that hasn't changed since people began recording their stories and thoughts: human nature.
And the best way to see unchanging human nature over the ages? By reading the classics, sometimes called The Great Books.
There is something to be said about learning what Marcus Aurelius said so many centuries ago, or what any number of other astute observers of human nature said a long, long time ago in so many other entirely different settings: The Tale of Genji, The Bhagavad Gita, The Odyssey. After seeing it here, there, and elsewhere enough times, it begins to sink in, and sink so much more so than reading someone's blog post or a Wikipedia entry.
I agree that acquiring the information in things like William H. McNeill's "Plagues and People," or Suzanne Simart's "Finding the Mother Tree," could probably done more efficiently via your method. But learning the deep lessons of humanity—and perhaps gaining some wisdom instead of just information—takes a bit more commitment.
Most old books are a rebuke to the modern reader, as they demonstrate the crudity of contemporary language and the sloppiness of our thoughts.
And our attention span.
We are incapable of ruminating on a set of related subjects.
Especially if our busy minds are worrying about the opportunity costs. "All the knowledge I could be packing in while I waste my time here captured by this one guy, getting emotionally involved in the fate of Anna and Vronsky, who aren't even real!"
This seems very wrong to me. When I read the best of old writing, it is always super wordy and has worse arguments than the best of modern writing. I will cite The Emergence of Probability by Ian Hacking as a great analysis of an aspect of this phenomena. What sorts of old books are you reading which make you think this?
I'm not gonna reach into Antiquity or anything, but compare e.g. The Federalist Papers to ... anything written today of a political nature. How one could do this and not despair is beyond me.
I mean I feel like if you compare the federalist papers to political speeches, then sure, but if you compare them to like the best of modern economic analysis or social commentary, then I think our modern economists win that fight? I’m not certain, since I haven’t gone in depth with either.
To be clear, the emergence of probability looks at the predecessors to the modern mathematical notion of probability, and a big theme is, it turns out, that the idea of 'evidence' as we understand it was actually really difficult to figure out. It doesn't look at why previous generations were so wordy.
This wordiness is actually very confusing to me, because you'd think they'd be less wordy since they spent more resources per letter they sent, and that the evolution of language should be mostly stable. Maybe the problem was that during at least the Enlightenment, lots of the important concepts used were recent inventions, so colloquial language didn't have the time to adapt around them, and so you had to use a bunch of clumsy phrases, or maybe its because everyone of import who was writing was a lawyer, and the legal profession optimizes against brevity for some reason (legal documents seem to read more anachronistically than other modern documents)?
Another possibility: It takes several drafts to cut down on wordiness, so in fact brevity is more resource-intense.
In most writing you can assume the reader will make a good faith attempt to understand the intended meaning of the writer. Legal documents are different, since they will be interpreted based on the literal meaning, by adversarial readers (lawyers) whose job is often to try and take advantage of the writer and exploit any loopholes and lack of clarity.
oo I like that description
Misread your comment. Great comment. And I agree. LOL...
I would add textbooks to the list of books that are worth reading. Not always, but often its the best way to learn a complex new field. Open to suggestions of alternative formats, like reading papers--though if you want an intro & problems, textbooks are still great.
When I was half-dropped-out of high school circa 2000 I was so into my mother's old uni chemistry textbooks, as an alternative to whatever I was supposed to be using in chemistry class, that later on when I was all the way dropped out of school circa 2005 I remember searching thrift stores for old 70s era textbooks in subjects I wanted, even 70s high school textbooks. They were not only cheaper and more abundant than anything modern, but the way they treated you like a somewhat abstracted ideal learner instead of an HR manager's idea of a 90s teen at risk of dropping out of school was actually far superior even for me as a specific exemplar of the audience the bad 90s textbooks wanted to reach.
The boomers got all kinds of sweet deals, but getting to go through a version of the old WASPy prewar education system before it got ruined by boomers might have been the sweetest deal of all.
