The Need to Read
wsj.com
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Most non-fiction books revolve around a few central ideas. Once you internalize this you realize it isn't necessary to read the entire book. You just need to read the summary and notes that someone else has written.
For eg : I'm currently going through the book notes that Derek Sivers has written and just posted this last night : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13042438
Another source of (business book) summaries is Actionable Books Weekly : http://www.actionablebooks.com/en-ca/
Sometimes a good review on Amazon sufficiently maps the ideas in the book and is all that is required.
Further, you don't always have to buy the books. Your free local public libraries carry a lot of these books and even have the digital version that you can borrow.
I do agree that summaries and comments are useful, but they serve the same purpose as non-fiction rather than fiction.
For most "pop" books, they are often either based on a long-form article (commonly New Yorker or The Economist) or have a long-form article that summarizes them. I have switched to just reading that instead and saving my reading time for more "meaty" books.
As some examples, off the top of my head: The Checklist Manifesto, Simple Rules, The Long Tail, anything by Gladwell. I didn't need to read the whole book of any of those; the long-form article covered it.
Exposing you to ^new^ ideas, ones not encountered before.
I for example make notes of the notes and then re-visit them frequently over the next few days. This helps me visualize and concretize the ideas in different ways since I'm revising them at different times. In the interim I'm trying to incorporate them in everyday life.
That only applies to business, popular history, popular psychology, self-help, etc. books written for the mass market. Not surprisingly most of them are garbage and frequently wrong. Malcolm Gladwell's books are probably the most well known in this geanra and IMO are garbage.
As soon as you start reading serious non-fiction (mathematics, psychology, philosophy) summaries just do not work. The "book about the book" in fact tends to be much longer in length (good examples: anything on Wittgenstein, anything on Galois theory)
Strong concur. Any serious work is a nuanced beast that demands grappling with and considering.
- changed my life - read summary first, if really good, buy and read book - cons are 1) makes you think less about content 2) may be too easily forgotten 3) retention isn't as high as reading a book that hits theme over and over with a sledgehammer 4) ignore books with bad review that may be useful to you
I wonder if anyone has techniques / software (voice to text) they would share..
To give examples, "The e-myth revisited" is clearly in the category of only really having one point. On the other hand, "Reasons and persons" by Derek Parfit has a multitude of small nuanced points and arguments scattered through the entire text.
I would definitely encourage you to seek out these denser, more serious books. They are harder going, but if you can find good ones then they have a lot to offer.
This is not to say that the summaries or notes are bereft of examples. Derek Sievers notes for example are extremely detailed and he retains the narrative wherever necessary.
That said, I prefer to read a summary of the book before the book itself so I can focus on the details instead of exhausting mental energy figuring out what is going on.
I find that I retain more if I actually read the book then write my own summary in a journal somewhere. I learned that habit from a friend and once in a while I'd go back over the notes.
How can you tell that without reading the book? The benefit of actually reading the thing is getting to synthesize the text and form your own ideas about what it all means.
Your method isn't unacceptable, but to use it as your main source of getting information from books is a bit...odd.
It all depends really. In fact, there's a whole science-of-sorts behind reading non-fiction: http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
I think though that some books have a large potential benefit (I'm thinking of Mindset right now) because they spend a few 10's of thousands of words changing your mind. Summaries won't have the same effect.
The central idea of the book is revealed in it's description on Amazon : Dweck shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we approach our goals. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are far less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and mentorship. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.
And then Derek's detailed notes will help me understand the sub-ideas presented by the author as well as any relevant and interesting examples.
The thing is, I'd hate for anyone to miss the experience I had with that book - I really & honestly put myself in the growth-mindset camp, but the book taught me how to see the many, many areas of my life that I had a fixed mindset about.
It's one of the few books that has literally changed my life, so like I said, I'd hate to see people missing out on that (assuming they're in need of it!) by reading a summary.
These ideas, you think you've read half a book and gotten the gist, but as time wears on, the ideas take on new life. Take, for example, a book like Guns, Germs, and Steel. I'm not going to go back and reread that book, but the underlying idea of geography as a fundamental determinant of society, is worth revisiting as time goes on. Because you miss things. You miss the full depth of what and how.
I find myself reading fewer books, and spending more time with each one. I savor each chapter, considering the implications over the next day before I read the next. The latest book I've read is The Dictator's Handbook, and I've found it pivotal. It places so much in perspective. The idea that corporate governance and small-country tyranny would have so much in common is something you just agree with because it sounds so right, but the book actually walks you through how and why.
