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Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
- misiti3780 8y agoInteresting post, but i would say you can easily read more than 3000 books if you retire at 65 and live to be 90+. Also there are great non-fiction books by journalists that are not about journalism, a few that come to mind are Bad Blood, The Chickenshit Club, Angler, All The President's Men, books by Matt Taibbi, etc.
- goldfeld 8y agoDune started out as journalistic research.
- cfmcdonald 8y agoFor similar reasons to the "time value of money" concept, books read now are worth more than books read in the future. e.g. reading GEB at 20 and having it change the course of your life to become a Computer Science Ph.D. is very different from reading it on your death bed. Moreover, 3000 books is still only scratching the surface of all non-fiction ever published in English (let alone other languages), so strong heuristics will still be needed.
- misiti3780 8y agogood point
- hermanschaaf 8y agoAt least some of the books you mention arguably can be (and are by Google) classified as biography, so they would not be removed by the rule of thumb. But perhaps a better way of phrasing the rule would be "Don't read books by journalists on technical subject matter if your intention is gaining an understanding of that subject". If you want to read journalistic works like Bad Blood because it's a heck of a story, then that's a different matter. I am still failing to find a succinct way to express this thought though :)
- jamesrcole 8y ago[EDIT: the post says "Prefer books by experts in the field" and says these are people who have spent their lives researching that field. It gives GEB as an example of such a book. That claim is factually incorrect and calls into question the idea of requiring books to meet that criteria. Does anyone of the many people who've downvoted my comment care to explain why you find it objectionable?] > The best nonfiction books I have read have invariably been by folks who spent their lives researching that particular issue. A couple of books in this category immediately come to mind: Why We Sleep, The Language Instinct, Gödel Escher Bach. Hofstadter was only 34 when GEB was published
- Retra 8y agoThat doesn't refute the fact that he spent his life researching the content in GEB.
- jamesrcole 8y ago"The idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves? Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...
- miloshadzic 8y agoHere's a rule: read stuff that you think is interesting.
- mav3rick 8y agoExactly. These rules just make life monotonic
- jodrellblank 8y agoAnd what's your answer to "But how can we identify those, without first reading them?"
- chc 8y agoMy system: Read the summary, read two reviews that sound vaguely sensible, take a guess. It works out well most of the time.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- axlprose 8y agoby previewing/skimming them first? I don't get how this is some big black/white issue. You don't have to finish every book you start, nor do you only have to read a single book at a time, and you can listen to audiobooks at high speeds if time is your main concern. Because in the time it takes you to "research" whether a book is worth your time or not, you could've already read a couple chapters of it and gotten enough of a broad overview of what it contains to decide for yourself. I've managed to read about 60-90 books a year for the last 6 years, and that's only counting the ones I actually finish. Yet I'm sure the tally of books I've only started/skimmed would be significantly higher than that if I bothered to keep track of it.
- jodrellblank 8y agoIt's a big issue because "There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe." - Forbes. You aren't going to preview / skim literally millions of books which exist to find the ones worth reading. You can't. I've managed to read about 60-90 books a year for the last 6 years That's, what, 8 hours worth of book publishing in the USA, in 6 years?
- maceurt 8y agoThe idea that only 4+ star rating books are worth reading is laughable. Reading only very popular books is a recipe to read only books that fit into your own preconceived worldview.
- gnclmorais 8y agoQuality assessment is not necessarily the same as popularity, surely.
- maceurt 8y agoMost people rate books not based on rather they are good books, but rather if they enjoyed the books and believed in what it was saying. Furthermore, there is a certain demographic of people who uses and rates nonfiction books on goodreads, which will skew the rating.
- andrepd 8y agoIn an online forum like goodreads (ditto imdb, etc) it most defnitely is.
- joelhoffman 8y agoIt's always worth checking the distribution. A 3 star rating with a normal-ish curve is very different than a 3 star rating with a lot of 5s and 1s -- and in that case the reviews will tell you clearly whose preconceived worldview the content fits.