Interesting. I’ve never read a textbook which gave me that vibe, though I entered the textbook buyer market at a time when essentially all textbooks were purchasable (or even free if you pirated them). Probably the textbooks I read are not stocked in any bookstores.
I mean for the most part they were just math textbooks but they would have weird shit in them that didn't seem like what the actual math textbook author likely would have put in there. Professional stock photos of generic classroom scenes with no content other than forced happiness and an unrealistically "perfect" level of diversity that clearly, unintentionally, indicated a kind of hierarchy among various demographics, all reckoned in terms of their relationship to a default white boy, for example. Besides the bizarre post-1970s identity politics of it, you could just tell that it wasn't done by a guy (or girl, or computer from Alpha Centauri) whose mind was primarily concerned with actually teaching math. Only a committeeman could have put it there. It was offensive even to a small child.
Yeah, those textbooks suck. The artifice is so transparent too - I remember making fun of the forced-diversity photos with my friends in elementary school.
If you think about it, the entire diversity hierarchy we have today - some people used to miscall it The Progressive Stack, because of a weird incident at OWS - is almost literally just built out from those old 80s and 90s school textbooks, and similar sources. Any time you were assembling a group of kids for one of those stupid diversity photos, you couldn't just sample the population randomly, or even sample the population randomly with a very vague and legitimate bias towards rarer or more exceptional members. You had to conform to a very specific diversity hierarchy. Two people? It's a black man and a white woman, because women and blacks seem to be making the most noise but we don't want to have to adjudicate between them. Three people? It's a white man, a black man, and an Asian woman, unless it's a later textbook where this became too obvious and you had to switch it around for only that reason.
Five kids? Probably no wheelchair. Eight kids? Yeah, somewhere between kid five and kid nine is about where you get the wheelchair kid. But you're trying to cover multiple bases at once here, so chances are he's not just a wheelchair kid, he's like an extra-white wheelchair kid, with red hair, who vaguely stands in for white ethnics that used to be important in the 1950s before they were fully integrated and still have lobby groups.
It's all this fucking stupid and I don't think adults ever realized how incredibly literally kids were taking it, even without being explicitly told.
The last time I saw a textbook like that, it was like elementary or middle school level, maybe early high school civics class. Generally those are not worth reading, since lots of the time (I assume) they’re covering very basic stuff or just ideology. I usually look up online (or nowadays ask chatgpt) “what are the best textbooks on x?” (chatgpt will say “best” is subjective, but if you ask for the 5 best textbooks it’ll get more comfortable giving you an answer).
Many fields also have universally recognized bibles, like convex optimization or rocket science, and you can ask someone in that field for that field’s bible to get a pretty great rec. Though there’s often much to be said about little known wonky textbooks on subjects. Math has a lot of these, possibly because its the subject for which its hardest to go insane about, so people can dance the edge of sanity more without falling off.
Haha.
The 70s were pretty much the nadir of American education. What the hell do you think A Nation at Risk was bitching about?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20299582#:~:text=1970s.,and%20468%20in%20those%20years.
Never heard of it! But I don't see the thesis as a challenge because I don't think that the 70s-era education quality decline was caused by the textbooks getting worse; if anything, they got worse in a misguided effort to fix the decline.
Didn't say it was. But you certainly seemed unaware that there was a decline.
Interesting.
I might look into some textbooks from this era for future homeschooling. I also try to get certain reference works from Oxford UP, though the tricky part is getting works that are not out of date ... but no too up to date either.