That's what I'm looking for in a book. Something that totally changes how I look at a certain aspect of the world. Anything else just isn't worth the time.
I do as you do, reading slowly and focusing on each chapter. I read the chapter and hand write a summary afterwards to allow myself to reflect on everything and ingrain what I have read. This is not be a quick process, but I enjoy it and try my best to improve my poor writing.
I envy the leisure of older generations where entertainment was reading and writing. From my experience the crisp writing of the past has morphed into ambiguity. I can't help but think constant TV, phone, and internet hinders our writing.
Books are wonderful. But they are not magic. Nevertheless, I do fully agree with the larger point that people should keep reading them.
...[great pause]...
I am not capable of replying in a way to meaningfully improve your outlook in life. Good luck to you sir.
...[close browser and go for walk]...
Please don't get me wrong: I love reading in general.
It's crazy isn't it? I wrote a math & physics textbook[1] that condenses nearly 2000+ pages of precalculus, mechanics, and calculus, in very few pages. I think I could make it even shorter, but I wanted to include lots of exercises/problems because those are important.
[1] https://minireference.com/ see extended preview here https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSguide_v5_previ...
Youtube has been godsend for me last couple of years. It exposed my own ignorance about how little I knew about the world.
Now I usually type in 'BBC documentary' into youtube every night and watch it in bed. Also helps me get rid of some of the self-centered pre-bed anxiety.
"Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied."
You need to use the knowledge you gain, not just hoard it.
1) There is a very strong relationship between the length of time it takes to compose something and its 'value'. [0] That shouldn't be a surprise. Twitter is on one end of that spectrum, books are on the other.
2) The range of value is far wider than people can conceive of. I know this fact yet in my tiny human mind I can't conceive of the entire breadth of that spectrum, and I inevitably lose perspective and get wrapped up in my what I'm currently reading.
3) The highest value content , addressing the same topic as lower value content, has entirely different things to say, different questions to ask, different (i.e., real) knowledge. When I read it (I tend to forget otherwise; see #2), I am reminded that the lower value content - and I mean 99% of what's out there - is bad information; it either addresses the wrong questions, is based on the wrong knowledge, or is flat out ignorant and/or deceitful.
EDIT: 3.5) High value content is far more efficient and rewarding: One good high-value book saves you far more time sifting through 99% of the rest. Also, the pleasure and reward of interacting with humanities geniuses through their words far exceeds that of reading hyperbolic tweets by the 99.9999% who have far less talent and knowledge (not excluding myself). Finally, you absorb some of the habits of what you read; read the best and you absorb the best - great writing, high standards, clear thinking, etc.
4) There exists is far more of the highest value content than I have time to read in my life.
So why read anything else?
....
[0] Value: For lack of a better term, I'll use value: It can include anything from directly applicable information to deep knowledge to artistic beauty.
I've been reading books -- lots of books, some recent, many not. Most not what you'll find on the shelves of your local bookstore (if you're lucky enough to have one) or even at a reasonably well-stocked library, but books I've specifically sought out, often through references in other books.
Libraries have been useful, inter-library loan even more so. But most especially, it's been services, some not fully above-board, though others are, which provide direct access to material, often only of limited availability. In the case of The Internet Archive, these can include a great many public-domain works. For any materials published after the copyright blackout year of 1924 -- and a great deal of what I'm interested in falls betwen 1924 and 1958, which is to say, is material which under the copyright laws extant at the time would now be public domain -- Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are tremendously useful. The ability to carry around what amounts to a considerable library in my hand is also quite powerful (though the tools for organising, managing, accessing, and annotating such a library on Android are entirely insufficient).
But yes: read books. Real books. Good books. Get the fuck off the Web and away from the idiots. Myself included.
Yes, it's hard. Yes, I struggle with that all the time (and rather particularly over the past few weeks what with a Recent Very Bad Collective Decision).
A book, a book worth writing, a book well-considered, well-conceived, well-planned, well-researched, and well-written, is an absolute gem. This is not an obsolete data format by any means.
> any examples of the wide gap between high-value content vs. low-value
A few spring to mind:
* Science: Compare IPCC reports with almost any discussion on climate change. If you take the time to read just the IPCC 'summary reports for policy makers', you quickly learn that almost all popular discussion of it is nonsense - the wrong questions based on wrong information, like discussing the quality of ice fishing in the Sahara - a waste of your time and worse, misinformation. A related example: Publications such as Nature and Science are so different than popular coverage of science, it's as if they are covering a different field of human knowledge.
