The Lost Art of Research as Leisure | Hacker News Reader

The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

kasurian.com

504 pointsaltilunium273 comments

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours.

>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts

I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else.

I actually deeply agree with the advice in the OP around curiosity but personally I end up implementing it in a totally different way than they do.

Lately I’ve found that LLMs are an amazing tool for this free-floating “research”- for example “Summarize the top three theories about why suburbs exist and who said them”. The LLM as open ended semantic search engine / research tool is an amazing way to figure out the topology of a subject you want to dive deeper into.

I usually work my way down a content ladder from there to podcasts, wikipedia and finally to books.

The idea that somehow civilization is ending because of our media consumption habits and that “reading source material” will save us comes off as more an aesthetic fantasy than a real-world complaint about today’s culture.

I was around before the internet and I’m so thankful that so much more information is accessible now than it was when there were only books.

I think you're generally right about the OP, but I don't see your alternative method as a tonic to the problem the author is discussing. I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong, and that the original post tends towards hierarchy in an almost reactionary way, yet at the same time I also see that many people tend to ingest information from other forms of media less critically than they might a book or written piece. I think this dichotomy derives from the different levels of focus we apply to different activities. Reading, even for leisure, demands a level of effort that forces you to focus and, in a way, analyze the information you're ingesting. By removing that barrier, you might fail to fully grasp the ideas that the primary source expressed.

In your use case, the LLM can be a great tool to get a start, but it's much easier to accept that output uncritically, which is especially problematic because it bears the biases of the training corpus. Sure, you can mitigate that issue if you're driven by the intellectual curiosity to dig deeper, which it seems you are, but at that point aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway? You're just using the initial steps to discover the "foundational texts", as the original post puts it, of the field. The LLM step becomes less material to the follow-up reading you've done after the fact.

Many, perhaps even most people will not make it to the second step. I see the lack of intellectual curiosity as a problem of focus more than anything else, and in my experience the overly rich media landscape of the internet does not concentrate that focus in most people.

Yea, it's the classic conflation of the format of the media with other factors- it's not the fact that you're reading from a screen instead of a paper page that's making you intellectually incurious.

But the disingenuous thing is that I don't think these arguments are really meant to examine why people might be less curious- it's just to sound cooler than people who read the OP and imagine the writer in some cafe pouring over a big stack of hardcover books.

>> aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway?

I would say the distinction is that I don't need to be precious about why I would look at foundational texts. Maybe foundational texts are a bit over-hyped- anything written 100 years ago was made for the context of that time, and even if the ideas are universal to a certain extent, it's better digested through a modern lens in light of how those ideas have affected everything since then. How much more do you get out of an idea reading it from the original? It feels like there's a bit of a diminishing return in a lot of cases.

> I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong

The good news is that not only does the "private researcher" (curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate some work.

The danger is that some wannabes create even more noise on the proper science channels that are already polluted by fraudsters generating fake papers via ChatGPT and friends... making it harder for the untrained eye to distinguish between respectable science and pseudo-science.

It's already hard to sort out the bs that respectable science generates.

Splitting hairs maybe, but more like it's already hard to suppress enough of the bs to get at the respectable science...

I think there'd be some value in asking each of the major chatLLMs whether vaccines cause autism. If the answer is not some unequivocal variation of "no, aside from fraudulent and discredited research," you have a serious problem if you're relying on AI to do research for you.

Personally I still go on Wikipedia deep dives where you end up going from link to link for hours. I think the author is entirely incorrect with that quote, the whole idea of leasure research is that there are no rules, some will go ask an LLM, others will go read 'foundational text' while others will just browse Wikipedia.

If that's what you like to do, of course that's fine. If we are going to talk with each other about what we like to do, we need to agree on meaning.

In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth. As ultimate solutions to that goal, Wikipedia and LLM output lack sufficient accuracy and lack verifiability. Many find them useful as bibliographic tools that point us to accurate, verifiable sources.

Also, research requires looking at the actual evidence - the primary sources; that's where the truth is, that's the foundation of the scientific method. Secondary sources filter the truth through someone else's interpretation, but for amateur researchers that may be all that's realistic - traveling to archives, building or using complex equipment is not realistic. Still, Wikipedia and (almost all) LLMs are tertiary or higher order sources: they are a combination of secondary or higher order sources - Wikipedia doesn't allow citing primary sources as far as I know (which would be necessary for Wikipedia to be a secondary source); LLM input is mostly secondary or higher order sources.

I don't object if you call reading Wikipedia, 'research'. I don't at all object to you doing what you value. But we are talking about two different things.

> In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth

> the primary sources; that's where the truth is

I mentioned this elsewhere on the thread, but I also feel like the most influential primary sources are less important than secondary sources- if you read Marx, the social and political circumstances of his ideas are in the context of an industrial economy and just don't apply in the same way anymore.

You can draw your own conclusions directly from what's written, but what's the point of that? I feel like it's more useful to engage with those ideas keeping in mind all of the thought and history that's happened since- in that case you would wait a pretty long time to work backwards until you read the original.

If you are researching economics, then Marx is a secondary (or higher order) source. The econmomic data used by Marx is primary.

If you are researching Marx the person or Marx's ideas, then [edit: Marx's writings would be primary sources, and then] what would you think of someone who only read others talking about Marx, but didn't read Marx's actual writings? It wouldn't make much sense for anything called 'research'.

> The econmomic data used by Marx is primary

Literally picking through tables of all economic data for the last century... shocked pikachu meme not sure what that would gain you....

Well, that's how actual research is done - that's what people do. It defines research, it's how they write all those (research-based) books and journal articles. That's scholarship - science, social science, humanities, etc. That's why Darwin travelled all the way to the Galapagos Islands - he identified a place to do primary resesarch on the questions he was investigating.

Journalists also - they look at the actual evidence and turn it into something coherent and cohesive for others to understand; the location in the byline/dateline shows where they went - that is, that if they wrote about Odessa, the dateline should show if they actually went to Odessa and saw it for themself.

Back to research: If you mean it's impractical for many people, that's often true. Some topics require less expertise, expense, and time: for example, tracking local bird populations. But those real natural scientists, the amateur researchers who get published, that's what they are doing. Pretty amazing!

If you don't want to do it, that's fine; few do. If you want to read secondary sources on a topic - wonderful (but read good ones based on primary sources; only accept what is tied back to actual, hard-won facts - necessary are the footnotes, which connect the secondary claim to the primary fact). If you want to read tertiary sources, find quality ones. If you want to read social media, have fun but it's just entertainment - to the extent it's accurate, you can't know unless you already have expertise.

With Marx the literature is basically religious in nature so reading his successors without reading Marx would be like reading religious commentaries on the bible without reading the original bible stories. There could be reasons to do that (e.g. modern text is easier to read), but you'd be missing a lot.

There are other writers who were writing before or at the same time as Marx on similar topics who were clearer in their thinking and their work is often surprisingly relevant even today.

Anti-liberalism and Marxism may be popular and therefore people join in dismissing Marx, but afaik Marx was and to some extent is (the ideas are from a long time ago) taken seriously as a serious theorist.

> Anti-liberalism and Marxism may be popular

I'm not sure whether to parse this as (anti-liberalism) and (Marxism) or as (anti-liberalism) and (anti-Marxism). But in case you meant the latter, Marxism is explicitly anti-liberal in the sense that he rejected the philosophical position that was called liberalism. And this vehement rejection has persisted through his followers. It's also anti-liberal in most broader senses.

> afaik Marx was and to some extent is (the ideas are from a long time ago) taken seriously as a serious theorist.

He's not taken seriously in philosophy or economics. There are some serious scholars who give him credit for contributions to early social science, although I think those scholars generally give him credit for ideas that were published and debated well before him and which he didn't really improve or advance.

Primarily he's taken seriously as an influential person in history, like Jesus, Buddha, Stalin, or Hitler. He was essentially a peripheral polemicist at the time of his death. The Soviets basically deified him because they needed something like a state religion, and they're responsible for whatever reputation he has today. But remember the Soviets were very big on propaganda, not so big on accuracy, and a lot of what people think they know about Marx is seen through the filter of authoritarian propaganda. Similarly a lot of what we know about Jesus passed through the filter of the Roman Empire and their desire to use him as the basis of an imperial religion. We're in a better shape with Marx, though, because we have many his writings (minus a significant amount of his correspondence which he and others destroyed).

There are, of course, economists and philosophers who consider themselves Marxists and who take him seriously. Often they're appointed to departments outside the main econ or philosophy department. For example, it wouldn't be unusual for a Marxist philosophy to be appointed to a German department or a history department.

You know well that contemporary conservatives call contemporary liberals, 'Marxists' (without knowing what they are talking about).

> There are, of course, economists and philosophers who consider themselves Marxists and who take him seriously.

We agree.

> the primary sources; that's where the truth is

Why is a primary source a better source for the "truth"? Often secondary sources have distilled the original rough ideas into more refined expressions of the original complex ideas. A secondary source will also have had more chances to catch any mistakes.

The secondary sources take the primary source facts (if the author is serious and honest) and add someone's subjective perspectives, etc. Those facts are the 'truths'.

For more, look up reading on the scientific method and empiricism.

I'm not disparaging all secondary sources; I read them too. But there's a reason serious research requires primary sources.

I think people are confused by the definitions of primary/secondary sources.

As an example, almost all textbooks are actually secondary sources. The primary source may be a journal article. And yes, often, those secondary sources are far superior than the primary sources. Insisting on reading all those journal articles as opposed to a good textbook is simply indulging in a fetish, IMO.

> I think people are confused by the definitions of primary/secondary sources.

Sorry:

Primary - the actual evidence. The actual letter written by Jefferson; the ice core itself, etc. For example, if you are an historian writing about Jefferson, you actually travel to the archive and read Jefferson's letters and look through the other papers, etc. - the actual stuff.

Secondary - the journal article, the scholarly book, based on primary sources (without those, it's just nonsense)

Tertiary - textbooks, news reports, etc. about the secondary source

Higher order - blog posts, social media, etc.: usually they haven't seen the evidence, haven't read the journal article, may have read the news report but often only read another social media post ...

> Insisting on reading all those journal articles as opposed to a good textbook is simply indulging in a fetish, IMO.

WTF do you know about me or anyone else to judge their choices? Your ignorance of the need for direct knowledge of things shines through. Here, the primary source is me; having no primary source your assertion isn't even secondary, just nonsense. Enjoy 'research' on social media.

> WTF do you know about me or anyone else to judge their choices?

I don't, and did not claim to. And yes, one can and usually does judge at some level. I don't need to know much about someone to have an opinion that intentionally touching random strangers' private parts in public is problematic.

Try not to be so sensitive. My comment was not a criticism of anyone.

> Your ignorance of the need for direct knowledge of things shines through.

Now who is making assumptions without knowing me?

I spent years being paid to do research at academic institutions, so it's not a random person on the Internet saying it. Sometimes the primary source is fantastic. More often it's inferior to better written pieces.

The reason journals like Rev Modern Physics have a high impact factor is precisely due to the fact that distillations can be superior to primary sources. It's a journal where a highly influential person in the field writes a (lengthy) journal article that is basically a well written, accessible tutorial of the whole field.

Have you tried reading Maxwell's original works? Do you not think there's a good reason pretty much every EM textbook teaches Maxwell's equations in a very different form from what he proposed?

Thanks for your explanations. It would be lovely if primary sources and data were some kind of ground truth with a capital T. But no: they are often messy first pass experiments. If we knew what we were doing it would not be research ;-) A dose of Ian Hacking or Paul Feyerabend or Nancy Cartwright could be curative.

Many, many times in historical research the "primary source" (I'm using your definition here because in historical circles the primary source is not always the original artifact or document) is lost to time. It's then up to historians, anthropologists, and other researchers to figure out whether the artifact in question actually existed and whether there's agreement among other sources on what it said.

In historical research at least having a primary source like the "actual letter written by Jefferson" is often rare and only found in more modern historical sources preserved by stable institutions. A great example is the Library of Baghdad where we know many texts existed but we still don't know the breadth of all the available texts nor their contents.

Thanks and very interesting. Are you an historian?

> in historical circles the primary source is not always the original artifact or document

What does it mean in historical circles? I know people will often use a digital scan, a reliable transcription, etc., and not necessarily the original - but then isn't that based on the assumption that it's a reliable representation of the original?

I didn't mean to suggest primary sources (by my definition) are always available; I was just trying to give an example where 'primary source' connects the world of ideas to the physical reality. Yes, life, including historical research, isn't that neat and simple.

I totally forgot to hit "Reply" to this. Apologies!

> Are you an historian?

I published some work in undergrad but stopped afterward (much to the chagrin of my professors.) I still keep up with historian circles, folks who either are academic historians or participate in the general community.

> I know people will often use a digital scan, a reliable transcription, etc., and not necessarily the original - but then isn't that based on the assumption that it's a reliable representation of the original?