In a modern digital context where you can pick the best from among some large selection, I wouldn't assume that textbooks from the 70s are actually systematically better. Nor would I assume that modern textbooks are good or bad in proportion to how much committeeman nonsense they include. All I can say is that in my specific context, old textbooks from the 70s were much more useful to me, and one aspect that stood out was the more abstracted and remote approach devoid of patronizing appeals to unrelated adult social concerns reframed as if they were legitimate obstacles to the learner rather than just stuff the adults felt like talking about as much as possible. To the extent that clumsy attempts at solving real-world social problems intervened at all, they would be problems like "we need more solid-state physics aces to keep up with the Soviet chip industry" or whatever. It looks legitimate even in retrospect even to people who fundamentally disagree with the actual political agenda behind it, because even if you think the Soviet Union should win, we are still gonna need the exact same kind of solid-state physics aces to implement digial communism or whatever it is they're gonna do. But we've lost that ideology. Things are valued now specifically for their ability to divide people and smoke out the secret traitors.
Very underrated
A real problem here is that no matter what demographic you're trying to teach, parents and society will demand simplistic apologetics on behalf of at least some existing institutions as part of the curriculum, whether it's Columbus or the Communist Party. It tends to promote a naive butterfly-collecting mentality in which we have to either take institutions at absolute face value, or else denounce them simplistically in terms of some theory we are obviously just applying mindlessly to every institution we see. The "third, secret thing" position will be understood by everyone as better overall, *except* in the one area they care about, which they will demand be changed; so it's not sustainable at an institutional level, they have to just pick between the two ways of being dumb case-by-case, off the menu.
So, I had to suffer through Plato in college and when I tried reading Thucydides a couple years ago, I gave up because it was so dry, but a couple minor defenses of reading old thinkers:
1. The analogy with the lost Amazon tribe I would say is off. The Greeks invented Western Civilization. Amazonian tribes haven't invented much of anything; odds are the best minds of ancient Greece were a little higher caliber, and probably less remote from the modern world, just because Greek city states are more similar to modern nation states than any hunter gatherer tribe.
2. You learn intellectual history reading old books, which can be just as interesting as reading modern history books. Think of it like reading the source material for a history book on the evolution of Western philosophy or what have you.
3. Revered old books usually have some good lines or famous quotes you might otherwise remain ignorant of. "Only the dead have seen the end of war." "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." The funeral oration of Pericles, etc.
This is a supremely silly post. Not everyone reads books in order to optimise their life and/or compress as much knowledge into as little room as possible. For me, reading is a pleasure in itself, and reading a well-written, well-structured and well-thought-out text has intrinsic value, regardless of whether its ideas could've been expressed more succinctly.
When I want to learn about a particular topic, I'd rather read three hundred pages with examples and detail and even repetition, than a five page essay that I'll surely forget within a few weeks. The longer form aids memory and makes points and ideas stick; you spend way more time with the material at hand.
Also, why use such a contemptuous and morally bankrupt character as Bankman-Fried to make your case?
I do agree that many books are mostly fluff and it's a known fact that getting a short book published is a lot harder than a long one, because of how publishing works, but this does not make a case "against most books". Not even close. Many books are not worth reading and they contain little value in them, but this is an entirely different matter, and the wild generalization made in the post strikes me as lazy, more than anything.
I think you're missing at least two important categories of worthwhile books:
(1) famous books by old-to-ancient authors on subjects that don't change much over time. And nothing is more fixed than human nature. The reason to read Sophocles or Dante or Shakespeare isn't to get the benefit of an understanding of the modern world, but by absorbing the themes of how people behave and what sorts of narratives shape them, a lot becomes clear. For the same reason that anyone seeking to understand New York City needs to read The Power Broker (surely in your category #1), anyone who wishes to understand people can find plenty of value in timeless works which don't depend on any recent innovation. I think Tolkien and Freud are worth reading because they *invented an entire field or genre*, and so it's useful to understand them even if we'd discard almost all of their contemporaries' works.
(2) foundational pillars of thought in a discipline, which are necessary or at least valuable background for *any educated person*. For the same reason that someone who plans to live in the West should read parts of the Bible, or someone who wants to understand biology would benefit from 1-2 works by Darwin, by the same token, someone who wishes to live in a democracy should read Locke (even if we have later political philosophy that maybe refines some of it), and probably Hobbes too. Someone who wishes to meet a standard of "educated" in our society probably needs a baseline of works we all agree are timeless parts of the canon of western literature and philosophy and science. Is the Stanford Prison Experiment the latest and greatest in behavioral psychology? No, but you need to know about it before you could call yourself knowledgeable in it. Most works in this category have stood the test of centuries if not millennia, and while some might fit your category #3, some are distinct but still essential.
