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Comment by apples_oranges | Hacker News Reader

Modern books are too long, too. Let's take something like "Atomic Habits", which was god knows how often recommended in various places.. it can be summarised on a few pages max. (Gauss would probably only need 1/3rd of a page..) I think it's psychology and psychology only why those books are too long: 1. more paper seems like it's worth more, so they can charge the $20 or whatever .. 2. reading 4 pages seems trivial, reading 400 is an accomplishment. Having accomplished something (even if its B.S.) increases likelihood that we recommend it, because we want to brag

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Modern "books". A lot of the problem is that these books, like atomic habits, aren't actually vehicles for information transfer. They're growth hacking blog spam. See also: Deep Work, The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck (one of the cringiest things I've read), etc... With this style of book, it's almost always evident by mid-way through chapter 01 that there's no actual book-length warranting content present. They all share that same padded undergrad college paper style of saying nothing about anything by massively over quoting and citing things that don't need quoted or cited.

Deep Work was such an egregious example of betraying its own principles by cluttering up a thesis for the sake of the NYT bestselling list and in doing so wasting its readers’ time.

This is why there is a paid app that gives you summaries of books everyone is talking about so that you don't have to read them but also won't be left out. For most popular books these days, totally sufficient.

Yeah almost every nonfiction book is like this which makes me hate reading them (plus half the stuff in psychology/behavioral economics books is unreplicated fabulation).

Small subthread derailment - nonfiction books which are worth the full length. I'll start:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Gödel, Escher, Bach; The Ancestor's Tale; Bad Pharma

A few pages? You barely need a single sentence. "Build lasting habits by recognizing how triggers lead to action."

Yeah, one of the problems with being too abstract is that it's open to many interpretations, most of them incorrect. Also, a few pages or paragraphs won't stick; I need examples. I'm not a computer; installing new ideas in my brain isn't like installing apps. My brain prefers storytelling to better grasp ideas and make them its own.

Agreed, but many self-help books either waste their time by making dubious claims from half-sourced research, using useless anecdotes, or repeating the problem in different ways. The best ones actually tell stories of different ways of using its method to solve a variety of problems.

Absolutely, that contextualization can be so useful even if some deem it fluffy. Also no one is obligated to read every single word of a book, if you don't want the anecdotes and case studies, you can skip them! They are helpful for the rest of us.

Ok, but a few sentences explaining what each of those terms mean would be ideal.

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