Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've been thinking about the halo around books on and off for years.

I think whatever special value books used to represent in our society from before the internet is long gone. I remember the pre-internet times when the information world you had access to was small. You could consume silly low-information things on the tv or radio or you could read a book on the topic, which had a much higher information density and chance of being correct. There was no one you could talk with about a detailed topic unless you had maybe built up a professional circle you met with regularly, so a book was your only opportunity to "converse" with an expert. If you paid thousands of dollars, you could take a class on the topic and have an knowledgeable person take you on a basic guided tour of some of the good books on the topic. You would never have been able to get Warren Buffet's detailed thoughts on the economy without reading his book.

In the post-internet world, information is cheap and plentiful. Endless hours of talks and interviews by major thinkers are available to all. With a quick Google, you can find people discussing any topic under the sun. Micro-niche content on all topics are being produced for YouTube, the likes of which you would have never seen on the Discovery Channel. Dozens of free courses are available on all major topics and you can cherry pick just the pieces you are most interested in. Most information can be just-in-time delivered to you at just the moment you need it. Books are not obsolete in this environment, but just another one of the dozens of formats through which you could consume detailed information on a topic.

And finally, our collective societal values change slowly in comparison to the pace of technological change. Books were far and away the best way to access information for so long that it has a sticky association with class, intelligence, wealth and wit. But really, if you are getting all your information from books, you are an anachronism and definitively behind the curve. Sometimes I think of Raphael's School of Athens and think that the conversions I've been privy to for the past 10 years on HN must far surpass anything they might have said to each other.

There is definitely a ton of value to be had from learning on the internet. Watching a 2 hour 92nd street Y debate on Youtube can be just as enlightening as reading a great book. But I still think books have a certain staying power due to their format.

The rigor of longform reading is still something special. I know I am prone to over-quoting from Thoreau, but as he said, "What is taken as argument in the auditorium is too often later found to be rhetoric in the study."

I think there's a lot of cargo-culting around books being magical in and of themselves, but there is a subtle trap in this line of thinking.

The micro-niche aspect of the internet is unrivaled for straightforward, practical information. I won't question that. That said, if you want the detailed thoughts of an expert on some topic, they will by definition be in a book or book-analog online format since no other medium allows for this sort of efficient and unforgiving long-form development of thoughts. Online courses and blog posts tend to refer to books anyway, or to summarize them. Videos can offer information as well but the format itself constrains the amount of information you can cram into the work, and the incentive to editorialize is greater.

But in a deeper sense it's not even about the books but the applicability and context of the information that is gleaned regardless of the format. Ten year's worth of HN can be impressive, but it mostly gives you perspective on HN users and which topics interest them to begin with. Just like the School of Athens gave a specific perspective, HN will give you a specific framework from which you may or may not have to escape eventually. To name another example, if you start reading non-popular history books it becomes clear that different experts can have radically different views of the same events. In turn you start to realize that the pop-history books you've read are so distorted as to be almost useless. Similarly, the internet can yield astounding quantities of information, but if they are optimized for views, reinforce an echo chamber, or are repeating ideas as a secondary source, it won't matter. It's seductive to feel this power at our fingertips but the end practical result tends to be the same, since developing thoughts takes effort. More importantly, time remains the true barrier.

I think there is value to reading 20 10-minute articles on the internet. I think there is a different kind of value to reading 1 200-minute book.

I like the knowledge I've gained from reading lots of articles. The problem comes up because I have to very intentionally choose to read a long book instead of defaulting to many short articles. Over time and in large enough quantity, this feels subjectively bad. Like I'm overloaded with information and lots of different perspectives, but without much of the depth, nuance, or understanding that can come from really sitting with one topic, world, story, or point of view in a deep and extended way.

I think the internet is amazing for providing the torrent of information it does. I just found that, for me, I was drawn to the bright, shiny, always-new, always-now nature of it at the expense of reading books. As I've made more of an effort to read lately, books feel like a different kind of information intake, and I like diversifying in that way.

I agree that social media and news media in particular can be an information torrent and very quantity over quality. The best that can be said about it is that it can be up to the minute timely, which is occasionally very important. And the news pre-internet was not much better than post-internet. It's always been a pretty bad source of nuanced info.

I don't think books are dead. I read books. I just think they are no longer the only game in town. For example, it was often said that through a book, you could step into someone else's experience. I had a great time reading Red Mars. Now we have VR and I have come closer to standing on the surface of Mars than anyone else in history; far better than imagining Kim Stanley imagining it. The huge expansion of new digital and interactive media is a lasting win for education and human knowledge. I think we all need a reminder of that in the trough of tech disillusionment.

It’s not that books are better than YouTube, in many cases (like visualizing math) books are much worse than video, but for a lot of topics books are the only source that goes in depth on a topic. It won’t necessarily be the case a hundred years from now, but right now if you want to study a topic that had been around for more than 30 years you’ll probably have to invest time in books. And the part that isn’t mentioned here is that most of those books are out of print so you will need to dig through libraries and maybe even use the Inter-library loan system.

But keep in mind, data is not information, information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not understanding.

A quick question: Is the plot summary on the Wikipedia page for Hamlet equivalent to watching the play, or to reading the play with timeouts to look up the references?

Hamlet is a good example of the non-primacy of books. Hamlet was meant to be performed, not read silently. It's far better to have access to a recording or taped performance to study it than the text alone. And yes, a plot summary or additional commentaries could be a big help as well. In our current information golden age I can pull up a dozen full performances on YouTube including a 360 degree VR experience where you can stand on stage with the actors. In 1990 such a thing would have been pure science fiction and you would have never encountered a person to even discuss the topic of serious Shakespearian study.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com