Would reading good modern books about Locke’s, Hobbes’ Dante’s works serve just as well or an even better purpose, in your opinion, or does one need to read the original works to get the full benefit?
It's an interesting question. I'm not positive on it.
I found Richard's description of most modern social science and policy books - "this book could be a blog post" - to be moderately persuasive. Some could probably be distilled down, if not by their own authors then at least by bloggers summarizing them, or (eventually) AI. That said, I can think of a number of books even in that category of his expertise where the full book really did hold up and the increased length was to build out further examples and document what happened and why, etc. (e.g. Richard Rothstein's "The Color of Law").
There are probably a lot of works where you can get 80% of the benefit of reading the whole thing by looking at a summary that takes 10-20% of the time required. Now, 80% is not 100%, but that does go to his diminishing-returns / opportunity cost argument. Suppose that were true of great works of political philosophy or literature, that there exist cliff notes getting you 80% of the understanding in 20% of the time. Would that suffice to really grok what's valuable about, I dunno, Shakespeare? Or Montesquieu? Is there not some poetry to it that can't be summarized, or some insights that can't be delivered if you dilute the delivery? That's beyond my level to say. But my instinct is that different people might have different utility curves on their marginal time vs marginal understanding, so there's no one right answer.
Makes sense. Thanks for replying.
I think I agree that one should get a sense for how an important figure of the past thought and wrote by reading at least some portion of one of their books if time doesn’t permit to read the whole thing.
As far as reading books about, for instance, Aristotle’s thought, instead of Aristotle himself, I do find that I get a lot of value out of that. Was curious whether others felt similarly or if they preferred reading Aristotle proper. I’m in the former camp, but that could just be do to the fact that my formal education in general is extremely limited.
I got the benefit of a highly-opinionated "core curriculum" in college, focused on the great works of western literature and of philosophy / political thought. Some of them I very much didn't enjoy (hi, Dostoevsky), but I will grudgingly say that I felt there was value to me actually reading the Odyssey and not just some synopsis, or reading John Stuart Mill and not someone's attempt to abbreviate it. The author's way of thinking seeps into you in very subtle ways, the way their own words convey a worldview, an attitude, a morality, an insight. Some of the value was being able to draw lines of commonality through a lot of the works that borrowed from, or echoed, major works of "the canon" that came before.
Some of it was brilliant all the way through, and would easily clear Richard's bar for Category #3. Augustine. Plato. Toni Morrison. The Prince. Some of them, though, could've really used an editor, e.g. Don Quixote, Aquinas, Virgil... not to mention Charles "paid by the word" Dickens standing in defiance of any concept of brevity. Aristotle might well benefit from being filtered through someone's attempt at distillation. All I'm saying is, the *category* of things Richard meant by referring to "Aristotle", I'd argue, are more often valuable to read at full length.
That and there's always the possibility the person doing the summarizing has their own agenda.
I think probably so. Someone else pointed out that reading textbooks is often worthwhile and I think this is why. A textbook can take a philosopher's most important points and sum them up more succinctly, with the added benefit of comparisons and criticisms that have been made since.
Spot on! Hanania's brilliance amazes me, but the idea that the cannon is outdated calls to mind both the liar's paradox and Aristotle's (hysterical) quip that "almost everything has been found out." We are just as blinkered and timebound as the great thinkers—the major difference being, of course, that we are intellectual knuckle-draggers compared to them. I do agree that the vast majority of today's books are a waste of trees and time.
