> 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?
(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.
So I guess I am judging. :)