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>> A lot of it is cruft and motivation for the underlying core ideas. Someone else made the exact same remark about Cal Newport's book "Deep Work" earlier this

>> A lot of it is cruft and motivation for the underlying core ideas. Someone else made the exact same remark about Cal Newport's book "Deep Work" earlier this week in another thread. I find this to be true about a lot of books/courses/content of a "self-help" nature that are designed to be practical and applicable - the real helpful stuff boiled down to its essence could fit in a tri-fold pamphlet (or a 350-line pastebin), but you can't make money selling a tri-fold pamphlet, so the content gets augmented with tons of case studies and variations on variations on variations of the core ideas to justify 200 pages or a multi-week course. I stopped buying these kinds of books. Every one turned into "thumb to about page 60 to skip the intro/life story/motivating metaphor, read a few pages, and skim the beginning of each chapter after that."

marklgr 9y ago
I call these books candy for the brain. That audience just love to feel smart, wise or "aware" (depending on the specific subgenre), and these books give them just that -- pleasant feelings. Napoleon Hill is perhaps the poster child of brain candy, and once you realize a lot of today's books are the (supposedly) backed-by-science versions of the same recipe, the whole genre loses almost all interest.
sp527 9y ago
Agreed. There's a serious problem of information density in content these days. Most publisher-driven content is almost intentionally sparse. It takes tremendous expertise to weld information with context in a way that doesn't feel hollow and commercial. Two books I've come across recently that do well to circumvent that problem: Sapiens by Yuval Harari and Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. In both cases, you get a sense of the author distilling a lifetime's worth of knowledge and expertise into a form that seems hopelessly condensed, and in fact provokes you into further study. That's the mark of excellent exposition in my opinion.
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  The problem of low information density isn't new. Most of the "classics" of western literature have the same problem. We're just more attuned to it now because we've been trained by internet articles to expect an idea to be introduced, explored and concluded in 1000-2000 words. Beyond that, these days many people won't even bother with that if there isn't a quick hook or a TL;DR that sucks them into reading further.
  - elcapitan 9y ago
    I think one good test is actually the table of contents. Some older books which were content-rich had the feature of "descriptive" TOCs. They would not only have a clear headline, but also a sort of teaser description of what that chapter would tell you. So you could use that to get a high level understanding of what the book is about and what it would tell or teach you without even having to skim the actual content. On the other side of the spectrum, many of those sparse business/popsci/etc books often have extremely cryptic TOCs. That's a good sign to just ignore that book.
  - ashark 9y ago
    > The problem of low information density isn't new. Most of the "classics" of western literature have the same problem. I would submit that you may not be tuned into the value in them, if you think that. Maybe it's true of some, but most are just an acquired taste of the same sort as, say, the freer-form varieties of jazz, or classical music. It takes some work and some experience before you get what they're doing, before you understand their rhythms, learn to recognize when they're telling you to pay attention (and to what, which may not be obvious at first), when and how they're simply playing and what about the particular play they're engaging in makes it remarkable and worthwhile, and so on. There's a sensitivity required for much (not all) of the body of classic literature that most people have to work to develop before they really get it, and lots of allusions that have the chicken/egg problem of requiring you already to be familiar with a lot of literature before they start to land with any frequency—again, same as some genres of music, like classical and jazz again, hip hop especially, others too, but usually not as much as those. Just because you can read doesn't mean you get literature, just like being able to see doesn't mean you get fine art, though in either case you might still enjoy at least some of it, and you might still develop strong opinions about the works you don't enjoy. Movies and TV are similar. You're not born recognizing good film-making, understanding why it's good, how the way the camera moved in that shot actually contributed meaning rather than just being an artifact of the medium, how that shot was a reference to some DW Griffith movie and what purpose that might have, how that shot is weak and works against the tone or action of the scene in a way that makes it bad, and so on. Most people who watch and enjoy film never bother to develop an actual understanding of it, but that doesn't mean the things that go over their heads are bad. That's just how all art is, really. Sure there's some posturing and BS mixed in with it all, but you in fact do have to put some serious hours and effort into arts to get the most out of them that you can—even just on a critical or enjoyment or character/intellect/empathy-building level, not even getting into making art—and very probably by the time you've done that a bunch of things that seemed like worthless overrated crap when you started won't seem that way anymore.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  Is it possible that the problem isn't publishers or authors, but rather readers and people in general? I know a retired journalist who worked for 20 something years. When started articles and film pieces used a strategy of jamming as much information in as densely as possible. Towards the end of his career the strategy was making the message as clear as possible so that a few facts could be conveyed accurately and meaningfully. The average person just isn't ready for dense facts outside their expertise. Things like repetition, dilution and numerous examples make internalizing external information easier. As a programmer you are probably already an expert at self directed learning and find that method simplistic. How would you want to approach a topic you were inexpert at not planning on pursuing professionally?