Is it worth reading Darwin when Dawkins is more accurate and concise? Knowing the genetic basis of natural selection is a major refinement
You wouldn't read Darwin to first become acquainted with the concept of evolution by natural selection. In a summary or intro biology class, you'd get the basics of what he did, generally *after* you've gone through biochemistry and genetics and all the other predecessor layers, and then the theory of evolution ties it all together. You'll get Gould's punctuated equilibrium, you might get some Dawkins, but if you're taking Bio 101 it won't be much Darwin. Much like how in physics, you first study mechanics, and later on get the generalized theory of gravity, once you're ready to put it into a mental framework.
No, instead, you'd read Darwin as a canonical example of the scientific method, as he tirelessly lays out his evidence collected over a decade, develops his theory from basic reasoning, *picks holes in his own argument*, and does his best to address them. Not only is Origin of Species a seminal work that changed the world, it is also one of the most persuasive works of science ever written. No fair-minded person could read that and come away unconvinced, even if he does not at that point know all of the "how" (which we have filled-in in the 150 years since).
The Descent of Man is not far behind in quality, but I think the argument to read a second work by him is a lot worse than the argument to read the first - just as a matter of exposure to scientific excellence. Unless, that is, you're reading it as a work of *history*, and want the context to see how that inspired religious pseudo-crusades (to this day), the Social Darwinism movement, eugenics, and other social issues relevant to understanding the times. There's an argument to do that, falling under Richard's Category #1, but I think I would only put Origin of Species into my own Bucket #2, not others.
I did name my son Charles.
Its education, indeed
A fundamental part of your case against (non fiction) Great Books is "But anything intelligent or insightful they said you’ve probably absorbed already through run-of-the-mill blogs and self-help books, shorn of all the stupid things that inevitably made their way into their writings." This means, among other things:
a) You're relying on other people to read them
b) You're relying on these readers (and the readers of readers, and so on) collectively to convey the ideas _better_ than the original. Even under the doubtful premise they could, it's a very likely massive loss in opportunity cost. Do more "stupid things" make it into Marcus Aurelius or the vast industry that rehashes the Stoics? You're telling people to join the worst game of (multithreading!) Telephone ever, clearly a massive packet loss.
c) You've foreclosed the ability to draw particular lessons from a work that this transmitting crowd might have missed, forgotten, or misinterpreted. Let's take at random something I doubt has been transmitted in Plato. Maybe it's just trivia that the Theatetus ends dramatically where the Euthyphro begins. Maybe it's a waste of time to try to figure out if that is meaningful in his theory of knowledge, and if his theory has anything to teach us today. Even the act of wrestling with a deep work will make your mind stronger at finding connections in other material than scrolling through a slipstream of tweets and blog posts from a bunch of UCLA philosophy grad students.
In short, you're frustrated with David Sinclair's book padding, but are fundamentally reliant on LOTS of writings like that collectively to have absorbed and transmitted all the good ideas of the past. I won't read Thucydides to decide whether to take rapamycin, just as you shouldn't read Sinclair on politics.
A good litmus test of whether a book - or any piece of information or literature including fiction - is great is: Can you draw different lessons from it on a second or more reading, or even just thinking about it longer. Few books and fewer tweets, substacks, whatever meet that threshold.
I'll read a book by you over some random forgotten Church father that might get assigned at St. John's, but over 99.99% of stuff that will show up on Amazon? A much safer bet. And I do hope people are reading Hanania in a century in whatever form ;)
This is brilliant stuff, thanks for posting. Especially (C).
I have read David Sinclair’s Lifespan. It is an easy read, quite well written book. As you say David could have written an essay in NYT to convey his ideas, but it would not have been well known. You can read an article within a few minutes, but you need to spend a few hours reading through the book. You are right that many ideas are repeated in the book, but it is tool of persuasion rather than knowledge. By presenting the core ideas and arguments again and again, the book tries to persuade you to agree with him.
