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Comment by lostmsu | Hacker News Reader

The problem I've been facing recently is that long form also turns out to be a waste of time after you go through the most informational/influential pieces.

Lots of the articles thread the same water, dive into totally unnecessary details, or just tell a story that, while fascinating, does not really give you any important new information, or bury it in a few casual sentences, never elaborating on them.

For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.

That applies even to some of the stuff recommended directly here on HN. I would not even dive into aggregators recommended here.

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I find that a lot of people in the software field confuse maximizing information density with finding valuable learning materials.

Almost all books have relatively low information density. You can condense "How to Win Friends and Influence People" down to a page of chapter headings, for example, or a history book into a 2-3 page timeline. The point of all of the anecdotes and details isn't to convey more information, it's to force the reader to slow down to think about the topic and provide more memory hooks to help with recall later.

Whenever you read a book, if you think "that was obvious, I knew that already," observe if you are actually acting on that knowledge the way you want to. After reading the book, do you act on that knowledge you already knew more easily?

Even books that are outright bad can be useful if they force you to think more about a topic and re-evaluate your own opinions. For example, I try to read 1-2 general software books a year. Some of them are terrible, most of them tell me things I already learned, but the spaced repetition makes me re-evaluate my own recent choices to see if there are any areas where I have been getting lazy and cutting corners I shouldn't.

> For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.

actual new things are by definition rare. each thing can only be done once for all of humanity. after that, its an iterative process with the occasional leap forward.

if you're thinking about technical or even worse self-help books: yes - there are very few that actually bring anything worthwhile to the table. thats simply because it becomes common knowledge if its correct to a degree where it has a significant effect.

if you're however thinking of story-books than ... you're just reading similar things. there is a lot of written stories around - they admittedly usually have things like `conversation` in common, but how else would you write a book? by leaving everything blank?

> how else would you write a book

Maybe you don't.

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

But then how could you fulfill your childhood dreams? This is all very important!!

I'm struggling to understand your comment about books. There are many thousands of very high-quality books written about lots of different subjects. Is it possible your book recommendations are all too similar, like only reading novels written in the past ten years or something?

Lindy effect, stuff worth reading is stuff that has been filtered by time.

Reading old books is worth it. New ones are hard to filter and many will turn out to be completely unnecessary.

Leaves you on the sides of contemporary culture but at least you're reading efficiently.

I thought we were supposed to decolonize our libraries?

These can both be true.

As a simultaneous question and example, Kipling is often given as an example of a British Empire writer with condescending attitudes to the very people he wrote about.

The names of Indian authors never reached me because my parents thought the Empire was unadulterated good, and they thought that because my grandparents were born near the peak of the Empire — one of my grandmothers was, for a period in her infancy, living in a military base in the British Raj.

They whose names I do not know could very plausibly be Kipling’s equal or better. I know from various examples that various cliques will have hidden the names of good authors from me.

That leads me to the question: can anyone here recommend a good Indian author from the same era as Kipling? (Yes I know Kipling was born in India).

> That leads me to the question: can anyone here recommend a good Indian author from the same era as Kipling? (Yes I know Kipling was born in India).

While not a direct answer to your question, I think The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha is relevant in the sense that it addresses why your question is difficult (perhaps impossible) to answer.

Thanks, I’ll add that to my to-read list.

I suppose rather than asking for a “good” author (subjective, for example I’ve met an Oxbridge English Literature graduate who thought Shakespeare was overrated), I should have asked for a “famous” author from the same era.

The sort of author whose works a current-day Indian politician would have on their shelves, or perhaps quote from, to signal how cultured they are — in the same sort of way UK PM Johnson tried to show how cultured he was by quoting Kipling.

I think the long form is really good actually, but it needs to be done by people who wrote it out of love. HN will sometimes lead you down that path, like that story about the diver who survived for many minutes on the floor of the North Sea without oxygen after his umbilical cord was severed. Mostly though, almost everything linked to by HN didn’t really need to be written and was likely written for clicks.