* International relations (i.e., foreign policy, etc.): I've taken the time to find the expert publications and, as in other fields, you quickly realize that they are a goldmine of knowledge and almost everything else - even 'experts' writing editorials in the NYT or WSJ - is ignorant and/or deceitful. The non-partisan think tanks are very good: Brookings, Carnegie Endowment, CSIS, the Lowy Institute in Australia is great and a different perspective ... I have a much longer list if you re interested, and I next mean to look into the leading academic publications.
* Think of a field you have deep expertise in; do outsiders really have a clue? For example, IT security: Even IT pros on HN have large blind spots and most of the public is clueless. The language spoken by IT security experts, the questions asked, the solutions, are very different than what everyone else says. You need to read the right books, not just any book, to gain real knowledge.
* Next time you need to research something, look at the usual sources via Google web search, then look at scholarly publications (e.g., via Google Scholar). IME, often the former seems valuable and persuasive until I read the latter, and then the popular stuff seems frighteningly misinformed.
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> Any pointers to high-value content since you mention there is much?
Of course it depends on the field you are interested in; there is far more to read in any field than you have time for, unless you want a masters degree in it. There are more great works of literature than we have time to read; why read anything less? (There are reasons, but you get my point.) Examples:
* In the last few years I decided to read Confucius' Analects, an obvious example of a high-value book - why read about it and about Chinese culture when I can just read the Master himself? - but which translation? Great writers are subtle and likely have a breadth and depth of ideas far beyond their translator's grasp (unless their translator also is a genius and expert in the same field). Amazon reviewers seemed persuasive and helpful - until I turned to journal articles by experts in the field. Then I learned once and for all that Amazon reviewers often sound good but have no clue; the Amazon reviews turned out to almost all useless or worse - I almost believed them.
* I'm reading The Inferno by Dante now (translated by John Sinclair, as recommended by a professor in the field). It's one of the most beautiful, moving, exceptional works of art I've ever encountered. It's a loss to the world that anyone doesn't get to see what I see.
* I recently bought the Koran (after researching translations). A billion people are talking about Islam; hardly any have a clue about what they are saying - they just repeat low-value information. Rather than spending hours reading all that, I'll spend it on one high value book and know far, far more. And I'll also need to find a high-value book, maybe sociology, on how Islam actually is understood and practiced today.
(Certainly not all high-value works are 'classic' books like the Analects, Inferno, or Koran, though consider that there are thousands of years of writing by smart people to mine; if you picked the best of each century you'd have a lot of reading to do.)
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A few tips based on my experience (low-value info, but I've never seen anything good on the subject!):
* Much of the high value stuff can be intimidating, has bad associations (from when you were forced to read it in school before you were ready) or has a status that overwhelms the ability to see it for the flawed, human genius that it is. Get by those issues, form your own opinion with fresh eyes, and you usually discover that, hey, this is flawed but is indeed absolutely brilliant and wonderful. Much is a great pleasure to read (see Dante, above) - extremely talented people tend to master writing well too, and there is a reason so many love it. Some is indeed dry and much of it is challenging - but I've become more accustomed to that and find low-value stuff often lacks the richness, depth and brilliance I've come to expect.
* Follow your nose; be opportunistic; keep asking questions about the world: When I'm asking the questions that the book also asks or addresses, that's a good time to start reading it. Also, my instincts about what I'm interested in also are a good guide to what I'm ready for; or if a work angers me then usually that's because it's challenging me and I really need to read it. If I don't grasp some art-form or artist, I keep my eyes open for when it suddenly resonates and then read/watch/etc. I get much less out of randomly chosen books, no matter how brilliant.
* Unless you are superhuman, low-value stuff can be very persuasive without high-value stuff to compare it to (see my Confucius example, above). Humans just have very limited ability to see through nonsense. If you've never been to Fiji, how could you tell if someone is giving you good or bad information about it?
* Try not to settle for less than the best: Knowledge based on research and above all, expertise; art from the true geniuses. Unless you are diving deep, the settled knowledge of a field is the best starting place - imperfect like all human knowledge, but far better than the alternatives. Amateurs, even smart, studied ones, have gaping blind spots. The high-value experts aren't gods, but when I approach them with healthy skepticism I find I appreciate them even more: They often turn out to be real people who achieved true genius and who created amazing works of art and knowledge.