A good example of this is Milton Friedman's book - Capitalism and Freedom. His core thesis could be just a 4 page article, but he would not have the cultural cache if he just wrote a paper or article in NYT. When someone buys a book, given its an investment, they normally try to finish the book, and successful books like that of Friedman normally focus on few simple ideas and repeatedly argue for them and hopes a reader would be persuaded. And once persuaded they recommend it to others, which does not happen with news articles as you spend too little time on it. I would argue for this reason, such books are good. A person with an idea could persuade a large number of people to agree with him with a book, which is not possible even with a well written article.
ironically, Friedman's most well-known piece - "the social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits" - was in fact a blog-length piece, a few thousand words in a major newspaper if I recall correctly. They now teach it in the ethics classes at major MBA programs, framed like "what is wrong and misguided about this?"
Many ideas can be concisely stated and sound convincing, but we don't know how good they really are until they're applied to lots of situations.
Communism can sound somewhat reasonable in a short essay. When you start reading the book form, where all the ludicrous ideas are mismatched up to reality, you see that it doesn't work.
On the other hand, if you read something like Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments or The Wealth of Nations, it's dry and tedious, but you get a complex and detailed explication of the theory in many situations.
In short, books provide evidence. For and against an idea. They're a tool for the writer to build out the idea and see how sound it is. And for the writer to evaluate it.
Friedman is a nincompoop. Like most of today's narcissistic intelligence festishists, he worships IQ and thinks he's smart enough to know all the details or they just don't matter. Events have shown that to be a less than optimal path.
I say, don't be like Friedman. Don't assume your special intelligence and then think that because you're smart, your silly Jerry McGuire thought bubble must be something important. Prove it through the hard work of supporting it with evidence. If you can't, your idea probably isn't so great and you probably aren't so smart.
True, books have a cultural cache, and one shouldn't overlook the utility of repetition to drive a solid point home.
People retain little information when they read non-fiction books and articles. It’s worthwhile to use spaced repetition software to remember the important points.
I can't believe it's 2023 and I'm posting a startup idea, but honestly, someone needs to fork and redo the basic concept of Anki. A sprinkling of sensible UI and ecosystem tweaks and a handful of organized, well-chosen employees actively working to maintain the overall system would increase adoption and cultural impact by like a hundred times, easy. Then you could start thinking about features that Anki can't dream of even with existing plugins, like highly intuitive AI-driven cell phone apps that turn normal everyday incidents from diverse fields of experience into new cards almost exactly the way you want with zero effort almost every time... if there was even 1/100th as much interest in this as in fake crypto nonsense, we could genuinely revolutionize large swathes of learning.
Interesting idea, but spaced repetition takes work. Lots of work. People, even readers, prefer to keep the illusion that are actually retaining something by simply reading the book (some even highlight to reinforce their delusion)
Spaced Repetition, even with your revamped Anki, will never go mainstream
While the actual practice will always be a hurdle, I think people would actually do much more of the practice if they didn't have to effectively build and self-maintain large parts of the practice system just to make it be usable for their learning tasks, never really being quite sure that they've gotten it right.
I can easily imagine someone who plays guitar pretty well, or at the very least has the calluses to prove they practice, but would never use something like Anki because it just makes their head hurt and something seems to go wrong every time they've tried. I think we need to be realistic about the fact that on some level that is all Anki users because the software is just a mess. The ones who stay with it have just learned to suffer with all the flaws because the basic concept is so gob-smackingly effective.
Mochi is trying to be better Anki.
It should be pretty easy to improve the UI, things like allowing you to hold the mouse in one place and just click to go through cards without veering off tiny buttons or seeing an annoying text pop up; or having multiple cards be displayed in one screen so the user doesn't have to wait a mental processing time every time a new card pops up.
LOL!
The purpose of books is not and has has never been to convey information. That's barely of any interest at all in my book writing process.
Also, Richard, I don't know if this is a function of neuroatypicality or what, but you have this sort of all-encompassing credulity that pops up a lot that I find very strange. Which of these two possibilities seems more likely to you?