andreisoare 9y ago
I suppose this is why there is room for startups that summarize these books into a few pages.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ssijak 9y ago
I agree in general, but reading 3-page summary will not leave you with deep impression if it is applicable/correct and why. Blog posts are like that and how many you read vs how many you changed your behavior? I tried one of the services that provide summaries for the books but disliked it. But I agree that this books, in general, could have around 100-150 pages, 200 tops.
- copperx 9y ago
  One of the promises of hypertext was to be able to "dig in" into deeper information if you wanted to. It would be nice to see a single page summary of a book, and then be able to click on hyperlinks to see more details about the interesting bits. Self-help books and textbooks are ideal for this, but I can see that it's a lot of work to structure something like that.
  - elcapitan 9y ago
    I always found these online versions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus very enlightening, because the entire book is hierarchically structured and thus lends itself to top-down exploration (which doesn't work well in traditional books): http://www.tractatuslogico-philosophicus.com/ http://www.tractatuslogico-philosophicus.com/
dharmon 9y ago
Specifically calling out the Deep Work book, I recall after the 6 months of promo, talks, and general marketing of the book the author wrote a blog post calling for participants to actually, well, you know, help test if the ideas in the book actually had any scientific merit. I was already pretty disillusioned with the self help crowd (even those who claimed a scientific background), but that was the nail in the coffin.
- galkk 9y ago
  Omg, did that really happened? I either missed it or didn't read properly, but I'm definitely going to unsubscribe. p.s. I've read the book and felt that there is too much noise and anecdotes for actually useful content.
- 1123581321 9y ago
  That doesn't make sense. Cal Newport's audience was built from the beginning around one person's efforts to get more work done. It's always been an anecdotal/self-experimental approach. Why quit reading now? Probably the biggest testable assertion Cal makes is that focus is a muscle that can be strengthened and called on a schedule rather than a depletable, fickle resource. This is consistent with current research: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/03/psychologys-favorite-theory-about-willpower-may-be-totally-wrong.html http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/03/psychologys-favorite-th...
  - JamesBarney 9y ago
    Do they have any studies where they manipulate people's beliefs about willpower to see if that affects it? This study has a been confound which is equivalent too "we asked a bunch of people if they thought they were strong. People who said yes we're stronger than people who said no! Therefore believing your strong is how to become stronger!"
indigo0086 9y ago
You don't know how true that is until you pick up "the five second rule"
kraftman 9y ago
Just finished 'so good they cant ignore you' and thought similar. It made some great, interesting points, but they were just too padded out.
PaulRobinson 9y ago
The Learning How to Learn course is free. They're not making money from it. They are arguably gaining reputation from it. However, I do not think it's true that they're making the same point over and over again. There is little repeated content, and what is repeated is done in a way that triggers recall. It is a content-dense course, and to put this in the same bucket as an airport best-seller self-help book is deeply unfair.
andy_ppp 9y ago
You're looking for https://www.blinkist.com https://www.blinkist.com - I've not bought anything yet but that's what they do. I do feel a lot of self help books are often hammering home a single point over 500 pages. By the end even the authors tend to seem bored of writing their chapters.
ikurei 9y ago
A more charitable interpretation could be that all that "filler" is used to motivate you, because just reading about this methods won't be enough to actually help most people.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  And a less charitable interpretation of that is that reading case studies and backing material makes people feel like they are accomplishing something without actual effort or anxiety, so they prefer reading to actual practice. "Research by Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues has shown that thinking about the benefits of success can actually make you less likely to achieve your goals. They can reduce the amount of effort that you want to put into achieving your aims." https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201302/positive-fantasies-can-reduce-future-effort https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201302...
mcintyre1994 9y ago
My favourite example of this is Harold Pollack who got tonnes of media coverage for coming up with 9 rules for personal finance which fit on an index card. I listened to his interview on Freakonomics, and he's now selling a 256 page book called "The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicate". 256 pages, about his rules that fit on an index card. As an aside I always hear podcast adverts for https://www.blinkist.com/ https://www.blinkist.com/ which does audio/text summaries of non-fiction books, I haven't tried it yet but it might be worth checking out.
- ericdykstra 9y ago
  A book that can be adequately summarized isn't worth reading at all.
  - perseusprime11 9y ago
    It is like reading a book without all the context. What is the point of takeaways if you don't know when to apply them? I will be wary of people reading summaries.
snthd 9y ago
Derek Sivers' book notes are worth looking at: https://sivers.org/book https://sivers.org/book