* Most people have developed the skills and resources to quickly find and evaluate low-value information, such as using Google web search and knowing Quora from Reddit from StackExchange. You'll need to develop the skills and resources for high-value stuff (see below) but once you do using them becomes far more efficient.
* The best resources on general topics that I've found (I'm still a bit of a novice myself): Google Scholar, JSTOR (if you can get access; it usually requires privileges at a university library), and most valuable in their way, reference specialists at university (not public) libraries (for example, there may be a Russian history reference specialist): They can immediately tell you which book or paper is the leader in its field, its strengths and weaknesses, etc., and can distinguish between books that are fringe ideas, experts' advocacy of their pet hypotheses, and settled knowledge. Most will help the public but you need to respect their time: Do your homework, carefully prepare your question, be patient, and don't expect many followups.
There is much talk here in New Zealand, as there is in the US, about the possibility of a Universal Basic Income.
Looking it up, I found a relatively short investigation into the idea commissioned by the government back in 2010[1], that has more real statistics and conclusions than all the other talk I've ever seen put together.
What you call "high-value" writing still, of course, has the possibility of errors, bias, etc. But man is it still more informative to read than everything else.
Of course the punishment for reading this stuff is the pain of living in a world full of people commenting who "didn't read the article." :p
[1] Available here: http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...
> the punishment for reading this stuff is the pain of living in a world full of people commenting who "didn't read the article." :p
Yup. And watch them take us blindly into calamity after calamity because they can't be bothered to click a link.
For instance you get programming threads where people will spend pages arguing about whether something is more efficient than something else, hours of their time, before someone finally spends five minutes running an actual benchmark.
One further thing I do with regards to Google Scholar: I add the term "(intitle:review OR intitle:summary)" and that offers only reviews , which are a good way to understand the key things about a field ,what's established and not , etc.
And if I'm interested in medical research , I go into pubmed , they have something called "clinical queries" which offers only reviews and the like, which is even more important in medicine, because of the statistical nature of knowledge there, and complexity of experimentation.
Btw, you gave good tips on how to find high quality knowledge, but probably there's more on that subject. Is there some source that teaches that ?
I wonder if a research library offers a course on efficient research using modern tools.
Do you think a service like a distilled wikipedia would be value - which would aggregate indisputable facts about the world around us. Both the IPCC reports on climate change and the Koran are very high value sources of information, and even offer summarized versions and lessons... yet people still don't refer to them whatsoever. Personally, it makes everyday conversation very frustrating as people continually fail to ground their stances in any semblance of fact or reality - and don't even begin to make an effort to do so.
I also currently resort to 'doing my homework' for researching these issues, but it seems like there has to be an easier way in a landscape with wikipedia, thousands of fact checking services, and access to high quality information in the form of reports academia that fails to materialize in conversation, policy, and isn't even aggregated if you aren't determined or an expert.
> a bit black on white on the difference between low/high value content
Agreed. I was simplifying - it was long enough as is! And it is already so speculative (it's almost embarrassing - ironically low-value) that I would hesitate to try to add nuance.
> Why do you think it is that 'low' value content is so prevalent - and we fail to refer to refer to actually high value content?
My personal hypotheses:
1) Few people care enough about the world to even consider making an effort to be better informed
2) Of those who care, few even consider that low-value content is so unreliable and high-value content exists (as I said in #2 in my original post)
3) Of those who care and know what they are missing, few want to make an effort to find and read the high-value content. People are lazy (me too!)
4) The low-value content establishes the norms: People read it and believe it, and therefore anything that contradicts it - especially from a whole different perspective - seems wrong, ridiculous, and at best challenges their worldview - not something many people will accept. If everyone thinks the Sun orbits the Earth, the person telling the truth is ridiculed.
> Do you think a service like a distilled wikipedia would be value
Absolutely, but it takes time and skilled labor. I've often thought about how to get the high-value content into the public conversation.
But there are good online resources: Try Encyclopedia Britannica, for example. It's what you describe, though necessarily smaller than Wikipedia.
I'd look at syllabi for IT security courses from leading schools as a start, or maybe ask a specialist reference librarian at a college or university (after researching the question on your own). There may be a widely accepted IT Security 101 textbook.
