I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas, but the publisher had the author pad it out to X00 pages because that's what makes their business model make sense.
I haven't fully sworn off blogs, but I will skim anything brought to my attention on Medium, a corporate site, or from search results. My default assumption for these is that I'm reading content marketing and not an actual blog post.
Tutorials are probably the most information dense things these days. Followed by podcasts, although the content marketers are actively trying to corrupt that medium.
> I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas
I feel like this is very true for topics that are extremely shallow, like programming language frameworks.
Otherwise, I find that a good non-fiction book has no equal when it comes to transferring a nuanced mindset or base understanding from the author to the audience.
A tutorial is nice for what it is, a way to quickly become a beginner. Books at their best can give you so much context around they how and why that is very difficult to build by scouring the web for short form content.
I do agree, though, that bad books are insidious time wasters. I've had to find ways to quickly identify if I'm reading one of those, and I apply that process any time I start a big book (I also tend to search out opinions on good books from others before I ever have the book in my hands).
Yeah like I'm reading The Radiance of France about the French nuclear industry and there is no way a blog could be nearly as informative. A blog would be good for a few quick highlights though.
> I feel like this is very true for topics that are extremely shallow, like programming language frameworks.
I'd argue that the framework in question matters a lot. If you could link me to a blog post to get me up and running on Rails, I'd ask for a link (seriously, would be interested).
For vast frameworks like that, I think a book could be very beneficial. "Getting Started" sections can focus too much on streamlined starts when (at least personally) I'd love to dive into how the ORM works for more complex joins instead of just a single "get all" query for a single table.
I had similar thoughts before submitting, but with Spring Framework in mind.
I agree that books like 'Spring in Action' are extremely beneficial, but I also think that the real benefit for me has been in understanding the nuance and context, not an exhaustive covering of details.
I've given up reading plenty of books that are really just reference manuals.
What metrics do you use to identify vacuous books? My current methods so far:
1) Check user reviews for complaints of repetition
2) Read the Table of Contents. If the chapter titles seem more "narrative" (e.g. The Man that Couldn't Tell a Lie..) I expect the kind of fluff I see on social media.
3) Read a chapter towards the middle or end of a book and see if it is building on prior concepts or just rehashing them and presenting new, potentially irrelevant information.
I also found this to be true. "Thought leaders", individual personalities as experts, etc. However: there are mountains of really good non-fiction books if you're willing to get a little boring. I've started digging heavily into mathematics and philosophy, and found Walter Rudin, Richard McElreath, and Nancy Cartwright. I read Bree Fram's With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in their Own Words. I basically survive by a few curated Twitter accounts, the Washington Post and AP, and good books these days. The web today feels like too much content, too much manipulation, too little value, too little time.
When studying history in university, I reveled in the deep, meaty kind of books I had to pore through, loaded with facts and arguments on every page, thick with footnotes and tempting bibliographic references to follow.
I had to take copious notes to make sense of the mass of information, to organize it in a way that my brain could take in, and to glean the facts needed for my research papers.
In some cases, I had to dispute the historian's arguments, which required even more concentration to get inside the head of a scholar who was backing up their statements with 20-30 years or more of research and learning.
That's what I think of as real writing! Then we have fiction (fantasy and science fiction have always been my preferences) that allows us to lose ourselves in a brilliantly described world created by an incredible imagination and lovingly crafted.
Modern writing... yeah, not quite as seductive, though once in a while one can find some very interesting stuff on substack or medium (or here on HN for that matter). There's always more to learn.
Exactly. If I'm listening to a podcast on a specific subject matter, I want discussion of that subject matter. I don't want 30 minutes of irrelevant back-and-forth about personal issues by the hosts before they get to the relevant stuff (or, even worse, tons of filler interspersed with the relevant content).
An odd pleasure of mine that I've subconsciously developed a way to sniff out is "self-help books that are a genuine effort from the author, regardless of whether they're precise or intelligent or verifiable."
You have to watch out for the ones who want to start a business or a cult, but it will be something like "Check out my new system of psycho-cyber-kinetics" and it's just "be kind to people." I imagine a lot of people wouldn't be into this but I love it.
If you've seen the show Severance, the for now imaginary "The You you are" would be a perfect example of this (and I'm hoping they really write it.)
It's not so much for the quality of the content, but for the...feel?
edit:
The more I think about it, I'm realizing I probably do this as an antidote to social media? Social media being "quick, not very thoughtful, hot takes, often unkind" and the above is the opposite?
I was laughing my ass off when they started reading that self-help book like it was gospel.
