* 1st third of the book: Lays out the basic ideas, gives several examples
* 2nd third of the book: More examples that repeat the themes from the 1st part
* 3rd third of the book: ??? I usually give up at this point
I sometimes wish that more books were like "The Mom Test" - just long enough to say what they need, even if that makes for a short book.
> But let’s say you can narrow it down to one good one, and you can find the time to read it. You plunk down an absurd $30 (of which, I’m told, less than $3 goes to the author) for a bulky hardcover and you quickly discover that the author doesn’t have all that much to say. But a book is a big thing, and they had to fill it all up, so the author padded it. There are several common techniques.
> One is to repeat your point over and over, each time slightly differently. This is surprisingly popular. Writing a book on how code is law, an idea so simple it can fit in the book’s title? Just give example after example after example.
> Another is to just fill the book with unnecessary detail. Arguing that the Bush administration is incompetent? Fill your book up with citation after citation. (Readers must love being hit over the head with evidence for a claim they’re already willing to believe.)
> I have nothing against completeness, accuracy, or preciseness, but if you really want a broad audience to hear what you have to say, you’ve got to be short. Put the details, for the ten people who care about them, on your website. Then take the three pages you have left, and put them on your website too.
Unless you are reading a topic you are already familiar with, reinforcement of an idea helps you to examine a concept from different angles and to solidify what is being discussed.
If everyone fully absorbed and understood everything they read, schooling could be completed years in advance.
Some people want more or less evidence based on their level of skepticism or critical thinking, while others want more evidence to reinforce the soundness of their inferred position on a topic, especially if it's a topic unfamiliar to them. Other people are under time constraints and just want the key points and a brief presentation.
This should be dealt with by pressuring the publishing industry not to inflate books and fill them with fluff. This could be done by not buying these kind of books, and publicly shaming publishers who engage in this behavior. It's easier in non fiction books since the amount of fluff in fiction books is a more subjective matter.
So you get a decade of "business nonfiction" bookstand fodder which is claims with high shock quality but often not relicable, mixed with anecdotes, to signal the reader's self-declared learnedness.
Combine this with the long-tailed nature of the statistic "the average American only reads one book a year" and it's frightening. I think Scott Galloway said sales of his e-book are >10x more than his paper book.
And during Covid lots of people got exposed for having fake bookshelf backdrops.
Can you read the title?
You can't shame them into buying books they can't sell.
How much electricity does it take an LLM to summarize a book? I'm sure the carbon emissions involved are trivial, and if they aren't, I've always been of the belief that (like eating meat) people are going to do what they want to do regardless of the environmental cost, so it's better to focus your ire on reducing the environmental cost. The problem here isn't using an LLM to summarize a book, it's that we've got a power grid fueled mainly by fossil fuels. (That is a problem that will fix itself in no time anyway now that renewables are cheaper and the gap is widening.)
This applies equally to Sci-Fi and fantasy doorstopper novels. At least those have interesting filler—sometimes even better than the main story.
The author's goal is to convey an idea to the reader. He breaks it up into small overlapping chunks and gradually doles out these small overlapping chunks over the course of the book, sometimes backtracking and repeating an idea with a different example, all accompanied by a compelling narrative.
If he does his job well then the reader doesn't notice that spaced-repetition learning is happening because the supporting examples are entertaining enough to continue reading. In the worst case, the author gets the exact criticism that you are leveling.
Honestly, if you had Mathematics books written like Thinking, Fast and Slow or Freakonomics you'd have a lot more students passing calculus.[1]
So, here's a challenge for you - in your area of expertise (whatever that is), write down the chapters of a hypothetical book you would write to explain one or two foundational principles to an outsider (to that area). It's pretty hard to do. Then compare with best-selling non-fiction aimed at outsiders like Freakonomics, etc.
I did this (chapter overview thing) and realised pretty quickly that I had planned a really boring book.
[1] I read Thinking, Fast and Slow around 2011, and I read The Mom Test last year. Almost all of the sub-themes of the former is still in my memory. The only thing I remember of The Mom Test is that people will lie to you to protect your feelings.
most non fiction could be well-summarized as a lengthy blog post
(Looking at you, The Checklist Manifesto)
Our brains learn best when they encounter something often across time (spaced repetition).
Reading a single tweet may summarize the book, but the chances of you recalling the idea in an appropriate situation is much lower than if you had spent hours on it.
The right checklist organizes uniformity, success, and safety in almost every human endeavor. - @SomeGuyOnTheInterwebs
"Use checklists." - @AtulGawande
There, now you don't need to read the book.
> Most books should be blog posts. Most blog posts should be tweets. Most tweets shouldn't exit.
History of science books thankfully stave off that final third until at least 80%. However, their final chapter or two universally manages to be a letdown. It's either wild optimistic speculation, hype for a theory that's debunked 5 years after publication, or a focus that accidentally happened to predict the course of science post-publication. The story is told in a tonally jarring manner compared to the tight narrative in the rest of the book.
My #1 suspect for this disease is a desire to connect the content of the book to real life. Such attempts miss more often than they drive the point home, even if they're factually correct.
The last 20% shifts in tone and goes into speculating on a general framework for genetic selection outside of biological systems. Very speculative, interesting, and birthed the term meme