Veracity of a source is a very, very complicated topic in historical research. Sometimes documents are authoritative. For example, the American Declaration of Independence is a well-preserved document that has been commented on millions of times at this point and has many, many copies. We can be very sure that the Declaration of Independence exists and says what it says. This isn't the case for a lot of historical documents.

Until use of the printing press became widespread in a culture, distributing copies of documents was laborious. Usually a scribe would have to read the original and copy it. Writing media from this time (paper, parchment, tablets, etc) were also usually expensive. Each document was usually considered an individual work of art and so even if a scribe was copying a document, we had no idea whether the scribe editorialized the work, forgot to copy some of the work, or otherwise modified its original intent. That means that while we may find a document with a title in our modern era, we don't know if that document was the authoritative original or even if the contemporary readers actually consumed the version of the document we have in our possession or a different edition.

Then there's the question of veracity of the claims of the document itself. A lot of surveys and statistics from historical writings are false. There are usually numerous cultural and political reasons for this (maybe the culture didn't count women as people, maybe the culture only counted landholders, maybe the author didn't see a certain tribe in the area as people to be counted, etc.) and so even when we're reasonably confident of when a document was authored and by whom it's hard to be certain of the veracity of its claims.

Maybe I'm confused about what you mean by primary and secondary sources, but I think you have to be a little more nuanced; otherwise, it sounds like you're advocating for reinventing the wheel ad vitam aeternam. As opposed to "standing on the shoulders of giants" and all that.

For instance, I would consider a literature review a secondary source. It can come to some conclusions as to the credibility of a hypothesis given all this presented evidence (primary sources). This can be very precious work, as it would save a person interested in higher-level topics a great deal of time, and most likely (if the review is any good) be done with more competence than the interested person has (amateur or not).

An amateur (or indeed a professional) is more likely to find pertinent information in existing "secondary sources" (which can also be plural) than by trying to comb through a comparatively enormous volume of primary work they are not equipped to interpret and synthesize (or even find). Not just in my lazy opinion, it's indeed the consensus in science that the most recent review/synthesis work is a good starting point to any background information collection.

And why not, as a starting point, have a tertiary source point you towards adequate synthetic work. When you type "my topic of interest review" on google scholar and pick the most cited moderately recent review of the topic, are you not in effect relying on a tertiary source?

I think those are essential things to do and valuable regardless of what else someone does. I do them myself all the time. I think the literature review is an amazing tool - really the best tool for learning, IME - and one that most people in the world (outside the research community) overlook.

Here we are talking about research in the science sense; those aren't research. You couldn't publish a literature review as 'research', for example, or get a Ph.D. for one - 'here's my dissertation topic - a lit review of ...'!.

There is lots of actual potential research for citizen scientists to do. And if they want to just learn from what's been discovered already, that's great - I certainly do that.

I think it's important that people understand that reading a textbook or secondary source isn't scientific research. Confusingly, now that I think of it, if you say 'I researched which EVs have the range we need', people assume you did not do actual research of driving them all. But that's a different meaning for the same word.

In your field, is 'research' used differently?

>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts

Leisurely and "must include" sounds very contradicting.

The author also asks "If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would you want to have with you?" which I also can't answer.

I would fall into the category of someone who does research as leisure. I have been slowly unraveling the genetics behind gender dysphoria. Yes I have borrowed a few biology books from libraries, but it has mostly been reading 70 years of research papers, piecing together all the evidence to make a hypothesis, comparing it to all the research data and iterating. In the last year I have also started getting a fair number of WGS (Whole Genome Sequenced) files, and I have a whole separate pile of anecdotal that just because it isn't published doesn't mean I can ignore it either. These are about as far from books as you can get. It is something I do for leisure, so my investigation has been somewhat random, following whatever I found interating at that time including dead ends. Been doing this very open ended research for years now and at this point we have a really solid understanding of it, so the edge cases are actually now the fun stuff. I never would have made anywhere near the progress I did if I had been forced to start with reading a bunch of random unrelated biology books.

Sounds interesting, do you have somewhere I can read some of what you've learned across your research?

Sure, add a way to contact you to your account and I can send you over the current understanding.

Also interested.

> can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler

Aren't you saying the same thing, putting them down? You could both be curious about each other.

I commented on the article so I suppose I'm engaging with the ideas.

To be clear, I also think it's a shame that people don't read as many books these days, I don't read a huge amount but I feel like I'm at the higher-end of my social circle in terms of reading volume.

Mostly, I don't like the trope that there's some kind of moral imperative to Read More Books and that Things Used to Be Better. Overall I'm philosophically disinclined to draw the conclusion that phones/attention/social media are bad and reading more will improve society. I also have TikTok but I don't think it makes me a worse person.

Agree, OP is points to Thoreau, Sagan, Galileo - most people on the planet earth are not like that and those guys were heavily privileged.

Doing personal fancy research was not available before as it is now. Even though one still has to be rather privileged to have time to dig through obscure details that don’t make him money.

> Agree, OP is points to Thoreau, Sagan, Galileo - most people on the planet earth are not like that and those guys were heavily privileged.

Sagan was heavily privileged? I mean, yes, he was born in the US and could afford to get a Bachelor's degree, but other than that, he was not particularly privileged.

>> I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else.

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that people do this less to actually feel superior to others and more as a desperate act of establishing an identity, ANY identity, to simply feel seen and validated in spite of just being yet another person on the planet. This uniquely-human trait seems to run counter to the natural order, where spotted leopards, panthers, elephants, myriad birds all just exist and go about their lives, despite their objective, innate individualities.

We are curious creatures lol

Plenty of animals go out of their way to be seen. If it’s a pretty bird it’s most likely a male bird.

Animals at play do appear to show off to each other. Orcas wear salmons as hats as if it was a fast fashion trend.

I don’t think humans are unique in this regard at all.

These observations are interpretations of behavior viewed through human eyes. (What’s the concept of a “hat” to an orca?)

Perhaps we interpret their behavior this way because it is our behavior.

Since it’s a trend it comes and goes, and the behavior spreads in a manner similar to fashion trends.

Google pics for it, can you think of any other reason for an orca to wear a salmon on their head.

Song birds also have similar fashions in what they choose to sing and that spreads much faster than evolution can explain.

“Faction” and “fashion” are etymological doublets. We wear trends as much to establish which tribe we are apart of as to impress potential mates.

The trend of Orcas wearing hats feels very much the same: https://archive.is/2024.12.15-213212/https://www.nationalgeo...

As someone who's had quite a few dealings with animals (the family business is a horse farm) my interpretation is that human psychology is basically animal psychology with a "language instinct" bolted on as a peripheral.

You might very well misinterpret an animal's experience or motives but it is not just mistaken "anthropomorphism" but could just be the same kind of misunderstanding you might have about another person's experience or motives.

From time to time I see a paper proving that horses or dogs could do something that people who work with horses or dogs always believed they could do or that some bird or mammal has a "theory of mind" -- I believe all birds and mammals have a pretty good "theory of mind", it's just hard to do an experiment to prove it.

We've had a cardinal that has been coming to our window for a few years that we can't agree on naming "bad bird" or "noisy bird" that sets up a nest a few yards from a bird feeder and spends all day fighting it's own reflection in the glass. My interpretation, which could be wrong, is that it believes it is a very successful bird that has found an excellent nesting spot and finds meaning in its life by fighting off "competition" for its nest -- certainly it does not need to spend a lot of energy foraging and has the time and energy to peck at the window all day.

How do you know the bird just isn't entertaining itself with its own reflection.

I don't, but your story could be accused of being anthropomorphic as much as my own. If it did have to work harder to forage though, it would have less time and energy to entertain itself.

A case where I know my own psychology has to do with it is the red winged blackbird which is a highly territorial bird which is always calling attention to nests that I'd otherwise ignore by buzz-bombing me and that I see high up in the air flapping frantically to nip at the tail feathers and harass huge hawks that are flapping languidly riding thermals. I see these birds sitting on top of "POSTED: NO TRESPASSING" signs all the time because these are convenient perches, although they have no idea that the sign fits their mindset really well. One of my photography goals in the next few weeks is to get some of those pictures though I don't have a particularly long lens so I'll have the problem that they'll probably try to buzz bomb me instead of sitting still to get their picture taken.

The same way you don't know if other humans are even conscious. Empathy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_other_minds

> As someone who's had quite a few dealings with animals (the family business is a horse farm) my interpretation is that human psychology is basically animal psychology with a "language instinct" bolted on as a peripheral.

Growing up with cats and dogs all my life I 100% agree with this. That has caused me to look at animals as individuals I can't communicate with instead of lower life forms that are brainless sacks of meat. They certainty are capable of thought and I am also convinced they share the same basic emotional states but humans have much more nuance and layers over them.

Where do you draw the line? Do you think dung beetles have emotions? Not being snarky, I just think it’s a difficult idea to pin down.

I mean, the whole predator/prey paradigm proves this, no? Both sides will act sneaky and use crafty mechanisms to get ahead of each other

I don’t think that fully encapsulates the issue. I can recognize some other being has subjective experience irrespective of any predator/prey relationship.

Why do you need a line?

Because we generally acknowledge a need to discriminate how we relate and interact with others. I treat a child differently than an adult, a dog differently than a human, and a plant differently from an animal. Humans as classification machines; I’m not sure we could interact in this world without it.

> I believe all birds and mammals have a pretty good "theory of mind", it's just hard to do an experiment to prove it

Our pet bird (sun conure) actively tries to lie and mislead when he's doing something naughty. Like he will go into the pantry to steal treats and quickly fly out pretending he wasn't in there when he hears you approaching.

This indicates he has some theory of mind. He has to understand there's a difference between what he knows and what we know, otherwise he wouldn't try to hide or obscure his actions.

And yes there is research showing/arguing that birds have theory of mind --> https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/144146926.pdf

Sun conjures are so smart this makes me smile :)

It gets better! He has learned that when he is naughty we will tell him to stop. If he doesn’t, we will eventually get up to come over and make him stop (shoo him away).

So now he uses that when he needs us to open a door. Threatening to be naughty is the most effective way to get human to come over. Then you fly to the door and human gets the message and opens door. Or treat box or whatever you want help with.

Little shits

I used to have a cat like this. He loved to drink out of the toilet bowl, which he knew he wasn't supposed to do. I would hear him lapping up the water and as I approached the bathroom he would quickly exit, almost but not quite running so as to not look too guilty, head held low and giving me a side eye like he was trying to see if I knew what he was doing in there.

I think it’s latent status signaling. Humans are hierarchical primates and we search for status in our social groups. To that end, it’s not much different than other social creatures that seek social status in their tribe/pride/pack/pod.

Being "seen and validated" translates to "feeling superior" when people want to be seen and validated on a scale that very few other people are, and I think many people naively want this.

Few would like to feel inferior in every dimension to other people in their group - because that effectively means they're useless to the group, beyond being a warm body to throw at problems requiring numbers; it means they're replaceable and will be replaced by someone better.

It feels to me that the ideas of social status, "feeling seen", finding connection, even finding meaning, all intersect in wanting to be unique along some dimension that at least part of your group values.

>The older I get, the more I'm convinced that people do this less to actually feel superior to others and more as a desperate act of establishing an identity, ANY identity, to simply feel seen and validated in spite of just being yet another person on the planet.

I think this is broadly correct. I have had a sense for a while now that there are quite a few people express extreme versions of their opinions substituting amplitude for fidelity. A strongly held opinion isn't heard as much as a weakly held opinion forcefully expressed.

Part of this is down to mass communication and it occurs for all things. There are good apps for mobile phones that never get seen because the focus goes to the top few percent. The same is probably true for games on Steam. Most peoples' blogs will be read by fewer people than the number of blogs they read themselves for the simple reason that some blogs get millions of readers.

I can see the obvious frustration that must be felt when someone has an idea to share that they feel isn't being expressed. When it comes to emotional expression, small communities are required if you want to have a group that reciprocates attention. Most people don't want to be heard by everyone, they just want to be heard. What we have is an environment where a few people are heard by everyone and lots of people are unheard.

I think sites like HN, and the smaller subreddit communities along with discords (I miss IRC, It's still there, but the people aren't) work against that flow.

There's an element of social 'groupthink' pressure if communities of similar opinions cluster, more often against ideas than for, but I think that on these platforms it also meets a degree of resistance that helps balance things.

HN has Rust/AI/Bitcoin where there are always a few people who will express distain for the subject. Each of these seem weird if you actually consider the criticisms as being in good faith.

Why should people be annoyed about liking another programming language, or want to write things in it, or talk about it?

Why are there people who are certain AI is doomed to failure that are so concerned about the money of investors? Especially when many of the people who express such distain for AI generally do not look terribly kindly towards investors anyway. It's like they don't like rich people while simultaneously concerned that the rich might lose all their money.

Why are those who decry Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme so angry about the fact that other people, who they disagree with and denigrate, are doomed to lose their money? Why are they so concerned for the finances for people they don't like?

I think the motivation behind all of them is they want their dissenting position to be heard. When these things are talked about people can see some degree of popularity for an opinion that they don't hold. It seems it isn't enough to think "I don't think that will work, but good luck to them."

