It's way more meaningful to understand and pursue your own actual interests than to humble brag by ticking the "correct" readings.
Not to mention that talking about the best anything is basically meaningless, except for very tightly constrained achievements (e.g. we can talk about the best sprinter, but who's the best philosopher? or the best mathematician?)
> This is not how to learn anything.
You don’t learn anything by reading books? So if you have an interest in astronomy you don’t learn by reading books on astronomy? How do you learn, then? Must one go study to become an astronomer as the first step? Won’t you have to read a book on it at some point?
> It's way more meaningful to understand and pursue your own actual interests
What does this mean in practice, and how does it invalidate reading? Can’t you understand and pursue an interest in philosophy by reading philosophy books?
> than to humble brag by ticking the "correct" readings.
Who’s talking about humble bragging? Wether you brag or not it’s up to you, I don’t see anything on the website encouraging you to do so.
> Not to mention that talking about the best anything is basically meaningless, except for very tightly constrained achievements
The website is very upfront about how it works:
> We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.
Seems like a good way to begin exploring. If you’re interested in a subject the website points you to someone they consider to be knowledgeable of the field, that person has recommendations to get your started, and they explain why they picked each one.
Maybe I missed something about the reason you oppose the website, but on the face of it I don’t see what’s so wrong as to justify such vehement disapproval.
It sounds like you took the primary criticism in the parent comment to be about reading in general.
I took it to mean that the best way to learn say economics is not to read one of "the top 5 recommended books on economics" but rather start by googling a specific aspect or question about economics that interests you and then following the thread.
Granted, reading one of the top 5 books may be a great entry point for many people but I think there's also a false promise of knowledge offered by sites like this.
Most people haven't studied any single field deeply, and they don't know how many hours of commitment it takes, how much practice, how much failure, how many projects & validated hypotheses it takes to actually understand something.
Reading a book written for non-experts is barely going to give you a sense of what you don't know, nothing more.
They're implying, "read this and you'll become an expert." Again try to read this through the eyes of someone who hasn't become an expert at anything. That's the target audience. Anyone who has, would never read the most popular book on a subject to learn from it, They'd read the introductory books meant for people who are planning to go on to study that subject.
No, they do not. I picked one interview at random and one from the homepage:
The interview about food books¹ has one solely about cheese which is praised for the photographs. On three of them the story of the people is the focus.
The interview on perfume² has two fiction books.
> They're implying, "read this and you'll become an expert."
This is demonstrably not the case. These are books on specific subjects that certain people familiar with the fields find interesting and worthy of your time. No one is selling you the idea that you’ll become an expert if you read them. You might be assuming they are, but the content tells a different story.
¹ https://fivebooks.com/best-books/food-books-2023-clare-finne...
I took it as being about this website or something the website represents. I do hope no one is against reading in general.
> I took it to mean that the best way to learn (…) start by googling a specific aspect
People learn different subjects in different ways. Perhaps googling fits some people and some subjects, but if you don’t know anything about a field you don’t know which questions it makes sense to search for or which websites to trust.
> but I think there's also a false promise of knowledge offered by sites like this.
I don’t get that at all from this particular website. They’re quite open that they’re presenting “the best books as recommended by X”. The person doing the recommendation is an integral part, they are interviews.
The site is a nice idea and does what it says honestly and well. I certainly don't have anything bad to say about the people who like it or who made it.
My feeling towards these sites is more of a personal frustration I have with the advertisement of books in general - whether that be through good reads, best seller lists, book stores etc.
I often find myself making lists of books to read like this but all it ever results in is me beating myself up for never getting around to them. On the other hand, the way I have actually learnt things has always been through googling an interest and following the thread. Often the thread leads me to reading a book or two. But rarely does the thread lead me to needing to find the top 5 books on x.
For me these sites mostly just create a sense of guilt for not having read the relevant "must read" books.
I suspect this is what's behind OPs frustration at the idea of "ticking off" books on a list.
Ideally yes, but failing that you learn from textbooks. Popsci books, at their best, get people interested and maybe manage to convey a few only moderately distorted factoids. They don't teach anything of substance.
(I have found good popsci books to sometimes be better at conveying historical context, though, simply because textbooks may consider that context to be out of scope, and in a formal settings your professor’s asides would compensate for that. Then, of course, there are textbooks disguised as popsci ones, like Aaronson’s quantum computing one.)
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t...
I think part of my point was covered by nathansherburn's sibling comment
> It sounds like you took the primary criticism in the parent comment to be about reading in general.
> I took it to mean that the best way to learn say economics is not to read one of "the top 5 recommended books on economics" but rather start by googling a specific aspect or question about economics that interests you and then following the thread.
I think my reaction was a bit vehement because it's not the first time I've encountered (albeit well intentioned) lists of "great books" on HN. In general I've grown to dislike ticking lists of things, be they books, "things to do before you die" etc. I just feel like this is too simplistic of an approach to anything in life. In my experience, the things that I learned best or the most meaningful experiences I've had were self-guided, often extemporaneous, almost always not matching neat prior expectations.
> Who’s talking about humble bragging? Wether you brag or not it’s up to you, I don’t see anything on the website encouraging you to do so.
True. This was mostly conjecture on my part as I've seen many people having neat lists of read books on their private sites/blogs (or links to goodreads etc.).
Addressing specifically the content on the website, I can say that the lists often seemed arbitrary, too granular or simply besides the point. I won't go into details, but I find all/most of the following to be confused, confusing, cutesy pop-intellectualism:
https://fivebooks.com/category/mathematics-and-science/maths...
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/artificial-intelligence-gpt... (pretty nonsensical, I assume it was made for laughs mostly)
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/learning-python-and-data-sc... (as practicing data scientist I've used none of these)
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/data-science-roger-peng/ (a random mix of things - Introduction to Statistical Learning is useful, but basic.)
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/nicholas-higham-applied-mat... (recurring theme, well exemplified here, is of books about smth, not something books. You're not gonna learn maths from these books. You're not even gonna start learning maths from these books.)
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/luciano-floridi-philosophy-... (just rando stuff. Plato, Descartes, Kant... thrown all in, because there must be smth about information somewhere there, right?)
The quantum computing books include at least one undergraduate text (Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists) and a more expansive reference (Quantum Computation and Quantum Information).
The CS books for data science include two undergraduate texts (SICP; Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena).
The regular CS books include two different undergraduate texts (Algorithms by Sedgewick and Wayne; Types and Programming Languages). I actually haven't read the latter, so maybe I will pick it up!
SICP is obviously a bona fide classic of CS and a great top 5 candidate. I also like Skiena's book a lot (and his lectures are available online and quite good).
It's just a bunch of lists of good books for people looking for something to read, arranged by subject. There's nothing wrong with that.