marklgr 9y ago

I call these books candy for the brain. That audience just love to feel smart, wise or "aware" (depending on the specific subgenre), and these books give them just that -- pleasant feelings. Napoleon Hill is perhaps the poster child of brain candy, and once you realize a lot of today's books are the (supposedly) backed-by-science versions of the same recipe, the whole genre loses almost all interest.

sp527 9y ago

Agreed. There's a serious problem of information density in content these days. Most publisher-driven content is almost intentionally sparse. It takes tremendous expertise to weld information with context in a way that doesn't feel hollow and commercial. Two books I've come across recently that do well to circumvent that problem: Sapiens by Yuval Harari and Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. In both cases, you get a sense of the author distilling a lifetime's worth of knowledge and expertise into a form that seems hopelessly condensed, and in fact provokes you into further study. That's the mark of excellent exposition in my opinion.

CuriouslyC 9y ago
The problem of low information density isn't new. Most of the "classics" of western literature have the same problem. We're just more attuned to it now because we've been trained by internet articles to expect an idea to be introduced, explored and concluded in 1000-2000 words. Beyond that, these days many people won't even bother with that if there isn't a quick hook or a TL;DR that sucks them into reading further.
- elcapitan 9y ago
  I think one good test is actually the table of contents. Some older books which were content-rich had the feature of "descriptive" TOCs. They would not only have a clear headline, but also a sort of teaser description of what that chapter would tell you. So you could use that to get a high level understanding of what the book is about and what it would tell or teach you without even having to skim the actual content. On the other side of the spectrum, many of those sparse business/popsci/etc books often have extremely cryptic TOCs. That's a good sign to just ignore that book.
- ashark 9y ago
  > The problem of low information density isn't new. Most of the "classics" of western literature have the same problem. I would submit that you may not be tuned into the value in them, if you think that. Maybe it's true of some, but most are just an acquired taste of the same sort as, say, the freer-form varieties of jazz, or classical music. It takes some work and some experience before you get what they're doing, before you understand their rhythms, learn to recognize when they're telling you to pay attention (and to what, which may not be obvious at first), when and how they're simply playing and what about the particular play they're engaging in makes it remarkable and worthwhile, and so on. There's a sensitivity required for much (not all) of the body of classic literature that most people have to work to develop before they really get it, and lots of allusions that have the chicken/egg problem of requiring you already to be familiar with a lot of literature before they start to land with any frequency—again, same as some genres of music, like classical and jazz again, hip hop especially, others too, but usually not as much as those. Just because you can read doesn't mean you get literature, just like being able to see doesn't mean you get fine art, though in either case you might still enjoy at least some of it, and you might still develop strong opinions about the works you don't enjoy. Movies and TV are similar. You're not born recognizing good film-making, understanding why it's good, how the way the camera moved in that shot actually contributed meaning rather than just being an artifact of the medium, how that shot was a reference to some DW Griffith movie and what purpose that might have, how that shot is weak and works against the tone or action of the scene in a way that makes it bad, and so on. Most people who watch and enjoy film never bother to develop an actual understanding of it, but that doesn't mean the things that go over their heads are bad. That's just how all art is, really. Sure there's some posturing and BS mixed in with it all, but you in fact do have to put some serious hours and effort into arts to get the most out of them that you can—even just on a critical or enjoyment or character/intellect/empathy-building level, not even getting into making art—and very probably by the time you've done that a bunch of things that seemed like worthless overrated crap when you started won't seem that way anymore.
sqeaky 9y ago
Is it possible that the problem isn't publishers or authors, but rather readers and people in general? I know a retired journalist who worked for 20 something years. When started articles and film pieces used a strategy of jamming as much information in as densely as possible. Towards the end of his career the strategy was making the message as clear as possible so that a few facts could be conveyed accurately and meaningfully. The average person just isn't ready for dense facts outside their expertise. Things like repetition, dilution and numerous examples make internalizing external information easier. As a programmer you are probably already an expert at self directed learning and find that method simplistic. How would you want to approach a topic you were inexpert at not planning on pursuing professionally?

andreisoare 9y ago

I suppose this is why there is room for startups that summarize these books into a few pages.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ssijak 9y ago

I agree in general, but reading 3-page summary will not leave you with deep impression if it is applicable/correct and why. Blog posts are like that and how many you read vs how many you changed your behavior? I tried one of the services that provide summaries for the books but disliked it. But I agree that this books, in general, could have around 100-150 pages, 200 tops.

copperx 9y ago
One of the promises of hypertext was to be able to "dig in" into deeper information if you wanted to. It would be nice to see a single page summary of a book, and then be able to click on hyperlinks to see more details about the interesting bits. Self-help books and textbooks are ideal for this, but I can see that it's a lot of work to structure something like that.
- elcapitan 9y ago
  I always found these online versions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus very enlightening, because the entire book is hierarchically structured and thus lends itself to top-down exploration (which doesn't work well in traditional books): http://www.tractatuslogico-philosophicus.com/ http://www.tractatuslogico-philosophicus.com/

dharmon 9y ago

Specifically calling out the Deep Work book, I recall after the 6 months of promo, talks, and general marketing of the book the author wrote a blog post calling for participants to actually, well, you know, help test if the ideas in the book actually had any scientific merit. I was already pretty disillusioned with the self help crowd (even those who claimed a scientific background), but that was the nail in the coffin.

galkk 9y ago
Omg, did that really happened? I either missed it or didn't read properly, but I'm definitely going to unsubscribe. p.s. I've read the book and felt that there is too much noise and anecdotes for actually useful content.
1123581321 9y ago
That doesn't make sense. Cal Newport's audience was built from the beginning around one person's efforts to get more work done. It's always been an anecdotal/self-experimental approach. Why quit reading now? Probably the biggest testable assertion Cal makes is that focus is a muscle that can be strengthened and called on a schedule rather than a depletable, fickle resource. This is consistent with current research: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/03/psychologys-favorite-theory-about-willpower-may-be-totally-wrong.html http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/03/psychologys-favorite-th...
- JamesBarney 9y ago
  Do they have any studies where they manipulate people's beliefs about willpower to see if that affects it? This study has a been confound which is equivalent too "we asked a bunch of people if they thought they were strong. People who said yes we're stronger than people who said no! Therefore believing your strong is how to become stronger!"

indigo0086 9y ago

You don't know how true that is until you pick up "the five second rule"

kraftman 9y ago

Just finished 'so good they cant ignore you' and thought similar. It made some great, interesting points, but they were just too padded out.

PaulRobinson 9y ago

The Learning How to Learn course is free. They're not making money from it. They are arguably gaining reputation from it. However, I do not think it's true that they're making the same point over and over again. There is little repeated content, and what is repeated is done in a way that triggers recall. It is a content-dense course, and to put this in the same bucket as an airport best-seller self-help book is deeply unfair.

andy_ppp 9y ago

You're looking for https://www.blinkist.com https://www.blinkist.com - I've not bought anything yet but that's what they do. I do feel a lot of self help books are often hammering home a single point over 500 pages. By the end even the authors tend to seem bored of writing their chapters.

ikurei 9y ago

A more charitable interpretation could be that all that "filler" is used to motivate you, because just reading about this methods won't be enough to actually help most people.

WalterSear 9y ago
And a less charitable interpretation of that is that reading case studies and backing material makes people feel like they are accomplishing something without actual effort or anxiety, so they prefer reading to actual practice. "Research by Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues has shown that thinking about the benefits of success can actually make you less likely to achieve your goals. They can reduce the amount of effort that you want to put into achieving your aims." https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201302/positive-fantasies-can-reduce-future-effort https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201302...

mcintyre1994 9y ago

My favourite example of this is Harold Pollack who got tonnes of media coverage for coming up with 9 rules for personal finance which fit on an index card. I listened to his interview on Freakonomics, and he's now selling a 256 page book called "The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicate". 256 pages, about his rules that fit on an index card. As an aside I always hear podcast adverts for https://www.blinkist.com/ https://www.blinkist.com/ which does audio/text summaries of non-fiction books, I haven't tried it yet but it might be worth checking out.

ericdykstra 9y ago
A book that can be adequately summarized isn't worth reading at all.
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  It is like reading a book without all the context. What is the point of takeaways if you don't know when to apply them? I will be wary of people reading summaries.

snthd 9y ago

Derek Sivers' book notes are worth looking at: https://sivers.org/book https://sivers.org/book