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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

Right, but, then what? If you throw away all of the books from experts, what do you do, go out in your backyard and start running experiments to re-create all of science? Or start googling? What, some random person on the internet is going to be a better 'expert' than someone that wrote a book?

  Books might not be great, but they are at least some minimum bar to reach.  You had to do some study and analysis.

Seems like any critic of books, if you scratch the surface is just the whole anti-science/anti-education tropes again and again. What is the option? Don't like peer review science, fine, it has flaws, propose an option.

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Many terrific books have been published in the past 500 years. The median book is not worth your time, however, and neither is the top 10%. You cannot possibly read everything so you have to be very selective or you will read only dreck. This is the opposite of being anti-science or anti-education.

But compared to the content on the internet?

Top 10% of Books. Ok

90 % of Books. marginal, lot of bad.

Internet. Just millions of pages of junk.

- Books still take some effort. So why not start there.

It isn't either/or, binary, a lot of books are bad, so guess I'll learn my medical degree from browsing the web because I don't trust those 'experts'.

The median book about medicine is over 100 years old, written in a language you don't speak, and filled to the brim with quackery. Worse than useless. Maybe you don't realize that bookstores and libraries only carry a minuscule fraction of all published works? You will get better information from reddit than from a book written before the discovery of penicillin.

I'll get you started with one of the great works from the 1600s:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/49513/pg49513-images.ht...

You seem to have excluded the possibility of a "Top 10% of the Internet" tranche.

""Top 10% of the Internet""

What is the top 10% of the Internet that isn't part of some publishing arm of existing media? And, how can you tell? Some dudes blog about vaccines verses Harvard? Which do you believe.

Where are the self funded scientific studies that are occurring outside of academia? And thus not 'biased' by the 'elites'.

For internet only writing. There aren't a ton of "Astral Codex Ten"'s to draw upon as independent thinkers. And even then, he didn't sprout out of the ether fully formed, he has a degree, he was trained in academia.

> What is the top 10% of the Internet that isn't part of some publishing arm of existing media?

Why does that even matter?

?? You said "You seem to have excluded the possibility of a "Top 10% of the Internet" tranche. "

So you brought up the top 10% of the Internet, possibly as argument against books? That maybe there is valuable information on the Internet.

I was just saying, that 10% is also created by the same people that create books. So if you are arguing against books, then the top 10% of the Internet isn't some golden age of knowledge coming from some different more reliable source.

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