It does convey an interesting idea though -- that if you knew nothing of the real world, even something written by that benevolent doofus brother-in-law would be emotionally impactful. I think I get what you mean by genuine authors.
Every medium has its gold nuggets. A lot of podcasts are garbage, even amongst the ones with interesting topics -- nothing more than a few bros hanging out and improvising on a topic with a little preparation. There are some very high quality podcasts in the mix, and the same is true of non-fiction books.
One podcast I really like is The Art of Manliness podcast [0]. I learn about a lot of interesting topics and get good book recommendations from it. All episodes are interviews with book authors regarding a specific book.
Brett, the interviewer, seems to be very well prepared for the questions and the conversation has always a good pace with every episode mostly under 50 minutes.
Two podcasts that I like, and pay monthly for both (more econ/macro/geopolitics-focused):
The first does a lot of research for every episode, and the second has ~30 years of knowledge about markets, trading, and goes into such depth in his episodes that it's hard to find equivalent level information elsewhere.
I also subscribed to Real Vision at some point, but I find that I simply don't have enough time to utilize all of the resources on there. One episode per week for each of the podcasts below is manageable though - to keep yourself up to date.
As someone who was/is in the circus world as well as software development, there are certain things that you can never learn without having access to the right people.
In circus, I had to travel to specific cities and work with specific coaches and pay them quite a premium to get access to the information that they knew - there is literally no alternative once you get to a high enough level.
My thoughts on the finance and geopolitics space is that there are some alternatives to the podcasts listed here, but they are really hard to find and aggregate and sort through all of the noise out there. I consider that a valuable enough service that I'm willing to pay and subscribe to the podcasts. I was also previously a subscriber to Lyn Alden's premium research service.
I like hearing what smart people have to say and I don't subscribe for "stock picks", so I'm not sure exactly why you would call this grift. It is a research service and almost like an auditory journal (is the Economist a grift too? the Financial Times?)
It relies on what articles particularily. There was an article about the advancement of AI in China after chinese researchers build a langage model able to produce some poetry in chinese. Since that model was build 1 1/2 years after an equivalent model in english by us computer engineers, the author of the article concluded China was far behind in matter of AI developement and there was nothing to be afraid of... What ???
No related to financial press chanel, I have just watched a documentary comparing development of big chains of grocery stores in the EU (carrefour, intermarche, and so on), US (amazon fresh), and some large Chinese grocery stores chain (with its vertical integration). The chinese stores chain is clearly ahead of amazon fresh, which is itself clearly ahead of EU stores. In China, AI is everywhere in the supply chain, from automatic surveillance (camera and microphone) of pigs elevage to detect disease at very early sign, to automatic delivery through self-driving car. Everywhere were they can save a buck or reduce production cost.
> Financial Times
Financial Times produced a ton of articles about crypto, and I would be very curious to knows what were their incentives for a big chunk of them... 'Lunch with ~Ponzi~ SBF' is still a subject of ridicule amongst it readers.
Beside, I buy sometimes the paper version, and once I encoutered a tiny ad about a business with no name active in 30 countries looking for partners with a gmail address for contact... Did it sound legit to the guy who accepted to put the ad in the printed version ?
This podcast is a good way to get the gist of a book directly from the author in 50 minutes without having to actually read through the whole (padded) slog.
I learned about a simple way to improve my balance on the last episode I listened to: stand on one foot while brushing your teeth. Is this manly? I'm not sure.
>the publisher had the author pad it out to X00 pages because that's what makes their business model make sense.
I got a subscription to Blinkist this year and use these ~20min audio summaries to determine if I think it is worth slogging through the whole book for more detail. It rarely is with modern non-fiction. I read most non-fiction to absorb information and learn new ideas, not for the joy of reading - that's what fiction is for. Of course the genre of non-fiction book is usually indicative of how much it is full of blaa blaa anecdotes, etc. Blinkist is at its best when listening to self improvement for example.
I tried blinkist but it never stuck. I think long-form stuff is better for developing semantic memory. Sure you can get to the point quicker with shorter form content, but tends to be less sticky.
I haven't gone back to blinkist to try this but I think a way to build up semantic memory with blinkist would be listening to every single title in a specific category to go really deep on that one category. At that point you're doing the equivalent of reading a full length non-fiction book anyway, so you haven't saved time, but at least you could triangulate what the core ideas / themes are through the entire category and really get the lay of the land whilst also getting the core messages deeply ingrained.
I've found that ChatGPT makes outstanding summaries of famous self-help/non-fiction books. Particularly if you ask it to give you a 100 word summary of each chapter.
