Alan Kay on How Many Books You Can Read in a Lifetime | Hacker News Reader

Alan Kay on How Many Books You Can Read in a Lifetime

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23 pointsDiabloD314 comments

I respect Alan Kay as much as the next guy, but I don't really know what the take-away is here.

Alan Kay having 4-6 hours a day to read books is certainly out of the ordinary and I can't emulate that. That's not "work day" - that seems more like "I don't have to go to work"-day. I suppose we can acknowledge that Alan Kay is making use of his time wisely.

Also, what kind of books are we talking about here? I guarantee you Alan Kay is not reading a technical book like Compilers by Aho in a day. Sure, he might be physically able to read the letters on all the pages in the book, but he's not LEARNING that much information in a day. That book is 2 semesters worth of new information, not to mention that it requires practice to solidify.

Even the author acknowledges this is a case of quantity over quality. How much actual learning is Alan Kay doing? Now that would be a useful point of reference. That would tell me if I have to up my learning game or if I'm doing just fine.

If every week I learn one new technology like RxJava, React Native, P, etc, am I beating Alan Kay at learning, even though I might be reading fewer pages?

Always worth checking with the source ...

(a) I'm quite sure I didn't tell him that I started a new book every day (note that this contradicts with a later sentence where he attributes me saying that I now read about 4 books a week). You really should realize that many people when they write, reconstruct their memories to fit what they are trying to be didactic about.

(b) and nowhere in the article does he say that I spend 4-6 hours a day reading (this is something -you- ("optymizer") constructed (quite innocently I'm sure). I probably read about 2 hours a day, maybe a little more. This is enough to finish most books. And, yes, some books require quite a bit more effort and time -- both from length and wrt depth.

I did start putting some effort into remembering "pretty nearly" what I read, starting in 3rd grade. However, my abilities never got to the legendary levels of some readers e.g. Bertrand Russell.

(c) I didn't say I've read 20,000 books. I said I'm pretty sure I haven't read more than this. And I do know a number of people who have read more than this. In fact, I don't know how many books I've read.

(d) Why bother thinking about competing? What point is there? Why not just enjoy knowledge and the fun of interrelating it?

Wow, I did not expect a reply from Alan Kay himself! Thank you for taking the time to write a thoughtful reply.

I think of friendly competition as means to improve myself. It's not required, but it can be fun.

Unrelated to the above, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask you the following question: what would you like to see all software engineers start doing?

Man if you learn one new technology a decade you're ahead of Alan Kay. I don't need to hear any more stories about PARC or Smalltalk. They were both wonderful, I am certain. We thank you for your service. Enjoy that Turing award, you earned it.

No, you learn derivative libraries-of-the-day; the dude learns paradigms.

This was not an attack on Alan Kay. He may be learning paradigms and I may be learning the alphabet. The act of learning is similar. Does reading 1 book a day == learning or is it just like reading the news and learning about the state of the world? Certainly some activities make you learn more.

Lately I've come to the realisation that growing up means you simply can't maintain all your hobbies.

It's just not possible to play video games, and read novels, and read comic books, and garden, and cook, and blog, and play an instrument, and code, and paint, and sketch, and do photography, and do pottery, and watch TV, and ballroom-dance, and ski, and practice archery, and go to the gym, etc.

For the majority of people, apart from whatever you do for work, I think you can only really maintain 1-3 hobbies. People like those described in the article have chosen books/reading as their big time-sink. And that's okay, but I bet they're not spending a lot of time painting, or watching TV, or downhill-skiing (unless it's their job). Because there are only so many hours in a day, and eventually you have to specialise.

Yeah, not if you have to balance all of that with a full-time job and a family. But if you can somehow manage to retire early [1], and you either don't have kids or you don't home-school them, then I think you could find time for all of those things you mentioned in your second paragraph. Of course, not all in the same day.

And you don't really need to specialize, unless you have the drive to become a world-class musician or painter. I have a lot of hobbies where I just have fun and don't really want to get famous or turn them into a career.

[1] http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence

Specialization is for insects.

There is an acquisition bias inherent in this article.

Reading 40 hours a week should not be viewed as an unadulterated good that is beneficial in all cases. I've known people who have escaped into reading with that kind of time commitment, at the cost of being able to function well in the real world. I don't judge their choice, but only note the correlation. A bell curve has two tails.

Personally, I've found that two hours a day is the max I can do without starting to get itchy that I'm wasting time by not doing anything. It's fine to get smarter, but, for me, at least, I feel like I have to do something with the smarts.

The writer touches on this:

"Am I saying that everyone should read 4–8 hours a day? Of course not. Why, then, did I write this article? Well, in part because it offers a reference."

and later

"The average American may read 2–4 books a year. But who cares? If you value reading, the average is the wrong reference."

I remember once calculating that I could read 1-2 metres of books per year, or roughly 100m over my lifetime.

Then the internet happened.

No, athletes don't train "30 hours a week". With proper intensity, anything over 2-3 hours a day is detrimental. This time includes stretching and warmup.

"Train" doesn't just mean "work out" as the non-professional athlete understands it. For a professional athlete, "training" encompasses reviewing performance recordings, reflecting on prior performance, technique refinement, endurance training and strength training. All of that certainly adds up to more than 30 hours a week. It's their profession, after all.

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