- wenc 8y agoThat's a good point -- I wish we could see Sparklines-like histograms of reviews. On a related note, for binary (good/bad) reviews, we can the temper the results by assuming a beta(1,1)-distributed prior and then updating [1]. The expectation (which can thought of as an "adjusted average rating") ends up being: E[x] = (good + 1)/(good + bad + 2) This adjusts for situations where the number of reviews is small, in which a good average rating can be misleading. [1] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/27/bayesian-amazon/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/27/bayesian-amazon/
- jcoffland 8y agoLike the article's #3, I have my own silly rule, but it's a good one. No books with the author's name written in a larger font than the title. This eliminates books who's main merit is the author's fame. It's especially good at filtering out crappy New York Times best sellers and it works for fiction too.
- kakarot 8y ago100% agree when dealing with non-fiction. It shows a lack of respect for the book as an art form or information resource. It shows the author is writing for exposure and money and not to produce something of true value. > it works for fiction too. Nonfiction authors usually write on a small handful of subjects, and chances are you're looking for a book on a particular subject and will compile a list of contenders, then do some light research on each author to gauge their authority on a subject. But with fiction, you aren't likely to know the general contents of a book before you read it. You may be looking for a particular genre, but not a particular story. If someone like Stephen King or Isaac Asimov have proven that they are capable writers within their genres, it's actually beneficial sales-wise for these names to stand out in a book rack. If I see a bunch of books on a rack and one of them says Asimov then I'm honing in on that book first.
- davidivadavid 8y agoSort of, but not really. To give a random example, look at Philip Roth book covers.
- msla 8y agoIt doesn't work for fiction for the simple reason a reprint is as good as the original, and a publisher reprinting Known Author's Work From Before Their Fame is going to do everything they can to make sure you know this unknown book is by Known Author. It isn't the book's fault, and it isn't the author's fault, and it in no way diminishes either.
- yoran 8y agoI would add #4: books that are at least 10 years old. I feel like knowledge has to pass the test of time. This rule would rule out "Why We Sleep" for instance, but you'll be able to read it in 10 years if the science behind it still stands.
- rollinDyno 8y agoI feel like every book is going to be contested both in the long and short terms. Instead of taking a book at face value, it is important to subscribe to the conversation around it that will inevitably follow.
- jodrellblank 8y agoTerence McKenna's suggestion was "if a book is less than 100 years old, don't read it". I think it's a combination of "contemporary books will be from the swirl of life around you that already know, old books will be from a different culture and time and that difference is important" and "knowledge lost, from people who are no longer living". It would also have the test of time - Darwinian natural selection of information. Something we're missing when we want the internet to keep data forever, we should be letting data rot and be lost, taking ongoing action to keep it in the present is a vote for its importance, setting up a system which preserves information without effort is cheating the system and leaving us swimming in e-waste.
- neaden 8y agoThis seems a bit silly. An analysis of British/EU relations that was written 10 years ago is going to be missing some pretty relevant things that have happened since then for instance.
- kilo_bravo_3 8y agoMy rule: no index, no sale. If the author didn't care enough to generate an index, what else did they not care enough about? A surprising number of books, especially "pop sci" books, don't include an index.
- StavrosK 8y agoWhat percentage of "good" books include an index?
- alephx 8y agoLife is too short to read 99% books.
- marcosdumay 8y agoFor non-fiction, I think I have always unconsciously followed the GP rule, because I don't remember any book, good or bad, that lacked one. Fiction, of course, rarely gets one.
- madcaptenor 8y agoI can't think of any fiction that has an index. Do you have examples?
- madcaptenor 8y agoAnswering my own question: the American Society for Indexers has a list. https://www.asindexing.org/about-indexing/indexes-and-indexers-in-fiction/ https://www.asindexing.org/about-indexing/indexes-and-indexe...
- sramsay 8y agoAre you under the impression that authors create indexes? Because generally, they do not. Specialists do it (because it's way harder than it looks). Some academic publishers might ask the author to pay for that work; bigger publishers might absorb it. But I can't imagine any respectable publisher accepting an index from an author who did it themselves.
- jcoffland 8y agoA trick I use to "read" books much faster is to feed them through Google's TTS but set a much higher than normal read speed. I call it robotting a book. It takes some getting used to and requires more focus but it's very efficient in terms of information dump. I've been able to increase the speed over time. My wife thinks I'm crazy. I use headphones.
- fouc 8y agoHow do you do this? How fast is the speech? 800wpm? Faster?
- jcoffland 8y agoCurrently I use FBReader TTS on Android. I'm not sure what the wpm is. I should test it with a stopwatch.