If you really want to be a professional computer security expert, you'll need to take courses from experts - the novice lacks the context to interpret the books, to understand them in context (e.g., 'this is one side of a long-running argument'), or to know what gaps they leave (e.g., 'there's a newer theory on this issue', 'this omits a whole field of knowledge', etc.) and to fill them. And you'll need real world experience, of course; learn from and make connections with the best people you can.
From Warren Buffett[0] to patio11[1] to Bill Gates[2] to Patrick/John Collison [3][4] it seems incredibly rare to find a successful investor/CEO/founder who _doesn't_ read.
Yet for some reason almost no one (especially not my friends in their early 20s!) reads. I'd like to understand why, if anyone has any ideas? I think the obvious argument is social media and shortening attention spans, but it's probably more nuanced than that.
[0] Warren Buffett apparently spends 80% of his day reading [1] "This makes buying books a stupidly high ROI, assuming you read and get value out of them." from https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/investing... [2] Bill Gates reads a book a week, from http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-favorite-books-201... [3]http://www.johncollison.ie/2013reading.html [4]https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf
By the way, I'm working on a tool that makes it easier to keep track of what you're reading and discover who's read what. I'd love to chat with any active readers on HN and hear about your reading pain points (I'm at me@tristanhomsi.com ).
I'm radically uninterested in 'social' or 'web' as it pertains to reading. A command line tool that interacts with org-mode to take notes and serve as a memex UI would be useful to manage sourcing and linkage of ideas.
What's not really solved right now, imo, is the organization of what you're reading and what to read next. Goodreads does a pretty awful job of this. A command line tool is definitely interesting! Although you wouldn't be able to access your "reading list" from a phone/anywhere. I find a lot of the time while on the go someone tells me about a book and I want to save it for later immediately.
Oh the horror of someone trying to better themselves with a 0 side-effect $10 book that in some instances can be more effective than antidepressants.
https://aeon.co/essays/can-self-help-books-be-better-than-me...
"No one with a feeling for literature and poetry can read the typical best-selling business or self-help book with a straight face, because their six rules or nine plans or 12 formulas are so manifestly idiotic, and couched in prose of such insulting simplicity."
The reason self-help books are written the way they are written, is because that's all there's to it. They have a formula that's pretty logical and people find it "idiotic" because in the inside, they already know what they have to do, yet for some reason they resort to these books.
I mean, for example, any given how to startup book: - Find a problem - Develop an idea to solve a problem - Get your hands dirty
Abstractly, that's pretty much it. There may be some other insights, but in general, that's what you get. Again, most people, by common sense already know that, but they keep reading self-help books. I have yet to find the reason.
I wonder if the benefits that the author and other people mention apply to technical books. Maybe I should pick up a fiction book or finally start reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach" again (which has been sitting on my shelf for too long).
It was in Polish and translation is something like that: "One probably has no soul, who - after reading this proof - can be totally free from a delicate thrill, which decent men used to feel after seeing something really beautiful."
But this is just an indexing issue: when you read a book, you acquire more from it than some list of facts you can intentionally recall afterward—that's just one way of indexing knowledge, and not a particularly useful one.
As an example, let's say you've read a book on compilers. Is it more useful for your brain to organize the information from the book so that when you think of certain aspects of compilers, the information is recalled; or is it better to have the information recalled when thinking of the book that it came from? Recalling the info. in connection with the book itself typically offers much less value than recalling it in connection with the book's subject matter.
You don't know about most of the knowledge you have, though it is still active in the sense that it participates in interpreting your experience and determining action. Additionally, reading (without intentional memorization) will add to this knowledge.
Makes me feel a lot better about all the time I've spent reading books that I can't immediately recall the details of.
It's ironic that people are arguing that books are a waste of time - on HN.
There are certainly too many one-idea books, but there are also many extraordinary, irreplicable works: A Pattern Language, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Landscape of History, The Modern Firm, The Diffusion of Innovations, Bowling Alone, The Life You Can Save, And the Band Played On, and on and on.
I think books and travel are the things that most improve you as a person.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Intelligent-Touchstone/...
Essentially by reading the same book the grandma and grandson had something to talk about. Obviously. Books aren't essential for this and there are any number of things that could have created the same effect. (She could take up playing and understanding, say, video games as only one example.). [2]
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
[2] I talk with my daughters about "The Bachelor" which I watch with my wife.
Unfortunately for the WSJ and the rest of the world he'll never read it.