Hacker News Reader

Comment by apples_oranges | Hacker News Reader

I have read "Range" and was underwhelmed. I feel like the idea in it can be summarised in a 5-15 minute blog post.

I also think that this year was probably not lousy for many people, me included, and I'm a bit tired of giving 2020 negative adjectives.

View on HN

I also read Range and I too was a bit underwhelmed. I took it as a sign that I’ve read too much in this area already as much of the book was familiar. It would probably be a good introduction for those who haven’t read about the topic before.

I keep telling people that 2020 is our chance to both address the lousy situation many are in, and to recognize what is truly important in our lives. The fact that many people did in fact have a very lousy year and you did not also falls into that category. Why do you think your year was not lousy, and what can we learn from it?

Book reports/reviews are a thing in their own. The thesis of a text is somewhat straightforward to summarize in articles and reports of that length.

Personally, I thought Range was a fantastic book. I agree that it was repetitive at times but that drum beating of the theme was welcome and showed the un/kind learning environment thesis in many areas of human learning.

I gave copies of the book out to my group at work in 2019 and everyone in the group loved it (so they told me!). My team members appreciated the other examples beyond the Woods-Federer example and my boss brings up those examples from time to time.

The central core idea of un/kind learning environments is a crucial one and has really helped me when I have to learn new things too. As my career is not generally in a kind learning environment, it has made me more confident to graze for new information far and wide, like here on HN (:

Most books could be summarized in an article.

And while I think attributing negative adjectives to 2020 is arbitrary, since the bad things happening now are not bound to the calendar, this year was particularly bad for an even bigger number of people than the average year. It may not have been bad for you, but passing off the year as remotely good is disrespectful and shows a lack of empathy to the millions who had it bad because of covid, racial conflicts, natural disasters, terrorism, increased poverty etc etc.

Or a wiki page [1]. The question then turns to what value the long form book adds. I think one aspect is that consuming content over multiple days approximates the first few cycles of a Spaced Repetition system [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range:_Why_Generalists_Triumph...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

This is the case for most non-fiction life/business advice books that come out these days. Many of them actually start out as articles/talks. The author then gets contacted by a publisher who proposes to stretch things out into a book.

I havent read it, but reading Gate's blurb, calling Roger Federer (A guy who has dedicated all his life to one specific sport) a generalist told me everything I wanted to know about the book, a Malcom-Gladwellian work.

Pop science with inundated with $50 words to sound more impressive than it really is.

I completely agree regarding your thoughts on "Range". I think quite a number of books dealing with same/similar subject areas can be shortened. But for some reason "Range" felt too long even by those standards. I felt like the author had nothing much to say in the second half and just keep going on for no reason.

That's the problem with most books. Stretched out like a Netflix production.

Ha, I actually associate Netflix with the opposite, killing their best works before they come of age.

Non-fiction books are terrible for this though, there's often a few brilliant pages buried in hundreds of pages of filler. Fiction (ironically, as a deliberate consumption of free time) is often not nearly as bloated.

Agreed. I think many books, even that have an interesting idea, take their main idea and slice it up into too many pieces and then add enough anecdotes per piece to really stretch it out.

Poor value for my reading hour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com