Most things people do, and the stories they weave around their lives are about finding ways that allow them to think of themselves as being a certain kind of person. More than money, more than others' opinions even.

I am getting old and I agree.

It really reads like he would like to be a British country parson in the 19th century.

Yes, because of course I have 20 extra hours per week to dedicate to focused research

I didn't read the post yet, but

>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts

It completely depends on the depth at which you are researching for leisure. If you like to do it to learn some stuff, just using LLMS, wiki and books is perfectly fine!

If you're trying to make a breakthrough in human understanding, it is useful to understand very very well the foundations. It is not required, sometime, another background is enough to see clearly some research issue.

But as you're doing research for fun, if you want to push the boundaries, having very strong foundational knowledge is awesome and very empowering.

Take for example the LLMs, you have many levels of comprehension that you may aim for (just an example):

- simply using occasionally (existance awareness)

- experimenting with prompts engineering (exploratory research)

- studying the neural architectures (understanding better what's going on)

- understanding how the architectures are validated (if they are...)

- finding limiting cases (deeper exploratory research)

- thinking about in under the perspective of bayesian/classical statistics (research at the normal mathematical/engineering level)

- going deep into characterizing the architectures in terms of manifolds, or any other suitable structure that you believe is true (deep fundamental research)

- opening up new questions about what can be learned and why (leading to another research field)

The first 3 are available inside a LLM, on Wikipedia and in books. The rest you need to fetch some papers. The more you go down the path, the more obscure the papers gets.

Up to the end, the last point, where you land in survey papers for the other field, and then you can start again with new questions. The good thing is that most of the fundamental research can be readily applied to understand the new field! It's like a jump start.

But at the end of the day, depending on which depth you want to do your leisure research, the deeper you go, the more foundation papers become important, not just from their content, but also the powerful ideas that can be transferred in other research projects.

Maybe.. One thing that is missing from what I say is that it's not about the quantity, or even the quality of the material you read. But it depends on engaging in deep thinking about it! Someone can spend his life reading and not become smarter, maybe only more knowledgeable.

I my opinion, deep thinking is maybe the most fun and useful skill in leisure research, as in paid research.

I've been finding that digital only sources have been declining in quality for probably 5 years now. I have actually greatly reduced my reliance on them due to the fact that anytime HTTP is involved you add a layer of potential marketing obscuring the goal. I've been finding especially lately that I would have been better just getting a book. In fact I've greatly increased by personal library after years of stagnation as the online source quality has decreased.

Books are dense on info (assuming its not a churned out book which are also a problem now with self publishing) the internet tends to be full of fluff and greatly increases the time that I spend sifting rather than just learning and researching. My best purchase in the last couple years is a 10.3" ebook reader. Technical subject books don't work well on smaller readers and it makes a huge difference in quality of my personal development/research/learning.

I do agree that right now LLM's can help you a lot when you are starting on especially on a subject you know little about. However this will absolutely be poisoned over time because marketing will always creep in until it dominates the HTTP source. There is simply too much money to be made jamming a product in someones face no matter how subtle over providing impartial information when it comes to HTTP. The subtle ads are the most insidious because they can often waste lots of your time without you realizing it. Sometimes for years if you don't realize you were evangelized rather than educated.

The majority of online content can decrease in quality while LLMs can increase in quality.

If the decrease in quality is noticeable to you, then it can be accounted for by future model makers. We already know that quantity isn't everything.

The average coming down only creates a stronger contrast for the high-quality work. As a writer, I'm excited about having LLMs available to help me. They're already indispensable.

I'll give an example a while ago I wanted to learn a new'ish tech. I did some research LLM and search which led me to an online course. I figure eh $20 is probably worth it to hear from someone that has used it.

After a couple of chapters I realized the author had no idea what they were doing and were literally reading page for page word for word from the official documentation. Valueless Trash masquerading as information. We've only just started down this forever merry-go-round of AI slop regurgitating and obscuring the often free source material for nothing more than profit off other peoples work.

> However this will absolutely be poisoned over time because marketing will always creep in until it dominates the HTTP source.

I often remind myself that we are in the golden age of LLMs, like the pre-enshitification days when Google would nearly always return relevant and useful results, and I felt like with access to the Internet I could learn anything.

This exactly mirrors my expectations.

Everytime I hear ebook my brain pictures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewok#/media/File%3AWicket_W_Wa...

It’s all the same duplicated/ copied information. No fact checks, no references. It’s exhausting to read the same stuff over and over again

Long live LLMs

I don't think it's a silver bullet, but reading source material is often quite informative.

Did he say anything else was important? I'd have to read the source material.

Why did he say you should read the source material?

Did he consider counter-arguments?

Was his overall argument more nuanced?

How did he come to the conclusion that you should read source material?

Was this his main point, or a secondary point in a list of several different arguments?

Honestly, a lot of academia seems like social media. People take a one-line summary and argue over the merits, often without any real idea of the source material.

But, media consumption habits to a certain degree, do dictate our thinking and how much and how long we can actually concentrate, no? I also agree that we need not do everything the same way we have done before and there are different ways to achieve the end.

>> I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else.

We all have our bias. We settle with and swear by a way we end up finding to work for us for right reasons.

I notice this a lot while doing math. I would normally start with books because they already have predefined structure and have all the topics a person would normally need. I buy 3 or 4 books for which solutions are available. I start with book and then I would listen to lectures. If I do not understand, I would read some other book on same topic. I would have one book which I can understand better than other. Then try to solve many problems from all the books and look up solutions.

Though this is so time consuming and demanding with a full time job, when I engage with learning, I try to engage in this manner. If somebody asks me, I would recommend this because for fairly technical topics because other ways have left me with vague understanding but not good enough mental model to make me relate to problems in terms of the abstractions from those topics. That does not mean this is the only way and each might have to find thier own path.

LLM has been godsend for me too here, particularly when I am trying to fill my gaps in understanding while reading technical books. And it is much more easier to listen or see, than to read. So, given our current landscape and how much time is spent with work, it is true that it is getting harder and harder to read and almost not feasible for many of us.

If I have to use an LLM, then I don't want to learn it. I have no interest in having my "food" chewed for me.

I'll do it the way I always have - read, cogitate, experiment.

That's not to say I don't think others should use LLMs by the way, knock yourself out.

I use LLMs quite a bit (as you can see, for example, on my stream). I also consume a lot of podcasts, YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles, and books.

My personal take is LLMs and podcasts are not great for research. Wikipedia is generally outstanding for science and related topics, although it's clearly astroturfed on topics about companies and some political topics. Podcasts typically cover things very shallowly but can sometimes be useful if there's a topic well served by the interview-a-day format. YouTube has a lot of treasure but you need to be able to search and not get distracted by clickbait.

LLMs function exceptionally as next generation search engines. But their knowledge for research bottoms out very quickly unless you know a lot about the subject and are able to prompt it effectively.

For example, I asked ChatGPT o1 your question about suburbs and its answer was basically total nonsense. The third theory it mentions was white flight and the post WWII era, which can't possibly explain why suburbs exist internationally and have since ancient times. There's probably a better prompt where you define what a suburb is and why you're interested in it and otherwise give it some good parameters and it gives you some more relevant information.

BTW I more or less agree that foundational texts can be very important to read. Not always, of course, but often enough that if you read a lot you should consider it. Often I find they bring considerable clarity to a subject.

I thought I got a pretty good response- not o1: https://chatgpt.com/share/67db7ea5-f770-800e-bd6f-67945f5842...

Maybe you meant that it immediately went to USA specific, but you can always change your question to clarify.

Basically, if I'm unfamiliar with the topic this gives me a solid basis to ask begin to ask follow-up questions that use the terminology of the field, or start to find out what is regarded as important.

I actually find it quite easy to go deep into a topic in a way that would be impossible in wikipedia, simply because if the topic becomes too dense for me it's hard to navigate your way back out- the wiki article begins to read like gibberish. With an LLM you can simply ask it to rephrase or clarify something.

Yeah I mean that it went USA specific and also time specific. If you know enough to ask clarification that's great. But the problem with research is I don't know what I don't know, so when it puts me in a very small part of the problem space it's hard for me to see how little knowledge I've gained.

In this example, I wouldn't personally consider any of these theories for why suburbs exist. They're all important reasons for the expansion of US suburbs during one time period. But that doesn't answer the question of why, for example, there aren't forces that pin everyone either to an urban or rural existence without suburbs. The answer to that question would involve rather different concepts than the answer it gave IMO.

I think reading is an essential skill, but we also need to get reading out of the pedestal. Because a lot of the time these arguments come across as some sort of literary elitism. Like if you're not ingesting information through reading, it doesn't count.

This month I spent many hours listening to lectures on youtube about geopolitics on the Asian continent from the naval war college. Sure I could have read it, but nevertheless I got curious about a topic, engaged in it, and "followed the rabbit holes"

I think there is a case to be made that we need to be more active in information seeking, rather than just being fed what the algorithm suggests you - on that topic Technology connections recently made a really good exposition of that issue -- https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA -- But it should not be about the method of ingesting information, but the quality and the intent of it.

I always love this conversation:

Snob: "Listening to an audio book doesn't count as reading the book!"

Everyone else in the world: "k"

I could argue that it doesn't because you use different neural path ways to absorb the book :)

Reading material (backlight vs. reflective screen) differs in my experience. Also typing and writing are very different neurologically, but people don't want to acknowledge that, AFAICS.

Speaking of neural pathways, my pet theory is that you're a lot more likely to be "engaged" by an "influencer" if you watch them talk than if you just read the same speech.

Mostly because a lot more of your brain is involved in just handling the input so a lot less is available to notice the bullshit.

Actually, I'm somewhere in between about Audio books.

First of all, for some books, that's great. Esp, if read by a good voice actor. It can convert a book to radio theater, that's magic.

However, if you're listening while you're driving, or being distracted, you lose the some parts of the picture.

Lastly, not all books are good audio books. Some of them need stopping, reflecting, and some re-reading sometimes.

So, horses for courses I may say.

Personally, even if I lose something listening to an audiobook while driving, I gain more than if I did something else. It's otherwise lost time. I can always re-listen and gain something I missed the first time.

That's one perspective. On the other hand, I find many missing pieces what I'm looking for while driving in silence. When I reach my destination, either have answers or new questions to jot down.

I think silence / noise is another form of breathing. After filling your brains' queues, you need to allow it to process these queues in its own terms. When queues are processed, there is loot to collect at the other end of the bar.

I'm paying more attention to an audiobook in my car than at a book in a busy place.

We are all different, and that's OK. Listening stuff while driving is impossible for me, but I can tune out pretty well while reading something.

I finished my Ph.D. in a Starbucks and thanked them to have me till closing for quite some time in my manuscript, too!

Interesting! I guess it depends on the kind of driving. Once you hit the Autobahn it's pretty easy on the brain. Riding a motorcycle in a big city is a different experience.

I love working from cafés. That mention in your manuscript is a lovely touch.

> I love working from cafés.

Me too. The different atmosphere acts like a catalyst if I like the place and work comfortable.

> That mention in your manuscript is a lovely touch.

Thanks.

I drive a car, but city traffic is much more demanding than the Autobahn. Even then, I lately prefer to listen to the machine, and let my brain to do its background processing.

I somehow learnt to sit comfortable by myself and let what lies beneath to surface. It serves me much better than constantly consuming something.

As long as you're paying more attention to the road than to your audiobook...

That's the main reason I never got into audiobooks and podcasts. They engage my brain just enough to prevent multitasking, but not enough to stop a part of me from getting bored and restless.

Similar to most work meetings when I'm not presenting or otherwise directly involved in specific topics under discussion. It's a pain.

> As long as you're paying more attention to the road than to your audiobook...

I am, that's why I hit "Rewind" on my audiobooks very often. But even though I'm "distracted" by the road, I find that I concentrate more on a (difficult) audiobook than the equivalent book. With a book, it's actually easy to zone out for a paragraph or two. With audiobooks, if I zone out, I feel quite lost very quickly. I need to rewind.

To be pedantic, it’s definitionally not reading. You listened to the book, you didn’t read it.

There’s just an odd legitimacy associated specifically with reading - that people want to access, and so makes other people weirdly snobbish/defensive of it.

The snob's take is bad, but there is a point of agreement I have with one aspect of audiobooks: it's impossible to remember details about things that fall outside your native language, if you haven't already studied them. For example, I listened to a nonfiction audiobook about Xi Jinping. I could tell you the broad strokes of the people in his orbit from the late 1970s on, but I have no idea how to spell or even Google them effectively, because I never read them--I only heard them.

The same goes for foreign concepts/places/etc., for me at least there is no substitute for reading when it comes to retention and recall of material.

I cannot say what works for other people. For me, unless I’m reading with my eyeballs, taking notes, and working examples, I’m not really convinced I’m learning anything difficult.

disagree. You just have to actively listen, and cannot let your mind wander. you can also read and have no idea what you just read if you let your mind wander. Currently learning spanish via a podcast and its very effective, I just have to pause and rewind constantly to make sure I fully understand whats going on

I was pretty clear that I was just describing what works for me, right? So, as the authority on the topic, I declare you incorrect.