- Benjammer 8y agoI do this with informational youtube videos. I crank the speed to 1.5-2x depending on how fast the presenter is talking, but I push it to the point where I feel like I'm just barely keeping up and I try to get faster over time where I'm setting more and more videos to 2x rather than 1.5x.
- codemac 8y agoUse youtube-dl and you can train yourself to go past 2x pretty easily as well.
- the_jeremy 8y agoI use the "video speed controller" extension to set the speed in increments of 0.1x. Works on any HTML5 player (netflix, youtube, most random websites).
- Benjammer 8y ago
- publicfig 8y agoI do think these are some good guidelines that are definitely worth at least considering if you're struggling with choice. One other method I've used to great effect is to read books that I see cited at least 3 times in 3 different places. So if I'm interested in or researching a topic and I see a book or work cited (or recommended) by multiple independent sources, I'll add it to my list. It really helps me find a lot of non-fiction/research-based works with generic titles that I may not come across otherwise. Obviously, YMMV. This can lead to issues (for example, ideological hegemony in a lot of the fields I'm researching in) and it's by no means the only method I use to pick works. But it has been really helpful for me!
- mindcrime 8y agoRatings aren't fungible from person to person, so I reject the whole "4.0 rating" thing. A book could have a 2.0 rating and I might still find it useful. Generic ratings like that are, at best, a VERY weak signal, and certainly not something I'd ever incorporate into an ironclad rule.
- tptacek 8y agoJohn Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much! I don't think these are very good rules. I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believe that, why are you interested in reading about journalism in the first place? HN has an unfortunate fixation on Michael Crichton's supposed Gell-Mann amnesia effect (wherein you read something in the news that pertains to your field, spot errors, get angry, and then forget that happened when you go on to read the next story). I propose the countervailing Djikstra amnesia effect, wherein a technical professional produces workmanlike output with all the attendant errors and omissions that attach to any work produced by humans (Christ knows our field is intimately acquainted with errors and omissions), then forgets they did that, and expects every other professional to measure up to the standard they themselves failed to meet.
- User23 8y agoEverything in the news is true, except the rare story one has firsthand knowledge of.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoGiven someone always has rare first hand experience and this is true for all stories that would actually mean no news stories are actually true. Probably an accurate statement really.
- pilingual 8y agoI like the idea of the Dijkstra amnesia effect. I feel like it’s due time to birth a system like what Ted Nelson had in mind using RDF or something more novel. Ever since YC had an RFS about replacing Wikipedia I’ve thought about how it needs to change. There are many shortcomings including the fact that it is hard to edit for a number of reasons, but most importantly going to a Wikipedia page at one point in time only captures that information which may be right at the time or wildly off or as you point out full of omissions. Information shouldn’t be deleted but instead we should see meta information like how other experts weigh in. If someone points to the Wait But Why article on AI it will be backed by the author and Elon Musk (who are both dilettantes), and maybe we can see some experts gave it a low rating. Part of the problem I see is that often so called experts are just those who are rabidly vocal while the actual experts are heads down becoming better experts. So while we might see hand waving about killer AI from several “experts” we only have a few people who occasionally interject like Rodney Brooks. (This is a bit why I’m not very optimistic about several of these startups trying to show consumers “the truth;” indeed, the Dijkstra amnesia effect.)
- AbyormPiranha 8y agoRead papers on arxiv and forget books.
- mathnmusic 8y agoPapers are written for peers, not beginners.
- omghiremenow 8y agoSpinposiumef
- omghiremenow 8y agoIt’s when you start noticing the differences between multiple Shawdow banned but unbounded accounts that you start to question Djikstra‘a motives. And Robinhood. And I capitalized that `S’ on purpose. Spinposium.ed
- crimsonalucard 8y agoRules restrict the diversity of your learning and restricts your knowledge. You don't have time for everything, so it's good to have rules. But always remember that on occasion you need to break your own rules otherwise your knowledge becomes biased. My extra rule to overcome this bias is. Anyone who recommends me their favorite book I will read it no matter how stupid I believe the recommendation is, no matter how many rules it violates. I found the DaVinci code this way. That book was a huge mistake, but still I now have actually read the book and have the definitive knowledge to know it's a mistake.