HN is still valuable for me because it sometimes leads to me discovering new frameworks I can actually use that I wouldn’t hear about anywhere else because people in my part of the world use JAVA, PHP or C#. But HN is mainly a social media and all the attention seeking that comes with that.

The comment section is now and again of higher quality, many who are informed on a particular subject.

The incentives on the web are skewed, and I believe the same is true for print. Nobody will be happy to pay the same price for a 50 page book as they would for a 200 page book, even if the information is the same, so if you have a 50 page book, you have every reason in the world to add fluff and stretch it to 200 pages.

For many articles on the web I believe it's an issue because of Google. Google does punish short pieces, so if you want to write about how to do X with Y, you need to start of with a history of Y, lay out a couple of use cases of X and then explain why doing X with Y is difficult, to finally explain how to do it.

Every time I come across a piece in that style I want to smash a screen. It could be a one-paragraph solution, but I have to scroll past three images and five paragraphs of worthless blather that assumes I'm a moron.

Unix man pages are amazing. Every technical help resource should be like that.

I would say that the ability to recognize true novelty is hard to train without experiencing a fair amount of repetition.

Very true. It is still better to jump right away into dense stuff though.

> For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.

I assume you’re referring to fiction ... there’s actually a whole field of study around this rooted in psychology, they’re called Jungian Archetypes. There’s a really fantastic book by Joseph Campbell called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

I’m not sure what the current state of study is, its been a few years since I personally studied the concepts. It might be a nice change from the mundanity you seem to be describing

There are lots, and lots, and lots of books. With those that have been filtered by time and decades to centuries of fans and specialists, if you can’t get something out of them usually that’s your fault—which is fine and normal, since for most people getting acquainted enough with literature from a different place or era to enjoy it takes some deliberate effort, just like learning to appreciate new genres of music, or film of a style you didn’t grow up with, or a genre of video game that’s not immediately rewarding. And that’s just fiction!

Maybe try poetry? Though, same applies. Anything that’s not popular, recent fiction aimed at a grade 8 reading level is going to take some effort and practice to learn to appreciate and fully understand. Literacy is a very wide spectrum.

[edit] incidentally, for whatever reason, I find drawing book recommendations from strangers online nearly useless. This goes double for genre fic and non-fic. For other media it works fine. Dunno why but I think part of it may be that people read more differently, and for more reasons, than they watch movies or listen to music play games. I also find it’s easier in other media to quickly spot people with tastes that are very contrary to mine, and so ignore them.

One thing that seems to help is that more people are able to say “this is trash, but it’s my kind of trash, but hey, here’s this other thing like it that’s actually good” with film than with books. Something about books seems to make people use a much broader and less-differentiated or less-well-tuned definition of “good” and then just apply that same label to everything they read and don’t hate.

This is very true to me. That’s why I believe it’s important to know when to skim or even call it quits on an article; particularly when the information on the event is limited and every platform seems to cover it with the same details and slightly different fashion. That way you don’t waste time.

I came to the same realization not so long ago. Most of the content being produced is pretty much deja vu. That lead me into questioning what creativity is but that I could not find anything interesting to read about the topic. So if anyone has any pointer please share.

It is exacerbated by the fact that there are so many ranking on the internet. I most often start by the top 10 and then the rest seems boring in comparison.

Platforms don't help either. There are hundreds of thousands of creators on Youtube and Instagram and they somehow manage to all produce the same thing...

Agreed about shallow articles. On that note, for someone seeking to browse current topics but with good, quality information sources - what news/etc sites do you enjoy?

Eg, i actually like "current events", especially news. I want to know what my political actors are doing, good or bad - but only concrete information. Especially with the current administration. Rumors / weak leaks are wasted cycles in my brain.

Try The Economist, they aren't focused on breaking news and tend to be terse and with high informational density.

They also have a companion magazine, 1843, that dives into longer-form cultural articles.

> same story told over and over again

I'm curious about how old you are. I think the problems you mention get worse, the more life experience one has?

Nowadays I think all 1st person shooters are mostly the same and get bored.

I enjoy the Axios news format; it's pretty concise, and you have the option to dig deeper into a given topic or event.

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