It is fine if you think I’m not representative or usual, but I’m telling you, I’ve tried listening very hard in many different contexts, it just doesn’t work.

A long time ago I remember taking tests in school that was explicitly about trying to determine how you best learned - audio/visual/hands-on etc

So you're definitely correct - everyone learns best a different way.

I don’t think language-learning is a good example, because of course hearing the language is a crucial part there. And on the other hand, good luck learning to read/write Chinese (or even Spanish) with just podcasts.

I tend to rewind audio books and re listen to the last minute or two or three.

Ten years ago I read James Joyce’s Ulysses as a book. I enjoyed it, but when I listened to it as an audio book a year later, the excellent actors/voice artists really brought it to life for me.

I often self describe myself as a ‘gentleman scientist’ because for many years I have done my own research, sometimes in areas where I had no interest in practical application. I also believe that the act of writing is crucial to thinking (I have written 20+ books, 2500+ blog articles). I think too many people put too much emphasis on “work” vs. just living: averaging only ‘working’ about 60% of my adult life has made room for other activitites.

I saw elsewhere that someone said it was ablist to say that an audiobook doesn't count as a book, which I could only think that we put too much importance on books.

Don't take this as an anti-intellectual screed. Far from it--I read a lot. But I think you can also learn from magazines, newspapers, plays, orations, etc. It leads to this weird situation where people are optimizing not for what they're learning but for the count. How many books have you read this year? Does an audiobook count? Like... it doesn't really matter.

Yeah if someone force me with gun to say it, I'd say even reading braille doesn't count as reading either. But it doesn't matter anyway since it's just different modes of absorbing information.

I used to agree with you, but then I found out how most people get through audiobooks and TV shows. They just miss stuff! They zone out for a few seconds or a few minutes. They take phone calls and move the laundry into the dryer without pausing and rewinding. It's crazy! Watching a fast-moving TV show with someone like that is bizarre because they'll happily sit through a complex conversation between characters even though they missed all the context that makes the conversation make sense.

Granted you can miss a lot when you're reading, too, since a lot of the context for any work is external to the work itself, but with a book, you have to actively choose to keep going when you're confused, rather than passively letting it flow past you. Nothing privileges the choice to turn to the next page rather than returning to the previous page.

I think the experience of reading books at least is good training for how to read an audiobook or listen to a lecture. You should be quick to pause and rewind if you suspect you missed something.

"What do you care what other people think?"

This is a personal take. I agree if you are actively participating and grappling with the material in your mind. One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step. So, it forces me to actively participate, argue and understand the text.

In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding. I heard, that is why Feynman lectures are bad for some people. It is very easy to understand, but doing physics require active problem solving.

Consuming audio is the most human way and if it works for you, it works for you.

Feynman lectures pretend that physics doesn’t require a ton of hard, painful, and not all that rewarding math to get to any of the good stuff.

Anyone who could write this has apparently no familiarity with The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which is chock full of quite difficult mathematics.

>One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step

Yes, you can. You can even skim—or entirely skip—whole sections.

But with reading it's more of an active or deliberate choice. With listening or watching it "just happens" naturally as the medium progresses.

I'm also a slow learner (and reader) so I think reading also suits me better because I allows me to control the pace better.

You've never gotten distracted while reading and then found that you've scanned over a bunch of text while thinking about something else?

I've never read anything _without_ realizing I had skipped most of the text while thinking of something else.

It happened for sure! But it usually happens for a few words, maybe one or two sentences max.

I think mind wandering briefly is a different thing to what's being discussed here though.

Like, let's say I'm watching a video about a complex subject, in my case it's easier to accidentally gloss over knowledge gaps than it is when when reading about it.

It's also feels more practical to take notes or annotate stuff I'm reading about rather than stuff, and it's easier to "revisit" it once recall fails.

It's also generally more convenient to consume (ie I can consume it while commuting/traveling), etc.

However, as a counter point (since I've been doing lots of technical art recently) watching videos on some subjects can be useful, but I still pair it with reading to get a more in-depth understanding on the subjects involved

Edit: Made my points subjective

Harder for me. I thought I can while reading fiction. "Gravity's rainbow" proved that wrong too.

What I mean is, I am more aware of information flow particularly because it is not the natural way of consuming knowledge. Speaking language is in a way part of our evolution. But, written language is a skill you learnt, like driving a bicycle.

This unnatural way, makes me much more aware of my own thinking. While I am reading, even if I understand I stop and muse and breathe in and bask on thoughts it cultivated in me. It has not happened, for me, in other medium.

As mentioned elsewhere, I should have been more careful with my phrasing. What I meant is I am much more aware of my own understanding, gaps and shortcomings and more actively involved in learning and processing information when I am reading.

Similar to other commenters I disagree. You can definitely read without parsing and just “move on”.

Or accept a superficial understanding and fail to see the deeper point. Philosophy might be a good domain to see this happen with - read the words but don’t parse the meaning.

> Similar to other commenters I disagree. You can definitely read without parsing and just “move on”.

What do you disagree with? Nobody said that reading makes you immune to moving on without understanding.

What they said was that while reading it is possible to pause if you don't understand something and move on when you are ready to move on. That's harder to do in videos or lectures. Do you disagree with this?

Parent said:

“if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step”.

I disagree that you can not move on. You definitely can. So your statement about what “nobody said” contradicts what was actually said.

I should have been more careful with my phrasing. What I meant is I am much more aware of my own understanding, gaps and shortcomings and more actively involved in learning and processing information when I am reading. And I honestly cannot think of even consuming certain books with audio medium. As I commented elsewhere, "Gravity's rainbow" is one such book, in which for me, even a single page cannot be consumed using audio medium.

There’s also the meta element of understanding how each medium affects the way you engage with the topic, which I think can be helpful in understanding when you might want to switch and why.

That is, assuming you probably want to have more than one media type in order to round out your understanding.

I think your personal take is more so that you require "interaction" in the learning process; which is extremely common and universally accepted as best way to learn stuff.

>If I don't understand I cannot move on to next step

Everytime you encounter new hard concept, you really have to actively think/interact with that information to make it yours. This is often lacking in the "lecture" style teaching. One key benefit of reading is that you can do it at your pace.

I think for audio/verbal medium, you would probably have a completely different experience if you were talking to Feynman. He have a lecture for you, and everytime you get stuck, you can interrupt him and ask follow up question or ask further. This is probably why Private tuition is so valuable (and very very often used in East Asian nation); whichever fence of preference you fall to, a someone dedicated to teaching you is an extreme advantage.

> This is probably why Private tuition is so valuable (and very very often used in East Asian nation); whichever fence of preference you fall to, a someone dedicated to teaching you is an extreme advantage.

That's gonna be a money printer for LLMs (even if for a short while - "no moat" & stuffs). Many people are fine with LLM-assisted learning, and able to navigate the hallucination problem. Then there's the (in)famous NotebookLM, that's known for only one of its many features: the ability to blend a bunch of source documents and generate an engaging podcast out of them. And a feature they're testing is letting the listener interrupt the podcast with their own questions. Meanwhile, OpenAI's "advanced voice" has been demonstrating for close to a year now, that a spoken conversation with an LLM can be done and feels... natural.

It's not hard to see the convergence of these ideas into ad-hoc experts: blend some textbooks, replace a podcast with a conversational "advanced voice" model, and suddenly you may experience "talking to Feynman". Not a real one - nowhere near as smart or likely to be correct - but still better than anything else you or me have access to.

(Whether or not you believe LLMs are good enough for this, or are too dumb a markov chain stochastic parrot something - it still begs to be tried, and someone will try it soon.)

> In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding.

That just means exploiting the medium to full potential hasn't been normalized yet. Much like with the books, you can pause video and audio. And, much like with books, you can go through the material once to get the high-level overview, and then play it again to learn more, now that you have better feel for how things fit.

I've noticed that both pausing to think and playing the same work couple times in a short succession, are something people are reluctant to do. Writing this, I've noticed that myself I am reluctant to do it too, for no apparent reason. Might be because people my age and older, we weren't forced to learn from videos or audio during school and university years, so we didn't internalize the same consumption patterns as we did with books.

I think, it is much more to do with the fact that audio or visual way of consuming information is so natural that you can sometimes go with the flow.

It helps me to be much more aware of the information being consumed, exactly because reading is an unnatural and learned way of consuming information. You can definitely do the same with audio medium, but books make me aware of where I am in the process much more than former.

I find myself rewinding a lot when listening to podcasts or watching videos. It's definitely more trouble trying to hit the right spot where my mind started wandering, compared to realizing the same thing with a book and flicking my eyes back to wherever the text looks familiar and restarting there, so that may be part of it.

At least for fiction, I like audiobooks for rereading something I've read before, where I can enjoy the story and it doesn't matter whether I miss a few lines that might include an important plot point. With a new book, I'm just rewinding too much unless it's a really engaging book and reader.

This is really true. People love to say, "Just don't make the same mistake twice" or whatever, but part of the necessity of ingesting truly novel information is that you're gonna weave back and trip over yourself a ton of times before you get to that clean refined mental model.

For me, note-taking is a godsend - I don't know how I would live without it. Anywhere from hyper specific detailed notes to just unstructured rants. It's the equivalent of storing things in memory - that alone makes algorithms far more powerful.

It doesn't help with real-time tasks like talking though... but I've noticed I have gotten a bit better at talking ever since I started note taking.

I think the "learn instinctually by doing stuff a lot" approach definitely is useful but note-taking is a healthy balance between that and getting perma-stuck in research mode.

"When in doubt, read on." — Alfred Korzybski, the father of modern semantics, in his foundational 1933 book, "Science and Sanity."

https://archive.org/stream/alfred-korzybksi-science-and-sani...

Feynman's introductory physics course also entailed a lot of problem-solving and labs, in addition to the lectures that are the basis for The Feynman Lectures on Physics. If you go to The Feynman Lectures Website (www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu) and you take a look at the "Original Course Handouts" you can see the homework sets, quizzes and tests his students took (which are not for the feint of heart - many of the problems are quite difficult), and also the labs they did. For those reading the book now, there is also a supplemental volume (sold separately), "Exercises for The Feynman Lectures on Physics" which includes most of the problems given to Feynman's students, and many from later years given to students whose textbook was The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

I don't think the accusation of elitism is valid here.

Postulating that a particular kind of activity might be better suited to a particular kind of goal isn't elitism. Is it "elitist" to claim that one sorting algorithm is faster than another?

People are so individualistic and sensitive these days that they take any proposed alternatives that don't align with their own habits and modes of consumption as a direct affront against them. I don't think this article is claiming any sort of superiority—it's lamenting a previous modality of information exchange and reflection that seems to be on the decline. Sure, you might argue that claiming civilization is in crisis is a form of elitism, but I interpret it more like an elaboration of a perceived problem and not a value judgement about the superiority of some alternatives.

I don't like riding in cars. I prefer to walk. Plenty of people would be right to tell me taking a car is often more efficient, I don't think of them as "car elitists".

This discussion on the immanent collapse of civilization never gets old. Socrates complained that this new invention of writing was ruining philosophy and memory. In his view philosophy was verbal jousting and conversation while walking.

The primary source is from Socrates lips (unavaiable), but you can read Plato’s Phaedrus, ask Wikipedia, or chat with Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

Civilizations did collapse many times, Egyptians forgot how to make their large stone monuments etc. It is important to try to avoid that, not all new things are progress, some does lead to collapses.

Well said. I should stop using social media, the level of discourse is low and anti-intellectualism is rampant. I do think the world would benefit from more amateur researchers.

Listening to a lecture is a far more passive form of learning than reading a book. Being an avid reader is seen as special because it requires more time and effort to do: you just can't read while doing the dishes or morning cardio or running unit tests. Also, by reading challenging books you learn the valuable skills of backtracking and skimming, which may be applied to better and more quickly understand difficult texts. The lecture equivalent is taking notes and asking questions, but you really can't do that with online recorded stuff.

Ok I'm going to invert that thought, and say: if books are so intelectually more efficient, why do we even have universities? Why do we have lectures, and why doesn't everyone just read?

Spoken word is one of the most primitive and human ways of communicating information. Written word appeared as a replacement to spoken word, because there was no other capable medium of information. Now we have mediums capable of doing so, why not use them instead.

Also you're somehow implying that because I'm doing the dishes I'm paying less attention? I think that's a really big assumption, and will probably vary a lot from person to person.

We have universities so students can have help with their work and their expert teachers about any issues they had with the study material. But since printing has become so efficient, a few hundred years ago, universities have gradually tapered off the long lecture times and have been given more and more reading assignments and homework. In fact, in classes that don't take attendance, many students do "just read", and when the classes do take attendance someone will usually beg the teacher to post the slides somewhere so they can read them... And do I even need to talk about how much reading is involved in professional academics?

> you just can't read while doing the dishes or morning cardio or running unit tests

this is literally what audiobooks are for. And I concentrate significantly better on audio if I'm multitasking with a mindless activity

I would very much dispute your claim that you are actually concentrating "significantly better" while multitasking, but we don't even need to go there. By the nature of an audiobook, you are forced to always go forward in your "reading", so your opportunities to trace back to a hard concept or even pause and think about a sentence for a while are close to 0 (especially if you aren't actively managing the player and instead are "multitasking"). Sure, it can be fine if you're just listening to Critical Role or the 100th true crime podcast of the week, but if you were trying to improve your comprehension of language by reading harder books, or trying to study actual concepts, audiobooks would be useless. I guess that's why most books recommended by audiobook enthusiasts are dumb self help stuff or contemporary genre fiction, no one is reading Goethe while doing the dishes

> you are forced to always go forward in your "reading", so your opportunities to trace back to a hard concept or even pause and think about a sentence for a while are close to 0

my earbuds have a double-tap to play/pause. What makes you think I don't use it??

> but if you were trying to improve your comprehension of language by reading harder books, or trying to study actual concepts, audiobooks would be useless

reading is reading. For nonfiction where my goal is to learn I do audio and pause to take notes. For entertainment I read speculative fiction usually as audio-only, sometimes also with text (Malazan and Terra Ignota being notable for when I wanted text). But that doesn't mean that what I listen to with audio only is somehow lower quality.

And it's kind of funny to me that you say "improve my comprehension of language" because I listen to audiobooks somewhere between 3.5x and 4.3x speed generally (and still working on improving my comprehension at higher speeds). You're probably going to say that this necessarily means I don't understand what I read but...no, actually, listening to audio has drastically improved my language processing ability. And even if mostly I'm listening to fiction for entertainment, this improvement in comprehension carries over to reading nonfiction.

The reading pedestal also often ignores that reading, and even writing, is not enough. In the posted piece the steps of "research" are, apart from haphazardly watching birds and architecture, all reading or writing.

I see problems arising from this in academia quite commonly. The discussions based only on reading and writing (and discussions) tend to get detached from reality, often to the point of inability to point out any real world examples where the discussion actually applies to.

Also many who lament lack of reading can be quite proudly "not technical persons", "not mathematical thinkers" or "not good with my hands", with kind of implication that these are not of much significance for intellectual development.

It feels like a healthy variety of media types and engagement types is the best way to engage with a subject. Internet, audio/podcasts, video, and also active writing on the topic.

Balance them all out depending on your preferences.

btw, the common idea that people have “learning styles” seems to have been debunked, but I do feel that there are so many ways to approach a topic that it’s helpful to understand them through different media

I do think people writ large do not read enough, there has been a lot of knowledge already written down and many engineers and researchers I work with would rather do than read. And the most detailed information is written, not in other forms. But I love video/audio too, it is often presented in a much more accessible form than papers.

But the people who put reading on a pedestal also need to remember that reading is still subservient to doing, because that is where theory meets reality and reality is not usually kind to theory.

You're not wrong, but anti elitism is a much greater problem than potentially being perceived as elitist.

When I say you should read, I'm not really saying that's the only valid way to take in information.

I'm saying that to a first approximation, if you do read, you are probably practicing healthy habits around taking in information. And if you don't, it's likely you're not.

It's a slightly blunt statement, but the more nuanced 'try to engage with information deeply, think through multi-step reasoning cascades on your own, integrate different sources of information and transfer them to new domains' really doesn't land in the same way.

If there are alternative media that covers the material, by all means utilize them!

The reality is when you get deep enough in a topic, virtually all the content is available solely in text form. So I tell people that while it's fine to consume content in other formats, you have to make sure you are quite capable when it comes to reading.

The reason reading was put on a pedestal is to ensure young learners develop the skill of reading. Once you have the essential reading skills, reading loses it's special position. But it can be hard for adults to break the mold of what they were taught as children.

Reading Wikipedia can easily become research

I started reading history as a hobby a few years after college when I heard some things from people that just didn’t make sense or didn’t seem true. So I picked up a booked that was well cited, read it while checking the citations after each chapter. Between the Library of Congress and Google, checking original sources has never been easier.

It was a really mind blowing exercise. Much more interesting than fiction.

When I do Bible study now I do it the same way, find whatever sources I can to cross reference with other history at the time. Strongly recommend it.

What’s funny is that history is the subject I was least interested in all through school.

Could you please recommend some history books?

The book that really got me hooked was The rise and fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer. He was a journalist in Berlin before WWII, and you can see the journalistic background shine through in his narrative. A lot of what I've read since then has been in trying to trace back the references he gives to how the events of WWII recapitulated older conflicts, which I then went and found references in which to learn about.

Barbara Tuchman is a delightful mostly medieval historian, and Mary Beard is a wonderful Roman historian. Both have a decidedly personal voice, which happened to click well with me; your milage may vary.

Someone else in the thread mentioned Simon Sebag Montefiore, and I've enjoyed most of what he's written. It feels a little less scholarly than some other popular historical sources, but that's just an informal impression from a tyro.

Lots of people enjoy Yuval Harari, but I do not enjoy him at all.

A people's history of the united states is a good one. Most history is written by the generals and leaders. This account is colored by the oft ignored people.

These days, Howard Zinn, Chomsky, and most other left wing intellectuals of yesteryear have lost their cultural power.

It doesn’t help that most of these folks are 1. So sold into the “American intelligence bad” narrative that they look at every left wing crack point and act like nothing bad happened under them.

Even Allende, the classic example of a “good Marxist” leader, was a total asshole and likely deserved to be shot. Zinn isn’t going to tell you that or about when the US IC got it right… they also won’t mention that the ultra conservative death squads were still often the lesser of the two evils.

Sorry, but Howard Zinn is post modern neo Marxism. Might as well go read Deleuze or Foucault.

Also sad to realize that the left in general has been extremely neutered. The plot to “Canadian Bacon” by Micheal Moore is happening IRL and no one even knows that movie exists except random old American leftists.

> lost their cultural power

Should people only read what's popular, what the dominant culture approves of? Are more unpopular ideas more wrong? You apparently dislike Chomsky; would you have liked Chomsky more when those books were more popular?

> the “American intelligence bad” narrative

You are ignorant of these issues if that is your understanding. Certainty also seems to support that, as does the ranting.

“Postmodern Neomarxism” basically doesn’t exist outside of a few fringe academics. Recommend you read Derrida’s _Spectres of Marx_, which goes into detail about how dead academic Marxism was even in 1993 (spoiler: it’s even deader now). His hopes for a “New International” never materialized and died with him.

Even Žižek’s more recent _Too Late to Awaken_ is a depressing slog of an elegy, and he is the closest thing to a real “Neomarxist” you could ask for.

Relatedly, Foucault and Deleuze do not write anything remotely like Zinn. Comparing them is wholly meaningless, they’re playing entirely different games.

That particular book is of special interest to me as a stirner shill/fanatic. The "Specter of Marx" he's refering to is Max Stirner! Derrida is trying to answer the question of "Why did Stirners book, The Unique and its Property, trigger Marx to write The German Ideology and dedicate over 300 pages to shitting on stirner?".

I've cover to cover read that book, and it's garbage dog shit just like Zizek is. The moment that you start trying to wax poetic about whose what ism is when you become post-modern neo marxism. It's academic ivy league eliteist careerism and its disgusting. Fashionable nonsense. Zinn and Zizek are playing the exact same game. One just writes more coherently than the other.

If you think Hegel or Marx are worth citing, you're a pomo/fraud. If you think Psychoanalysis/Freud are worth citing, you're a pomo/fraud. Deleuze killed himself. Mark fischer killed himself. Althussar killed his wife. Wilhelm Reich was a loony who after writing his analysis of the sexuality of fascism went nuts about "Orgone" machines. Foucault, Sartre/De Bouvier were pedos and collaborators. Even my favorite half-breed of pluralism mixed with pomo shit, Arendt, was in love with the arch nemesis of "oh they were literally a nazi " pomos - Heidigger! And who can forgot Carl Schmitt?

JUST WRITE THESE IDIOTS ALL OFF ALREADY AND LEAVE THEM IN THE DUST BIN OF HISTORY!

I took someone's suggestion to read a more orthodox US history 'A History of the American People', Paul Johnson, before diving in to the Zinn book.

How do you compare them? Johnson, iirc, is conservative (is that right?); Zinn is liberal.

> Critics assert blatant omissions of important historical episodes, uncritical reliance on biased sources, and failure to examine opposing views.

and this history texts are provided as a counter balance to the biased sources and failure to examine opposing views of other history texts.

take in a range and make informed decisions. When a book presents any factoid, something else was chosen to not be presented. And that choice colors the narrative. Those who say "teach the facts" miss that the facts chosen paint a bias.

You basically say that everyone is biased, take the middle.

But I've seen with my own eyes living in dictatorial countries, that there are wild differences in how much bias there are. If one source lies 5% of the facts and an opposing source lies 95% of the facts, taking the middle leaves you with 50% lies, heavily biased to one side. You'd better just go with the first completely and have only 5% lies.

I've read several real scientific historical papers, and I immediately see they don't work like that. They are typically very-very boring, with tons of views and sources mentioned, considered and scrutinized. In fact, that's a good test for how scientific is a paper -- real scientist knows about all the works in their field, so omission of anything is a red flag. So they really strive to include everything available.

One history says Christopher Columbus sailed across the ocean with his three ships and made friends with the Indians.

Another history says, with quotes from him, that the people he found are very friendly and will make great slaves.

I'm not saying take the middle. I'm saying there is a narrative. Who's story are you hearing and why? The usual narrative we get supports those with power. Who's narrative is suppressed and why?

You get a narrative about Columbus the explorer and bringer of civilization to the new world. The other narrative is that he brought untold suffering and despair. Did he expanded European civilization and manifest destiny, or did he murder and enslave and subjugate people and their children to the horrors of chattel slavery?

Which one is a lie? Which is fact or not fact? It's both. It's neither. It is the narrative that is painting the story that is being told.

> so omission of anything is a red flag

you would then agree that all the factoids and accounts presented in A People's History of the United States _not_ being present in other works and education of our students is a red flag. But, honestly, and you know this, you can't include _all_ the facts and stories. By picking something, something else is not included.

You pick a photo to share of your family smiling, you didn't pick the photo of them fighting. Is your photo a lie? Heck, you may not have even thought to take a photo of the family fighting. Now future generations will only see the good times grandpa had. Is that a lie?

A People's History is littered with first hand accounts and journal entries. It is full of quotes to other authors who've collected similar. If you can point to the 95% of lies it contains, that would be great. I don't think you can though. I think the best you can say is that you disagree with the narrative, and to do so, you must ignore the real stories from real people.

Handwriting in America, Thornton

IMO it's too broad. You need to have something you want to learn more about and then try to find a couple of different books on the subject to get a clearer picture.

My interest grew when I had the realization that you can easily spot "gaps" in history, if you just start asking "Why?"

Example: This country invaded that country. Why?

History is full of cause and effect. The fastest way to figure out where you're not getting the whole story is if there's not a "Why?" or the reason simply doesn't make sense.

I enjoy US history, but I've learned to gravitate towards topics that simply don't get discussed much in the "highlights", with the highlights being the American Revolution and WWII. Just for example, the War of 1812, French and Indian War aren't talked about much but are pretty interesting. Learning about the Cold War by reading Skunkworks was really cool. There's a book called The Code Book that is a great read and covers a lot of "history of encryption" during wartime that I really enjoyed.

On the Biblical side of things, I went down a rabbit hole trying to track the migration of the Jewish Tribe of Dan from Cyprus and their influence on Greek/Roman mythology. Just really interesting stuff to me so I even blogged about it.

https://www.readnotmisled.org/p/was-herculesjewish-biblical-...

Curious, what events are documented in the bible that correspond to actual historical events? Does it have good historical accuracy for the time it was written? (forgive my ignorance, I have never read the bible)

Have you read Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore? I admit I didn't finish it, but what I did read was very interesting. Although I admittedly didn't fact check it.

I’d recommend to just start reading it to get a feel for it. It’s not all history, there is poetry, proverbs, lawgiving, etc.

The relationship of the Bible to history is complicated. I recommend the “Pete Ruins ____” episodes of The Bible for Normal People podcast, which is fun but also grounded in the academic field of biblical studies. Here’s the first one for Genesis, where the historical aspects are especially complex and interesting: https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/episode-277-pete-enns-pe...

With respect to the New Testament, Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews" is the most contemporary historical account of the region, written in the late 1st century, and attests to the execution of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas, the rule of Pontius Pilate in Judea, and some other events attested to in the New Testament. Some of these events are themselves corroborated by Roman authors and archaeological evidence, such as coins and the Pilate stone.

The Bible is a mixture of history, poetry, wisdom literature, and much more. There's a really fascinating study Bible (ESV Archaeology Study Bible) that does a fantastic job of putting everything into its historical, sociopolitical, and geographical context.

A prince of Egypt that believed in the religion of the sun was forced to leave and took some slaves with him. For example.

Same with geopolitics now, since the USA have basically sided with Russia against Ukraine. I want to have a solid background to be able to interpret current events and tendencies.

You’ve been siding with Russia since 1776?

(We had a kind of falling out when Capitalism felt threatened.)

> You’ve been siding with Russia since 1776?

Huh? In most senses of "siding with," I don't think that this statement has really been true for this broad a sweep of US history.

To say I misread your original comment would be an understatement, my apologies.

I am not freilanzer, who made the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410830 to which you responded, so, if you do think an apology is warranted, then it should probably be to them.

> What’s funny is that history is the subject I was least interested in all through school.

Indeed, history is largely lost on kids. You need to see some real world events play out before you can care about history.

I also think, if you're going to teach history to children, it should be taught in reverse chronology. Basically here's what's happening now, and that's due to what happened last year, which is due to what happened last decade, etc. Work your way back to the Greeks and Babylonians. Like James Burke's Connections.

>it should be taught in reverse chronology. Basically here's what's happening now, and that's due to what happened last year, which is due to what happened last decade, etc

Boy, oh boy, you will hate Karl Popper if you ever decide to read him lol

I've read some of his work (only a little bit), but I can't figure out what you're referring to. Is it just that we can't properly know what causes what? For the purposes of childhood education that does not matter too much :)

Fair enough

I perused the three posts on this blog, and believe that an LLM was heavily used, because I used one daily, and this is the way its content reads.

The leisure the author speaks of may be their own, and the research of which they speak today may be done by a machine.

I think the intent is good, and if you as the reader get insight from it, then it is still valid, but I cannot read it, because I don’t feel a thread of consciousness helping me experience life with them.

If an author chose to instead pair with an LLM to research on their own and write themselves about it, perhaps it would be different.

Why do these posts keep getting to the front and even to the top of the HN feed? We are no better than machines, I guess.

I feel the same way.

I see the blogger only has 1 post.

“We are no better than machines, I guess.”

Well, our minds aren’t but we have legs and arms which is cool. But maybe that will change too.

My gut feeling (with bias) is that most people don't think about things around them because society is in a constant state of hurry. If someone is wondering 'how did zoning laws came to be?', they are not being productive. And our western society seems to value the individuals based on how much they produce.

The person working, or commuting to/from work, is tired and doesn't have the energy to ponder about the world around us.

The 'first researchers' if I may call them that, were the Ionians, a Greek island of merchants, that had the time and resources to pursue the interests of the mind.

That's of course, only part of the story. The other part, I'd say, is to have the habit of questioning and wondering about the world around us. That comes with practice. And ironically, lots of parents indirectly discourage their kids from asking questions by becoming annoyed at how many 'whys' their kids ask.

Our educational system is also discouraging of such way of thinking. It's mostly a production line of workers.

I agree with your gut feeling and add that to me it feels im surrounded by f*ing Zombies.

It's not that they are too stupid, but they don't even __try__ to think.

My boss regularly criticizes me for thinking too much. Sometimes I stop and think if this is the best way to implement something, and then suddenly receive a lecture about velocity, moving fast, being efficient, being ok with pushing bugs to prod, and all that shebang.

Our society has a pathological obsession with productivity.

> then suddenly receive a lecture about velocity, moving fast, being efficient

I like to give the opposite kind of lecture, like when someone refused to even consider alternative ways of solving a problem. Some phrases I like to throw around: "you just wasted 2 days of work, because you skipped 30min of research at the start", or "it's arrogant to assume, you'll find the perfect solution on the very first try".

One of the underrated downsides of the professionalization of research is how much it sucked the "fun" out of things. It's strange, but research papers in most fields are written very differently from how people actually talk to each other. Professional researchers still communicate informally like normal humans, in ways that are "fun" and show much more of how they came up with ideas and what they are really thinking. But this is very hard for outsiders to access.

One of my favorites:

https://thorehusfeldt.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/soda201...

Agree! I spent the last 15 years teaching myself genetics and human biology. I will send emails to researchers and we often some long, interesting, conversations. I even assisted a researcher at Stanford, helping her set up a study on a nutritional genetics. And another even stole my idea about ethanol addiction and did a study on it as well.

They have no idea I only have a degree in American History and Secondary Education. When they do ask some actually get upset thinking that I was tricking them! I used to get upset, but I know now how much some people hold their degree close to their ego.

Science needs more "art", that is the fun part.

Adam Mastroianni talks about this a lot. His best example is at:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/things-could-be-bette...

Marshall McLuhan also thought television would displace reading but I think it only happened for real when YouTube came along in that YouTube vastly expanded the availability of non-fiction TV.

One example is the disappearance of text guides for video games: circa 2010 you could still find good FAQs and walkthroughs such that if you got stuck or were trying to work out the dependencies in a Neptunia game such that you need items A, B and C to make item D and you'll have to visit locations E, F and F' (a variant of F you can unlock by making a "plan") you could do it efficiently.

Now for a 30 hour game you have to find the right place in 30 hours worth of video -- once in a while you are stuck because there is some place where you can jump where it doesn't look like you can jump and just seeing somebody do it in a video makes it totally clear, but just as often somebody in the video took a different route or has a different build and you've got no freakin' idea even after watching the video. There was already a problem for games like Pokemon where walkthroughs were problematic because of the high variance of builds, but it's far worse in video where you want a database more than you want a walkthrough.

Currently re-visiting and re-describing old tumulus tombs in my area where the last survey was decades ago and where no current description exists. Also, I found tombs via Lidar maps that have been unaccounted before and I am cataloguing them. All that as a hobby and as a member of an association of local history.

Things can be done and should!!

I'm doing genealogy. Practically everyone in the hobby is doing research for leisure.

What a wonderful article! Thanks for sharing!

I’ve been thinking a lot about how research — as both leisure and serious inquiry — is making a comeback in unexpected ways. One sign of that resurgence is the huge interest in so-called “personal knowledge management” (PKM) tools like Obsidian, Roam Research, or Notion. People love referencing Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method, because it promises to structure and connect scattered notes into a web of insights.

But here’s the interesting part: the tools themselves are often treated as ends in their own right, rather than as vehicles for truly deep research or the creation of original knowledge. We end up collecting articles, or carefully formatting our digital note-cards, without necessarily moving to the next step — true synthesis and exploration. In that sense, we risk becoming (to borrow from the article) “collectors rather than readers.”

I read Mortimer Adler’s "How to read a book" 30 years ago. It mentions severl levels of reading-ability. The highest, he says, is “syntopical reading”, which is a powerful antidote to this trend mentioned above. Instead of reading one source in isolation or simply chasing random tangents, syntopical reading demands that we gather multiple perspectives on a single topic. We compare their arguments and frameworks, actively looking for deeper patterns or contradictions. This process leads to truly “connecting the dots” and arriving at new insights — which, in my view, is one of the real goals of research.

So doing research well requires:

1. *A sense of wonder*: the initial spark that keeps us motivated.

2. *A well-formed question*: something that orients our curiosity but leaves room for discovery.

3. *Evidence gathering from diverse sources*: that’s where syntopical reading really shines.

4. *A culminating answer* (even if it simply leads to more questions).

5. *Community*: sharing and testing ideas with others.

What stands out is that none of this necessarily requires an academic institution or official credentials. In fact, it might be even better done outside formal structures, where curiosity can roam freely without departmental silos. In other words, anyone can be an amateur researcher, provided they move beyond the mere collection of ideas toward genuine synthesis and thoughtful communication.

"How to read a book" sounds like a ridiculous premise for a book, but I can't recommend it highly enough. It's one of the best introductions to academic skills I've ever read. I assimilated much of Adler's advice at university through trial-and-error, but seeing the reading process analysed and systematised into an algorithm was genuinely enlightening.

Worth noting that Adler was also the editor of Encyclopdia Britannica's Great Books Series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...

I learned more about intellectual etiquette & inquiry from this book than from my teachers and professors. And I learned about the canon of european / western literature.

The best home cooks I know do this meta or syntopical reading. For a new dish, gather a few different recipe sources and then look at all the common elements, and work from there.

This comment is better than the submitted post.

> Community: sharing and testing ideas with others.

Where do you find community interested in serious amatuer research?

Don't buy it at all. Global book market is healthy and as big as it ever was. Most of us a reading more in a day that even scholars did in a month two centuries ago. It has never been more accessible to research any kind of subject and phenomenon than it is now.

The article is rolling out the same old bourgeois doomsday theory people like Stefan Zweig and McLuhan subscribed to. Luckily the democratization of literacy or even leaving the medium of the book behind is the opposite of an issue.

This is why my brain kind of short-circuits when I'm asked the question "do you like to read?"

I know what most people actually mean by that, but my gears start turning because not only do I know that I read more than any of my ancestors. Reading is like breathing to me.

I guess I do it out of leisure in a sense, but it's a way of life in many respects. Perhaps I don't read much fiction, but not a day goes by that I'm not cracking open an encyclopedia (aka Wikipedia), reading blog posts, investigating research papers, and reading some eBook I've stripped the DRM from on my Kobo.

And I'm an oddball – so if I'm reading that much, then surely there are plenty of people out there reading stuff.

I do sometimes wonder whether Gen Z and Alpha are even reading anything outside of school anymore, but that's probably more of that doomsday crap I'm prone to slipping into as I gradually become an old man.

The boom of Romantasy seems to be attributed at least partially to GenZ. So depending on how you classify reading Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Romantasy GenZ is definitely still reading.

> It has never been more accessible to research any kind of subject and phenomenon than it is now.

Absolutely - it's a miracle, almost. But relatively few people really do it because they are rarely pursuing truth. They are reading and watching misinformation and disinformation.

> Global book market is healthy and as big as it ever was. Most of us a reading more in a day that even scholars did in a month two centuries ago.

Enjoy yourself; still, most of that is social media and that's equating things based on their medium. It's like saying, 'I look at lots of paintings' when you're talking about your walls, because Jackson Pollack's art and your walls both use paint and some of it even splattered.

Also among books, there are instant romances and On the Origin of Species and Analects. There's nothing wrong with the former, but the fact that they all share a medium is almost meaningless.

> democratization

I'm familiar with the expression, but I think it's an attempt by propagandists and nihilists to ennoble their work. It's 'democratization' that they can spread misinformation and disinformation. Social media is not comparable to books; it's professional media, only 100x worse.

Don't know about you guys, but reading has become more and more of a burden for me.

It is as if -- I have greatly narrowed my interest such that most books are not interesting any more. Even the sci-fi and fantasy books, once I loved, lost their magic.

Nowadays there are only two types of books that excite me: 1) those about software/hardware engineering, such as iWoz(I even bought a few Tom Swift JR books for my son), Showstopper and Soul of the New Machine, and 2) books about existentialism such as Shestov's philosophy books.

I suspect it has something to do with getting older and getting kid(s).

What about you guys?

I wonder if after you've read the classics and modern greats you have to start searching out and take chances on books you don't know. I also think people will happily walk away from a show or movie but for some reason won't walk away from a book. If you're 30% in and you hate it, just walk away.

Yeah I feel that too. It's kinda hard to go away from a book, even a borrowed one and I have no idea why. Maybe I'm trying to convince myself that I should like the book but I don't.

I used to read a lot of books including classics and others when I was younger, before 25, but then Internet took off so I barely read books. When my son was born a few years ago I tried to go back and found my interests narrowed to a niche.

Anyway, maybe I shouldn't complain as it helps to focus...

> I also think people will happily walk away from a show or movie

I’m not so sure. I feel like people may walk away from a show in between seasons, when a new one comes out and they realise they aren’t interested anymore. But in the age of binge watching, it’s harder to realise “I’m not actually enjoying this” because each episode is made to be addictive.

With movies, my feeling is that even when people realise midway they’re not enjoying it, they experience sunk cost and will watch to the end hoping it gets better.

I remember (but I’m not finding) a This American Life segment about a woman who relished in exiting the movie theatre midway through a feature. It wasn’t seen as a common thing.

> but for some reason won't walk away from a book. If you're 30% in and you hate it, just walk away.

I completely agree. I’d even say you could do it sooner than 30%.

The question is, have you stopped reading same-ish books only to watch same-ish TV series?

While various obligations can reduce your entertainment time, I've noticed that most people complaining about that tend to be able to list tens of Netflix series that they watched. And then wonder why I have no idea what they're talking about and when I have time to read.

> Even the sci-fi and fantasy books, once I loved, lost their magic.

Have they, or have you finished all the great books that were published before the present, and now need to wait for someone to write new great books?

95% of what gets published in a year in any medium is probably only worth watching/reading if you're very bored. Your saving grace when you are born is there is a century of previously published good stuff. But you're eventually going to run out.

> Have they, or have you finished all the great books that were published before the present, and now need to wait for someone to write new great books?

I know that for me, the kind of books I used to like lost appeal. I would read them multiple times, but I just do not find them pleasurable anymore. It is not about me finishing all the great books humanity wrote up to now. It is about me changing.

For the record, the same thing happened with some movies/series. They used to be super great, when I am trying to rewatch they are not.

I don't watch movies or TV shows very much.

For TV shows I keep going back to the same ones I loved, that is the X-Files. And I can't even think of a second one I'd go back to watch...damn there is really no other TV show I'm going to watch, unless you count kids show such as Bluey.

For movies I'm also going back to the ones I loved to watch. I think I did add maybe a few throughout the years, but it's safe to say that most of the movies in my library are older than 10 years old.

The thing about movies and shows is, reality can be weirder and more interesting. Most of the movies and TV shows are pretty naive when they try talking about politics or such.

Without even knowing you, I think I know exactly what is your problem. You're not reading with an open mind. Most people only read books where they agree with the author and agree with the books content. Get some books that you'd probably find disagreeable, and read them with the benefit of the doubt. Assume the author is right, and if you really can't do that, just remember that the writer is probably dead since long and it's just a reflection of how some people thought at the time.

I found that disagreeable viewpoints very seldom takes away any value of a book. Much worse is if it's written badly, repetitive, slow, etc.

Have you read the Bible? It's shockingly different from what people believe is written there. It is a post-apocalyptic survival guide, as well as a collection of human stories and ideas that might date back hundreds of thousands of years.

Have you read the Quran? Reading it is essential to understanding Muslims and their faith. It is first and foremost an anti-christian book, and the faith is foremost anti-christian. Just as christendom at one time was foremost anti-pagan.

There's an immense wealth in mythology from all over the world to read, which takes you on journeys much more profound than any fantasy book.

Have you read the communist manifesto? It is a short pamphlet, energetic and quite fun to read. Even an anti-communist can understand why it riled up so many people.

Have you read the books written by historical figures, instead of about historical figures. The former is much more interesting, while the latter is written by some dusty professor with an agenda.

Think about the most provocative book you can imagine and go and read it. It's just letters on paper, nothing more.

As for sci-fi and fantasy, you shouldn't read that. You only have one life, why would you waste it? You can and should read von Brauns book "Mars Project", which is the only science "fiction" book which should have been written.

For fiction, there are hundreds of classics, and the older the more interesting.

When I read a book and there's an interesting reference to another book, I always download that book as well. This takes you down paths that you never thought existed, and now I have a couple hundred books already on my reading list. If one is a dud, I just delete it.

> Have you read the Bible? It's shockingly different from what people believe is written there. It is a post-apocalyptic survival guide, as well as a collection of human stories and ideas that might date back hundreds of thousands of years.

You must mean hundreds or thousands, right? Modern homo-sapiens are not hundreds of thousands of years old.

> Have you read the Quran? Reading it is essential to understanding Muslims and their faith. It is first and foremost an anti-christian book, and the faith is foremost anti-christian. Just as christendom at one time was foremost anti-pagan.

I've only read parts of the Quran in translation, and I wouldn't say that I understand it that well. It's not organized in a narrative structure like the bible, and there are a lot of parts that are impossible to understand without outside knowledge, like a surah that condemns Abu Lahab but doesn't explain who he was [1]. The Quran is not really the sort of book that you can just read on its own without guidance and expect to understand.

So, with the preface that you should take what I have to say about the Quran with a grain of salt, I'm not sure how you could take away that it's primarily an anti-Christian text. Yes, it criticizes Christians and Jews a lot, but it also has good things to say about them. For example:

"Indeed, the believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabians—whoever truly believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good will have their reward with their Lord. And there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve." [2]

The main villains of the Quran are polytheists (like Abu Lahab). It talks about them a lot more and never has anything good to say [3]. By contrast, the New Testament barely even mentions polytheists or pagans – most of its criticism is directed against Jews.

Muslims traditionally believe that Jesus was the messiah, that he was born of a virgin, that he performed miracles, and that he's going to return and rule the world in a future era [4]. It's also said that Muhammad was identified as a prophet by a Christian monk named Bahira [5]. Early on, Orthodox Christians identified Islam as a heretical form of Christianity, not a different religion [6]. These do not seem like traits of a religion that is foremost anti-Christian.

[1] https://quran.com/111

[2] https://quran.com/2/62

[3] https://quran.com/search?query=polytheist

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_Islam

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahira

[6] https://archive.org/details/johnofdamascuson0000saha

It's easy for anybody to find a Quran and read it for themselves. The book cannot be more clear and concise regarding christians. Considering that Mohammad was familiar with christianity, and that the message most repeated in the Quran is that you should not join God with other gods and that you will go to hell if you do – I would say that the primary message of the book is anti-christian. Not against Jesus, but against those who worship him as God.

The most famous saying in Islam (which you all know) is clear about the strict monotheistic message. While the most famous saying in Christendom (which you all know), is clear about the trinity message.

As for joining God with other gods, this became a hallmark of Christendom even more so than just the trinity. But this is also after the time of Mohammad, and bears no relevance when talking about the Quran.

No matter which, the Quran and the Bible are two very different scripts, even though there is a popular belief that they are similar. Anybody who has read both can see that similarities are very few.

Sci-fi and fantasy suited me when I was young as they stretched my mind to possibility.

The older and more cynical I have become, they're kind of just bullshit. I'd love to say their escapist but they fail even there as I my escapism increasingly requires a modicum of plausibility. I think there are still some books out there that might ring true in terms of seeing people and society for the way they are, but then there is a lot of Harry Potter.

What you describe you want is, in a sense, the definition of 'serious' literature. A value of it is that it has real insight about real people and life.

A lot of people reject it - because of school/authority associations, because they didn't understand it in high school, for culture war reasons, etc. When you put all that aside and just read the book, it is what you describe - the 'great' writing offering soaring, beautiful, tranformative insight, the work of genius.

I think it's hard to understand without experience in the world and life - real responsibility, pressure, failure, success, real injury, healing, trauma, seeing evil and good in yourself - whatever your age. I'm not sure it's accessible for most high schoolers and often people don't try it again.

Yeah I get the same feeling about books, movies and TV shows.

The moment that they try to talk about politics or something serious, I feel they fell short. Reality is way more complex than what they are trying to reveal.

But I'm going to try some hard sci-fi and see what happens.

Genuinely I cannot remember the last time I read a book. I read absolute crap-tons of interesting stuff online, but books? Those out-of-date, read-only, closed-perspectives from people with their ideas/thoughts/biases/prejudices they're trying to implant into your brain? Nope.

I think there is a lot of elitism about reading and the intellectualism around it. "What books are you reading right now?" is a sort of shibboleth or even one-upmanship ("Oh yes I read that last year - you should read this other thing that I think is better/more clever" etc).

Don't play the game. If you don't like reading books and don't get much out of it, don't do it.

I get a secret glee when I have mentees and younger folks asking me about what books to read to achieve success or get hired etc, and I tell them "don't waste your time reading books - learn <thing> instead." It ruffles feathers, and I am sure I'll get roasted on here too, but there you go! :)

> I think there is a lot of elitism about reading and the intellectualism around it. … Don't play the game. If you don't like reading books and don't get much out of it, don't do it.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that it's good to get your knowledge wherever you enjoy getting it, as long as it's from a reliable source and you're checking them when possible for any claims you intend to rely on. With that said, I think that:

> Genuinely I cannot remember the last time I read a book. I read absolute crap-tons of interesting stuff online, but books? Those out-of-date, read-only, closed-perspectives from people with something they're trying to say? Nope.

may go too far the other direction in implying that books have nothing valuable to offer, which I think isn't true. (I'm also curious about the "from people with something they're trying to say" line, which, coming after the others, sounds like it's meant to be criticism. Surely that's true of wherever else you get your information, too? I can't imagine wanting to read the writing, in any form, or watch the videos or listen to the podcasts or whatever, of someone who isn't trying to say something.)

> can't imagine wanting to read the writing, in any form, or watch the videos or listen to the podcasts or whatever, of someone who isn't trying to say something.)

There is too much "agenda" in most things I read. If you get to the stage of getting a publishing deal, then you likely have "something to say" that is advancing that agenda.

Grass-roots publishing online has people trying to push their own agendas too of course, but you don't need to have an "edge" that publishers need to put up your own website or blog or whatever. You can put up something entirely dull and mundane.

And the crucial thing IMHO that the internet has that books don't have is the intangible and throw-away nature. How many times have you read a book all the way to the end even though you are not enjoying it or not getting anything out of it? I've found you'll often feel you must finish a book simply because you physically have the copy and that perhaps you spent real money on it too, so it feels like the right thing to do. Online you close the tab the moment you decide it's not what you want, and you don't keep on consuming the author's agenda just because you have the tab open in the same way people feel compelled to finish a book. You can open many tabs at once, scan over hundreds of sources, discarding what you don't need etc in a matter of minutes ... meanwhile with a book you've just got past the preface and you'll keep on donating your limited time alive to read through to the end of the book often even if you don't want to (obviously some people do just abandon a book mid-way through, but I've found that very often most people don't)

I have exactly the same experience, and in fact, I'm slowly starting to lose interest in the 'nerdy' books too.

However, I don't necessarily think the problem is books. I think the problem is 'time', and how reading has evolved in my life to be less about "the enjoyment of the action of reading" into "the necessity of acquiring the information" (even if that 'necessity' is intended for 'leisure' / 'pleasure').

It's as if the modern world has conditioned us all to skim-read, prioritise, and optimise information-to-words ratio. I wouldn't "mind" sitting down with an unknown book and giving it a good-old college try, in principle, but in practice, any book I read now competes with some other book in my backlog, which I'm also not ever going to read because that too competes with another book in my backlog, and I simply don't have the time, because I should be reading more stuff for work etc instead.

I remember I told a friend of mine once, that I was practicing speed-reading, and that I was getting good at it, and reading books faster as a result. I remember the look of horror on his face, he thought it was a terrible idea. The whole point of a book is to read it slowly, he said. There was this idea that, if you speed read it, even if you do in fact read everything in it, you've still only just looked at the all content, but you haven't really experienced or savoured the book, or allowed yourself to get lost in it. And he's right, I think, and his words do still echo and haunt me a tiny bit to this day. I do remember what that feeling of getting lost in a good book was like, and I really miss it. But I don't know how to get it back. Certainly not between breaks while reading reports at work.

That's where I'm at. Not just with books, but with movies and games, it just feels like too much time to commit to a single leisure activity. And I'm not a workaholic or super busy otherwise, so I could make the time to enjoy a book. It's just a mindset I didn't used to have, that says I shouldn't just read a book and enjoy it, but should be taking notes and learning something while I do, or listening to the audiobook so I can do some other tasks at the same time.

I'm not sure how that happened, but it feels like it happened to a lot of us.

I have begun to recognize a sense of restlessness in myself that prompts me to optimize for information, as you have said, and I think I can begin to name it: anxiety due to withdrawal. It is illuminating to have once been a smoker because the feeling is quite similar. That our tastes have changed is due at least in part to the addiction of information. And a solution, at least in part, is to accept the pain of withdrawal.

It can be exceedingly difficult to distinguish good habits from bad where they involve the necessities and pleasures of life, such as food and information. Bad habits tend to comfort us in the moment but weaken us over time; good habits tend toward opposite. When I am honest with myself, I recognize the majority of my information seeking as quelling some anxious feeling rather than building true knowledge or wisdom, and the majority of the information I sought to be naught but empty distractions in the long term. And I also recognize my backlogs as a series of deaths that I have not accepted: I retain them to grasp onto the passing potentiality of my youth; I hold fast to the mirage of different lives.

Interesting insight. I'd heard people talking about 'information addiction' before, but I'd never considered it quite how you just described it. But you're right, makes perfect sense.

Perhaps you have just found your niche. Like the person who reads romantasy or the person who reads history, you like engineering and existentialism (not an uncommon pairing) and you get something out of it.

From the age of 20 to 38, I had a hard time reading books. I grew up reading Tolkien, Dan Simmons, Timothy Zahn, but the internet exploding in speeds and online content replaced my reading habits. So I moved to just read that.

I recently got back into reading books by trying books I used to read. I'm fine with Tolkien, but I couldn't stomach 3 chapters of Heir to the Empire. Star Wars was just boring to me now. And I found that I like mystery/spooky books more than I did before. I can still read Tolkien and Hyperion without a problem and I also like my nonfiction software/hardware stuff too.

Yeah you could be right. I'm actually in a similar boat. I used to read a lot of fictions before 25-ish but then I got hooked by the Internet so I rarely read any books since then. I used to enjoy Tolkien and D&D novels a LOT but recently I found them to be meh.

Fiction is hard for me too, but I was able to reincorporate it by making it more social. I joined a local book club and they often read fiction books, so it's usually the better fiction out there and not stuff that I would pick out myself. I almost make it like a reading assignment, but if I don't like it, I will just not read it and say I didn't like it and listen to the discussion.

My wife also reads fiction so occasionally I'll read a book she is so we have something to talk about.

