You only really grasp a point when you hear it many times, and see it applied (or even better apply it yourself).
There is this online service selling summarised versions of popular books. I’ve read many of those summaries, and undoubtedly the key points are all contained in there. But: you read it, and then you forget.
The complete book takes time to lay out the key points and arguments, puts them in context, explains various aspects, gives many examples, challenges you to apply them, and, yes, repeats them. And that’s what you need to actually take them on board. It’s a whole web of beliefs.
As an extreme example: you could give the basic definitions and axioms of, say, group theory on one page, and say “the rest follows”. No fluff. But somebody that’s only read that page has no idea about group theory. For that you need the book, with fluff.
Not getting to the point, or giving relevant context and precursor ideas, while dwelling on unrelated subjects = fluff.
I like my non-fiction the way I like science articles: starting with a summary, and diving into all necessary details later.
However using poetic language in writing that's trying to communicate scientific understanding to everyone, I find, is useful and appropriate. Look at Carl Sagan's popular writings, or some of Asimov's more science related works for good examples.
It's blinkist
I often get how the applications go after reading the section titles, thus I think it can still be more concise. That said, the two books have much better signal-to-noise ratio than some high-brow journalistic pieces.
Quite the opposite. He expands one single argument ad nauseum into each of his books.
It's exasperating.
Fat tailed probability distributions are fat tailed...! Assuming normal distribution underestimates risky events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-tailed_distribution
> and Antifragile
Simple complex systems are too complex to be simple enough ...!
Okay, so this is a bit more technical, but the important thing is that unintelligent systems (= they are simple) that are complex (= have complex dynamics) are bad at adapting to different circumstances.
Also, these systems are products of design trade offs. (We want things to be cheap and get done fast, and also politically okay, and so on.) And thus they are not robust enough, nor resilient enough. They are fragile. (Taleb laments a lot about how antifragiltiy is different from robustness and resilience. And sure, they are because he uses a model in which they are.)
And the book talks about what is needed for anti-fragility, and it turns out that some kind of feedback loop that optimizes for certain problems. Or of course intelligence.
I couldn't have explained it better.
> Fooled by randomness.
Selection / survivorship bias
The barbell strategy is applied to a lot more domains throughout the book - a small excerpt: https://www.nuggetsofthought.com/2018/04/02/nassim-taleb-sen...
I also don’t like when they beat around the bush, but repetition increases retention.
Also, when reading nonfiction, I typically read the beginning and the end, and then skim the rest. If it seems worth the time, then I read the whole thing.
I saw this advice for reading papers, and it has been extremely useful to me for deciding if something is worth reading. For whatever reason though, I have some kind of aversion to doing it with books. Some form of childhood engrained "eat your vegetables" kind of conditioning about finishing books cover to cover.
I should really try it though. I've slogged through many non-fiction books with little beside annoyance to show for it.
I think if you want to avoid fluff, read something that was written more than 20 years ago. Time has a means of eroding away the pop-sci books (Will anyone read Gladwell in 20 years?). I personally like reading the pivotal pieces of a field / founding texts. Jung and Nietzsche come to mind.
Maybe another question you could ask (a fluff test if you will): Could you see a college course using the text as a primary source?
Historical philosophers are not even remotely comparable to present-day popular authors, a more fair comparison would be to present-day philosophers. Present-day popular authors are best compared to old popular authors, like the ones who wrote books on manners for 1800s Americans who wanted to use their affluence to become more like old-world elites, or the 1950s authors that wrote manuals on how to "be a man."
A lot of for-the-masses nonfiction books suffer from the incentives problem. They're not selling information, they're selling the feeling of being smart, intellectual, and well informed. They don't aim to teach you anything, they aim to give you ammunition to impress your friends with at a dinner party.
As such they have to be large and voluminous so you can feel good about yourself just by buying them. Then they have to convey the core point in the first 30 pages because you're not going to read more than that probably. The rest is there to give you cool anecdotes and supporting arguments so you can impress your friends further should they probe (and you actually read that far).
Do you have recommendations that might be different?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz