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Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

Books have a lot of undeserved cultural cachet, in my view. It's common for a book to have about a blog post's worth of useful information.

Fiction books are full of outright lies =)

But even nonfiction books tend to fail fact-checks: https://reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/cwa4uv/how_acc...

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That’s true for most mass market crap but that’s a low bar because it’s all just escapism in a different format. Books still have a much higher signal to noise ratio and information density than all content short of academic textbooks or courses (and I’ll die on that hill).

Sapiens is a good example of that kind of mass market crap. I’m currently reading After the Ice by Mithen and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow which are much better attempts at pop-academia takes at early human history. Even just the notes section of those books is a goldmine for sources that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else outside a dense textbook.

Now with AI it’s easier than ever to stick to the good (nonfiction) stuff. Ask it for book recommendations and then ask it to search online for criticisms/reviews of their accuracy. I used to double check the sources for the reviews but never found any broad strokes inaccuracies.

> After the Ice

Thank you for that recommendation! Looks great.

FWIW here's a critique I found based on a quick Google search: https://reddit.com/r/Archeology/comments/1ksaqw9/after_the_i...

I wonder if it makes sense to just avoid reading anthropology books until the field settles down a little more.

> Sapiens is a good example of that kind of mass market crap.

I think Sapiens is an interesting case, because, in my situation, I listened to the audiobook and enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed it so much that I started to question everything I was hearing and spent at least twice as many hours checking what the author said than listening.

To the point that now I completely forgot the content of the book, but learned about so many things that I would probably had no reason to learn about without the book. So it acted as a gateway with me. Meanwhile I know of other people who took it as gospel and are now living with a polarized mindset.

IMO this kinda illustrates my point about cultural cachet. Going down a Wikipedia-driven rabbit hole doesn't have cultural cachet. Looking up sources from a prestigious book does have cultural cachet. But they are sort of the same activity?

> That's true for most mass market crap but that's a low bar because it's all just escapism in a different format.

Well one could make the same argument for other sources of media.

As far as SNR goes, I think you're overextended there too. A good science video on YouTube can communicate information through diagrams and animations that only textbooks even try, and animations often work better for me than long winded paragraphs of explaining something.

I think arguing whether one spends time reading a book vs watching a YouTube video is a silly exercise. The more important question is what book/video one is reading/watching.

So from the perspective the GP's point that books have a more than deserved reputation for being a better way to spend your time has some validity imo.

"[The Dawn of Everything] suffers from serious shortcomings: the authors’ commitment to an excessively idealist view of historical dynamics, their use of rhetorical strategies that misguide their audience, and their resultant inability to account for broad trajectories of human development."

Source: https://zenodo.org/records/5907061

>the notes section

Why not just browse Wikipedia if notes are what you're after?

You don't read, typically, for fact-ness. The more facts you know doesn't mean your mind works better or you're smarter. Those are pretty much separate things.

Books are mostly for comprehension and critical thinking.

The problem with facts is that they're a bit anti-critical thinking. They're just true - there's no debate, or philosophy, or introspection.

Fiction makes you think. About the world, about the future, about yourself, about who you want to be, about what life is about, about why you exist, about love, about injustice, etc. Facts don't really do that.

There's no one stopping you from engaging in critical thought watching a YouTube video either. And some of the most interesting conversations I've had with my partner about the world and relationships have come after watching a TV show or playing a game together. Screens are just another medium folks.

I don't disagree with this - I was addressing the notion that fictional work is somehow less valuable than non-fiction.

>Fiction makes you think.

A good computer game makes you think too.

The strategic play in this game is very deep: https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/

If I had a kid, I would be tempted to have them play Slay the Spire as a homework assignment, to teach practical arithmetic and critical thinking. (No reading wikis or discussion forums; you have to figure out the best strategies for yourself!)

>About the world, about the future, about yourself, about who you want to be, about what life is about, about why you exist, about love, about injustice, etc.

This statement is also true for movies, TV shows, AskReddit discussions, etc. Yet they don't have the same cultural cachet as fiction.

I agree, again, I was not addressing this - I was addressing the notion that fictional work is somehow less valuable than non-fictional work.

Fictional work is very valuable, in a unique way that non-fiction work, whether the medium be video games, literature, or television, cannot capture.

> It's common for a book to have about a blog post's worth of useful information.

What books are you reading? And why are you reading them, after having read the cover and being able to read the summary?

Most books I read have a lot of information, if they didn't I would stop reading.

If you go to a bookstore and flip through a lot of the recently released stuff, especially the celebrity books, a lot of them are really thin on content. Especially if you grew up reading dense novels and textbooks, it can be surprising to see what the mass market for books is like.

> recently released stuff

That's a tiny slice of the books on the market though and these are books that weren't already proven to be good by the test of time. I don't think most books sold are recently released by a huge margin. The only publication where recently released matters are specifications, papers, documentation and news, but these tend to be mostly online or digital these days.

Here are some books I've read from semi-recently which felt like they had "about a blog post's worth of useful information" (probably an exaggeration, but still):

https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Steam-Money-Industrial-Revolutio...

https://www.amazon.com/Rents-How-Marketing-Causes-Inequality...

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/...

Oftentimes such books will repeat their core points over and over, or include a lot of detail which feels irrelevant/overly technical and I will soon forget. In my experience, it's surprisingly common for books written for a general audience to include technical details and descriptions which are only meaningful for a specialist. Even though the book is hundreds of pages long, and there's plenty of room, the author still doesn't provide the necessary background knowledge to interpret the technical details they're including.

>Most books I read have a lot of information, if they didn't I would stop reading.

Any tips on finding such books?

> It's common for a book to have about a blog post's worth of useful information.

What books are you reading? And why are you reading them, after having read the cover and being able to read the summary?

Oops, I've only seen now, that my comment occurred twice, and now I can't delete it. :-)

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