It’s more that software books ruin your brain and make you incapable of enjoying good literature. Same for existentialism which you fled into out of despair from working in and reading about software. It is a hollow and empty profession that only breaks humans or turns them into monsters. Or not. Either way you should be worried if you can’t read fiction, it means you’ve lost the ability to put yourself in someone else’s mindset.

The blog post gives a slight posh impression. With the excessive quoting of authors and their book but in an incoherent manner that only strengthen the authors narrative by "look many famous people agree with me" and not why they agree with you.

I agree with the general sentiment of the article but I think it kinda defeat itself in its need to reaffirm it's own excellence over actually being informative. He could've skipped everything above the "Against hollow reading" Section and got the same message across.

The message below that section is valuable but only in value. It doesn't really get in to how to practice it. It laments the modern information landscape but doesn't tell us how. His point can be summarized to "don't be a passive consumer of information, be active in asking questions, refine those questions, and develop answers".

How? Write. Write for leisure, not for anyone else but yourself and read it with critical lenses you use when reading others. Only then will you need to refine your writing and thinking, which leads to new questions, new exploration and perspective.

Research of any kind is an iterative process. You find new information, you create a bias in favor of it, try to explain many things with it. Then you realize that it doesn't explain everything, and now you have to go back to reading or finding out more. It's easier to catch yourself getting stuck with one idea, when you write those down and review them. Reading as he put it, the introspecting one is only complete when combined with Writing. (Or at least deep contemplation that resembles the structure of writing)

This article reminds me of "I don't like honors" by Richard Feynman[1]. Too caught up in how one ought to be, rather than being (or informing).

[1] https://youtu.be/iNCiQzMDcV0?feature=shared

> The blog post gives a slight posh impression.

I don't know about that, but so what if it did? Why is it even worth remarking on?

I care about the value of their ideas; they don't need to pass a culture war test first.

Lost? It has never been easier to do research or start a research project. What has changed is the inclination to read. Reading was a refuge for some - and probably fiction graphic novels, computer games, doom scrolling are now the comparable refuge. So basic, cursory research has lost one population.

Did that population do all that much in-depth research. Some sure. Not all that much.

So there was perhaps an anomaly in research for a short while and we are now back to deeper research belonging again to the people who enjoy the rabbit hole and the full fledged projects. And for us, research has never been easier.

I grew up in poverty in India, so research was never a leisure activity—it was a race to keep up. That’s why I think the article is right about the cultural shift. Deep reading feels like a luxury not everyone can afford.

Now, I see more people relying on step-by-step guides instead of digging in themselves. It fits the trend of passive consumption. But reading alone isn’t enough. It only matters if you can use it to solve real problems you care about.

"Where have the amateur researchers gone"

To their 2nd job.

"and how do we bring them back?"

Pay them enough salary to survive on just 1 job.

A lot (and I mean A LOT) of research and breakthroughs in the period of 1500 to 1900 was completed by people with no jobs whatsoever. If you are looking to revive the great mathematicians, writers, philosophers, and scientists of yesteryear, you will need to pay them a UBI and sit back and hope for the best.

Plus in 2020 all the news outlets told us not to do our own research.

I’ve been researching Greek mythology for the past few years as an amateur. It’s been a lot of fun and rewarding for me. There are a few things, which make the research in my leisure time tough though.

1. Society is set up so that I have to prioritize making money in my limited free time. Fortunately this pressure has lessened since I got a well paying job, but it held back my free time for years.

2. Because of the first constraint, I don’t have the time to dive into mastery. I’m reading works at a much slower rate since I have to work everyday. I’ve also found the time over the past few years to study Modern Greek, which I could have spent studying Ancient Greek I suppose. However, I don’t have the time to study both and Modern Greek has been my priority for reasons outside of my research.

3. I owe a great deal of my research to people with PhDs/DPhils on the topic. However, I also can’t contribute much to the field because they deliver their incredible work full time. I’m far less likely to make significant contributions when they have already spent years studying Ancient Greek and then every day performing acts such as translating great works.

All that said, I’m satisfied not competing with the experts. I just recognize that this is purely a hobby that I perform for fun when I have the time, which isn’t as often as I need in order to be a more useful researcher.

Stamp collecting is a good outlet for research as leisure. If you're the type of person who falls into wiki holes and likes talking about what you learn with other people, it might be for you.

Many stamp collectors follow the research-as-leisure framework naturally as part of their hobby. The article outlines cultivating curiosity, developing questions, gathering evidence, developing answers, and building communities around that process, which is basically what collectors are doing when they're talking about stamps and other philatelic material. They're sharing discoveries they find interesting, often only after identifying the material, looking up its historical context, drawing parallels to current events, and then formulating some kind of answer or conclusion that makes it worthwhile to share what they've found.

I think the experts in a lot of hobbies engage in this sort of recreational research for the joy of it, but it's closer to the norm for casual collectors. There is a whole wide spectrum of collectors though, ranging from aesthetics-driven folks who spend more time on thematic album pages than on researching anything, over to experts in narrow areas like Transylvanian hotel stamps who publish whole books on about how they weren't valid for postal use but were used by hospitality workers nestled up in the Carpathians to get mail from guests back into the official mail stream because the state couldn't be bothered to service up there. If you get into it you'll find there are a lot of curious and motivated people in the middle who are happy to share what they've been reading about (or listening to, or watching) lately.

I like the idea of collecting a list of books that you would take with you on a remote island. Imagine you would never leave that island, what would you take?

- The Art of Computer Programming I-IVb

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

- Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition

- ...

or perhaps

- The Bible

- The Scouting Guide to Wilderness First Aid: An Officially-Licensed Book of the Boy Scouts of America: More than 200 Essential Skills for Medical ... in Remote Environments (A BSA Scouting Guide)

- ...?

Certainly survival guide stuff.

I was thinking about the civilization book case and wondering if they had forgotten to include sun tzu, clausewitz, etc ...

I did some leisure research on how the Nazca Lines align with mountain shadows and made a publication. That was a nice weekend. https://zenodo.org/records/11422308

I find this fascinating; I do a lot of reading and writing (leisure work) outside my own specialization; Some I believe are possibly publishable, but I am reluctant so far to attempt to publish them. Is zenodo a good place for this in your opinion?

I would have published on arXiv, but to do that you need an endorsement from an established arXiv user in that specific category. And even then, you can only submit papers in that category. On Zenodo, I was able to publish quickly, and I like that I can see the number of views and downloads.

First of all, there was a lot of interesting food for thought in this post and I love the framework it offers for leisurely research. However; I don't agree with this:

> through audiovisual devices, which ask no discipline of the mind, and which are already giving the room the languor of an opium parlor.

I wish there was concrete evidence provided to support this. I suspect that learning outcomes are going to be more influenced by the quality of the material and the level of engagement of the learner, regardless of medium. Bad content is bad content, whether it's text or audiovisual, and I can passively read a book as easily as I can passively consume a video.

The most important thing is having a wealth of free time.

I'm sure it's still out there, but I don't seem to notice as much prevalence of dedicated research trivia as I used to, like Damn Interesting, or Cracked. Lots of the articles would be some niche question that wasn't just a google away and it was obvious that it took effort and time at a library to write. The closest thing that comes to mind now is Asianometry's youtube channel and mailing list.

The victorian urge to travel the world collecting rare botanical samples.

> Where free time is not used for research — for developing questions, and investigating the answers with an explorer’s spirit — cultural coherence crumbles.

Perhaps, but the reality for a great many is that "free time" is occupied by survival anxiety, whether because that time is spent in additional paid work, care of loved ones, or attempting to get a leg up or to jump on a non-sinking life raft.

While technology-enabled cultural fragmentation is undoubtedly a strong influence in this, the long term affordability inversion that has occurred between consumables (food, clothes, electronics, etc) and assets (housing, education, security) has exacerbated the aforementioned anxieties and therefore makes people vulnerable to the charms of the escapism that new types of quick-hit media provide, from cable-news through to social media.

I don't think amateur researchers have disappeared - they're evolving how they discover, process, and share knowledge. And we need both traditional deep reading and newer modalities to accommodate different learning contexts and preferences.

This article read a little different than I expected from the title. I was just thinking about this topic recently through a book that surveyed historians in the 19th century. So many of them got their starts doing historical research as a hobby or a passion in life. The discoveries they made were a life's work, their joy rather than something required to do (many did make it their occupation, though not all).

It's inspiring I think that the depth of passion in any topic can carry you through to important discoveries. In that sense the coding hobbyist and the citizen scientist are little different IMHO.

Stan Ulam has a great book discussing his worry about the change in research environments pre-wwII vs post-WWII. Before the war, they’d sit in cafes and draw in tables and just sit and think sometimes as a group. After they would meet in offices with blackboards and no life in the room or fun with direct funding telling them exactly what to study. I think his concern will be shown to be sound.

I wonder if LLMs can help bring that kind of exploratory culture back. Because this is not an exploratory culture.

Amateur researchers are frequently derided as dilettantes. Sometimes they are. But "Science" is filled with gatekeepers demanding institutional credentials. For good and bad.

This article sums up precisely why I don't mind being a "forever GM".

I'm constantly researching new things to flesh out game ideas for my groups to add flavor, immersion & a sense of "reality" to my players' worlds & I love doing it. It almost makes running the actual games for them, an afterthought to tide me over to the new thing to learn about & implement. Great article!

The academic establishment has done a pretty good job of excluding and discrediting anyone without a PhD from actively participating in research.

>>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts

>I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else.

This is how you end up on the Crackpot Index. Thinking you created a theory of everything or a cold fusion device despite literally not knowing algebra or basic electrical engineering.

Join the RR&R or start your own charter club!

https://ephorate.org

It would be nice to afford to practice that art. Most people are practicing the art of putting food on their tables.

Most researchers are doing it for a living and they might want to pursue other activities in their free time. Other people do not possess the skill level. Science and research is harder than it was centuries ago.

Perhaps one could work at a US tech company and spend the free time that results on research.

It's difficult, especially if you have to earn money and support others.

I'm taking some time off, and I'm currently busy reading the German Idealist philosophers, Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and some Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus. I am having the time of my life!

I only skimmed everything before "From Theory to Practice: A Framework for Research as Leisure" and read everything after that, but it doesn't seem this covers actual obstacles to doing research on the side that I face. I do want to note that to the author, "research" seems to be basically a learning process, whereas I'm interested in building something, which I think is more involved. Here's my perspective on the obstacles towards this form of deeper research:

1. Lack of time and energy. This to me is the largest obstacle for any of the research side projects I've had since finishing my PhD. My day job gets the best of my time and energy and everything else gets scraps. What I do on the side tends to be more superficial than I'd like for this reason. (More specifically: Lots of reading and writing, little implementation of my ideas.) I simply don't have the energy to do much deeper work. I recently concluded that to make progress on the one side project I'm prioritizing, I'm probably going to have to take leave from my job. And it's also been necessary to think like a startup, to limit the scope and focus on a MVP. But even the MVP is still challenging.

2. Intellectual property assignment agreements. A lot of technical folks' employers made them sign agreements that arguably give the employers' full rights to what their employees do in their free time. If I'm working on a side project that could turn into a business, it's simply risky if my employer could swoop in and claim ownership of the entire thing. I think even the "favorable" versions of these agreements that limit what employers can take to things related to what the company does are still overreach. A lot of companies do tons of things and could find justification to take nearly anything for that reason.

3. Lack of collaborators and community. I think the linked article discusses "community of knowledge" in a superficial way. I haven't tried, mind you, but I think it would be really hard to find a group of people online with similar research interests to mine. I think people who have more common or less specific interests would not have a problem, but for anything more specific, finding collaborators is going to be a challenge. I think I won't find a close collaborator until I publish something (could be journal article or even a web page) and they come to me.

"Books as civilization" implies that those peoples who had not "created" books (or something similar) were not civilized. Quite eurocentric.

“I have studied, alas, philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, and even, sad to say, theology, all with great exertion.” – Faust, Part I, Scene I (“Night”)

I do research as leisure, any tips on how to keep track of sources, snippets, websites spanning several hdds, machines and decades?

AI is bringing that back. It's so fun to say: "Teach me about..." and just keep going. :)

The largest impediment to researching in my leisure time is the vast and exorbitant paywalls that academic publishers deploy.

It’s particularly galling when I know the work was funded by my own tax dollars. If a govt employee had produced the work, it would have been in the public domain. But if the govt gives a grant to a researcher, suddenly their output is intellectual property with a grossly inflated profit margin.

I do a ton of product research for leisure...

The fact that all historians still refuse to acknowledge the origin of the term “yankees”.

"Fundamental to the art of research as leisure is the creation of formal and informal ‘communities of knowledge’ in which well-researched ideas are communicated in a written form, and presented for wider debate."

I think the better message for this article is publish your findings if you do original research. On a personal blog. In a paper. Maybe a book.

All the other stuff is a bit circle jerky.

Academia has a combination of monopoly and scarcity that drove would-be researchers insane. Simple as that.

I mean this both flippantly in many cases and literally in many others. Academia in my orbit appears to be a risk factor for psychological problems.

Yeah, quants are another breed.

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