Many people write in this thread about summaries, but in my opinion, the book is more than that. What I'm searching in a book, besides relaxing and other stuff, is ideas. I always find interesting that most boring part of the a book introduce some great ideas, or advices. Like when you expect it at least, they appears - like finding your better half. If you try to search for a one, the chances are that you won't find one. They appears in some random hidden places. That's how I see books. There's always something hidden where you don't expect it. Also I read a book from cover to cover, for the reason I explained before.
Similar here. If a non-fiction book interests me, I check out the table of contents, try to derive the content from this and read a bunch of reviews on goodreads.com
Most of the time, it's clear that there's not much more in the book.
I'm not off non-fiction entirely but I do agree with one variation: I don't read non-fiction books that are written as prescriptive "do this to succeed" business advice. Nothing turns me off more quickly. Those books are right up there with top-X lists or "do this to succeed" twitter threads.
There are crappy books, and there are excellent books. I find that business and self-books in particular match your description, and sometimes popular science books. But not well-regarded histories and biographies.
You seem to be referring to "pop" nonfiction books about one specific claim, not biography or history or a textbook or a monograph. There are many great accessible nonfiction books, like those from Isaacson or Gleick.
What makes such a nonfiction book different from a fiction book, which is usually just a bag of tropes?
I started writing a real blog.
My mindset is notes to myself. A place to collect my own writings and thoughts that I myself would like to refer back to that I also don’t mind sharing. It is almost entirely for myself, but I might as well make what I can public, maybe someone finds it interesting.
> I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas
Totally agree with you on this. Best example of this is much hyped "Atomic Habits". I appreciate this book's ideas, and have huge respect for the author.
It depends on the type of book. Tutorials are more like recipes from a recipe book, they help you achieve a specific outcome but don't necessarily teach the underlying reason or background information.
Agreed. Recently started reading Radical Candor by Kim Scott and truly - it could be written as (maybe a longish) a blog post than fluff that's been added to the book.
> I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas, but the publisher had the author pad it out to X00 pages because that's what makes their business model make sense.
(One trick here is to buy short/small non-fiction books.)
Looking at books to use in class, I'm constantly surprised at how many words they use to convey so few concepts. Teaching is an optimization problem, and if you're optimizing for something else (e.g. making money), the teaching is likely to suffer.
For that reason, you're right on about distrusting blog posts. A lot of them are written in order to make money. Sometimes they also teach.
Not that there's anything wrong with getting paid for your work. I've made a great deal of capitalist money doing various things. But I also believe that I should make my money doing something else, and use that to fund the information-sharing portion of my life.
When it comes to teaching, I don't demand anything from my students or readers. At least not directly--students still pay tuition, and some of that goes to me. But all the ebooks and materials I write are free to use and have no ads and no tracking. The only goal is to teach as efficiently as possible, and no have money enter the picture.
Again, if one wants to make money with your blog or videos or whatever, I'm not judging. My personal ethic prohibits it for me, but of course people are free to do what they want. I just tend to value sites without advertising more than those with.
I'm interested in the statement 'teaching is an optimization problem'. I enjoy teaching (did it professionally for a brief and happy time in my life) but this is the first time I've encountered the idea it's an optimization problem. Could you speak a bit more on that?
Regarding making money, I've found at least one way that I think aligns the different needs - some of the videos on my youtube channel are book reviews and summaries of books I've genuinely enjoyed and find worth recommending. Easy way to put an affiliate link in front of people who'd appreciate it, and it's not enough of a concern for me that I'd ever be tempted to recommend a book I didn't personally love just to create content.
I love the affiliate link idea, as long as the videos aren't primarily built to drive traffic to the affiliate link. Those tend to be fluff. (Not saying you're doing that, but I know it happens.)
Re optimization, imagine an instructional book on any particular topic, and the publisher decides that to maximize revenue, the book must be 350 pages. But the topic can be concisely and effectively covered in 150 pages. So the author pads the content with unrelated topics and verbosity. It's now an inefficient way to learn the material. It could be optimized by bringing it to 150 pages.
But is that all? Is there some way to get the same amount of learning done in 100 pages? In 50 pages?
I have a 20 page powerpoint presentation. Is that the best way of getting this information across? Could I craft a three sentence problem prompt, split the class into teams, and have them learn more in less time?
I haven't fully sworn off blogs, but I will skim anything brought to my attention on Medium, a corporate site, or from search results. My default assumption for these is that I'm reading content marketing and not an actual blog post.
Tutorials are probably the most information dense things these days. Followed by podcasts, although the content marketers are actively trying to corrupt that medium.