1. Sam Bankman-Fried actually has a principled stance against reading
2. Sam Bankman-Fried is a pseud who wanted to be this kind of celebrity intellectual and coming out against books was a provocative means of separating himself from his peers.
Also, why do you think people like this argument - because they agree with it on the merits, or because they've always resented book readers and this gives them credibility in opposing them?
My theory was 3. Sam Bankman-Fried is widely known as a fraud, and Richard is citing him as a contrarian method to say 'even the jerk has a point'.
this is mostly fair - especially the last paragraph - but I don't think it's fair to characterize this as being "against reading". It's about preferring time to be spent on articles, posts, essays, shorter-form, higher-density stuff, rather than *books* as a particular medium and delivery vehicle for ideas.
You can still disagree (I'm on the fence myself), but the argument isn't against reading, it's for preferring breadth over depth with respect to one's reading.
"When I wrote my piece on Enlightened Centrism, some took issue with me saying that I don’t believe in Great Books. After thinking about the topic a bit, I’m more certain that I’m correct."
"I’m not mad at people who want to read old books. The problem is that I get the sense from some of them that they think they gain more wisdom than others by doing so. Last month, there was a tweet going around that showed how absurd this worship of the past can get."
I'm sorry, Richard but there is so much wrong with this essay and with your perspective, it's almost comical. First is your title. "The Case Against Most Books." Really? In your lifetime, you will not read even a small percentage of the books in the world, you're aware of that, right? So what percentage of the 129,864,880 books in the world are you referencing? Just curious.
Other people reading "old books" is not something you should concern yourself with, nor should you presume that books only represent history, and/or nonfiction books. Moreover, why would you be "mad at people who want to read books" and why would you even phrase it that way? Do you realize how self-absorbed you sound? Your preference with regard to reading and/or encouraging others not to read is not "correct" It's just your preference, as in an opinion and as you know opinions are like --------, everyone's got one.
And then there's this gem... "I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."
The fact that you use profanity in that snippet of content, and think that a book should only be a six paragraph post tells me a great deal about how much you have not read and how much you don't know about writing and reading, and education.
Do you realize how much this short essay makes you seem, hmm, how shall I put it? Not "smart" perhaps? Please keep reading, because if anyone needs to read, a lot, YOU do.
Be well. :)
You read it well enough to realize that he was quoting Bankman-Fried, right? You can quote people without agreeing with every single word or the exact nature of the point they're making.
The basic points this very young and inexperienced man is making are clear, and extremely naive. I had no idea who this person was, then yesterday I Googled him for 5 minutes and saw how young he was, and then it clicked. Only an uneducated Millennial would have made his absurd claims. My analysis stands. In 5 years or less, Richard, whoever he is, will cringe when he rereads this hilariously un-insightful short essay which only confirms his own mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the vast majority of his generation. 😊
I think the point about older thinkers is correct with one notable exception. That exception are books/essays which allow (or more often force) you to reinterpret a large amount of data in a more simplified and probably framework. Socrates, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Pareto, etc. are all good examples of this. Imo the Straussian interpretation is pretty much correct:
1) there are truths most people deny
2) people who plainly tell the truth can be persecuted
3) "Lindy" texts are preserved precisely because they have some interesting hidden truth which people continue to deny
That being said I think there is an overcorrection in conservative circles where they don't actually test whether their interpretations line up with observed reality. I'd be interested to know what you think of people who try to test older philosophy with modern empirics, like Brett Andersen (https://brettandersen.substack.com/).
For those like me who may not have understood Brian's reference to "Lindy" texts, I think this is what he means:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
in short: "the expected timespan of a non-perishable thing, like a technology or an idea, is often proportional to the time it has already existed". In other words, new things are likely to be brief, but stuff that's been around a while is likely to persist for a while yet.
I dunno about classic, canonical works being "hidden truths that most people deny". I think, say, Shakespeare is probably still widely read (and produced, and copied) because he had a brilliant sense of how people think and behave, and the kinds of human problems that are timeless and engaging. Not because the undercurrents of his plays were taboo or something. But the Lindy Effect... I like that theory.
I know a human who became a Latin teacher in 1961, on the grounds that Latin was regularly taught for centuries, so they probably weren't about to stop now.
I guess that's why they call it the "Lindy Effect" and not "Lindy's Law".
Plenty of Latin teachers still gainfully employed out there, so I'm not sure they were wrong.
That said, if your point is "not all that is old is valuable", I'll gladly agree.
I think you will find a lot fewer schools offering Latin than was the case in 1961.
Is Nietzsche really an “old” thinker? To me, philosophers can be divided into two camps: those who were aware of Darwin and those who weren’t. Kant was really smart, but his view of human nature is cartoonish because he didn’t know that we are just smart primates and wasted much ink exalting human rationality. Nietzsche broke hard from that crap spectacularly, though he was needlessly prolix and opaque
I immediately thought of Nietzsche. As you note writers whose views aren’t accepted. You don’t need to read Kant.
This was excellent but too brief -- you should contact your publisher about a book deal.
I never read books because as a class they're not lindy. The traditional way to digest information is to have it spoken aloud, which is why we have audible now. Substack represents the longest-form that I can commit to reading with my own eyes, like some kind of pleb who has no lector.
Finally, the thinkers of the past weren't better at thinking than we are, but they had frittered away a smaller portion of evolved human wisdom than we have now. Socrates isn't interesting because of what he said that was cutting-edge when he said it, but because of the things he says that his own newfangledness hadn't infected. I'm not just talking about (via Henrich) to prepare manioc. Little glimpses of the sanity of the past can be deeply unscientific but remind us of true things we're tempted to forget. Consider St. John Chrysostom assuming that adipose tissue is undigestible because people who eat a lot of fattened-up animals appear to collect this tissue in themselves. Utterly wrong, of course, but it's good to see a direct reminder that people have always found the obese disturbing to look at, to the point of spontaneously generating bogus theories about them.
Just to see if I understand your argument: You are assuming that individuals read books because they want to obtain information or insight; and, with time, wisdom. Then, you rightly point out that if you want to maximize the amount of information you obtain, you are better-off reading a blog post or a summary -- or anything that is short and potentially comes from several sources.
I would pushback on this. People who like books read them for the experience of going through a long, cohesive text. This includes, of course, obtaining insight, but also includes entering a deeper state of reflexion that is impossible to achieve when you are reading a blog post. A state that requires a long engagement (maybe days) with the text. And I claim that deep reflexion probably generates more important insight than light reflexion. Moreover, because of the way the brain works, it also makes you happy.
👏🏾👏
Exactly this.
I agree with categories 1 and 3. Those make up most of my reading (esp category 1). I’d add that good fictional novels are worth reading, but it’s something I really only enjoyed when younger.
Jeff Bezos famously said that knowing what won't change in 10 years is important, because you can build a business model around things that you know won't change.
Just so, I tell all kids who are going to college that if they can learn what won't change in their lifetimes, they can build a life plan around that. And what won't change in their lifetimes? The same thing that hasn't changed since people began recording their stories and thoughts: human nature.
And the best way to see unchanging human nature over the ages? By reading the classics, sometimes called The Great Books.
There is something to be said about learning what Marcus Aurelius said so many centuries ago, or what any number of other astute observers of human nature said a long, long time ago in so many other entirely different settings: The Tale of Genji, The Bhagavad Gita, The Odyssey. After seeing it here, there, and elsewhere enough times, it begins to sink in, and sink so much more so than reading someone's blog post or a Wikipedia entry.
I agree that acquiring the information in things like William H. McNeill's "Plagues and People," or Suzanne Simart's "Finding the Mother Tree," could probably done more efficiently via your method. But learning the deep lessons of humanity—and perhaps gaining some wisdom instead of just information—takes a bit more commitment.
This could’ve been a tweet.