- kakarot 8y agoIt’s also a good idea to read some of the lowest-rated reviews first, to see what the main complaints about the book are, and whether they would put you off reading it. This goes for basically anything you purchase online. Read a couple highly positive reviews, read a couple highly negative reviews, then read some somewhat positive and somewhat negative reviews. Get the entire spectrum. Emotions or lack of consideration cause some people to leave inaccurate ratings but still give useful information in the reviews themselves. Therefore you should never trust a 5-star or 1-star rating, but you should still consider why the reviewer felt compelled to leave such a rating. At the same time, less extreme ratings might provide a fair and comprehensive assessment but the reviewer might have overlooked a particular edge case or issue.
- jodrellblank 8y agoThe positive reviews are always "I bought this for my grandson, I'm sure he will love it, 5 stars" or "I liked it". Negative reviews are a mix of "I hated it" and actionable information "can't use both sections at the same time, wobbles, and edge is too sharp" I contend that only negative reviews have information; positive ones are propaganda you read with excitement to reinforce your emotional feeling of "I want this thing to enhance my life, I want to be part of the people experiencing this 5-star feeling, I'm dreaming of who I can be if I own this product, let me join in!", they don't tell you useful things. If you read the negative reviews looking for dealbreakers, and think you can live with the defects described, then it might be a good enough buy. If you want to read the negative reviews with an emotional view, you can use it to reject the dream and stop wanting to buy the item or anything like it entirely, but that's not mandatory.
- yoz-y 8y agoThat depends though on what you are looking for. In movies, most of the 1/10 reviews I saw were along the lines "I hate this kind of movies and hated this one too" (then why have they watched it) or "this movie pushes some ideas I don't like so I disregard everything else and give it shit rating". For applications, there are lot of 1 star reviews in line of "the author did not translate this into my language so 1/5" or "I used this in a completely wrong manner and I failed". For physical goods I mostly agree. Especially on Amazon if I see an item with a very controversial distribution I assume that half of the shipped products are fakes which Amazon lets slide.
- User23 8y agoI pick the shortest one on the shelf for the subject. That’s how I found Einstein’s Relativity and Feynman’s QED. Omit needless words!
- tasty_freeze 8y agoThen check out the "A very Short Introduction To ..." series from Oxford University Press. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=oxford+very+short+introduction+series https://www.amazon.com/s?k=oxford+very+short+introduction+se...
- stuxnet79 8y agoMy experience with the Very Short Introduction series is mixed. I kind of wish there was more editorial oversight to ensure that the style, content and pacing are more consistent from book to book. Some books I've read don't really follow the spirit of "Very Short Introduction" and are rather dense. The quality of writing also varies quite a bit. Overall though, they are a good first stop if you want to get basic familiarity with a topic.
- User23 8y agoI'm actually a fan of dense. If I have to reread a well written paragraph five times to understand that's fine by me. When I'm reading serious non-fiction (currently Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics by Dijkstra and Scholten) I consider it normal to just make it through a handful of pages per day.
- fasteddie 8y agoIn recent years I've switched a lot to watching a non-fiction author's 30 minute talk on youtube about their book rather than reading the book entirely. This is especially true for business/self-improvement type books, where I've found its almost never really time efficient when I'm really just looking for the list of 5 things I should be doing and skipping the extraneous pages of anecdotes.
- e1g 8y agoFor me it's the opposite: for example, I had watched countless videos on "disruption" but did not fully grasp it until I read The Innovator's Dilemma. The same holds true for theory of constraints vs reading The Goal, Robert Cialdini's works on influence, Richard Dawkin's views etc. In all cases, I thought I understood the material before reading the original source, and in every time the books blew me away. Perhaps there is a dimension about how rigorous the thinking is behind the book. I struggle to imagine a YouTube video that could effectively and convincingly unpack ideas from The Intelligent Investor, The Sovereign Individual, Sapiens, etc. Other topics like "How to get rich with x" or pop-sci covered by the likes of Kurzgesagt are simplistic enough for a video essay, but those are seldom worth consuming regardless of medium.
- tynpeddler 8y agoI think you're hitting at the dichotomy of knowing vs grokking. A lot of powerful concepts have high level summaries that can trick the audience into thinking that's all there is to it. Chris Voss's excellent "Never Split the Difference" comes to mind. A lot of his negotiating strategy can be boiled down to "develop a mutual and deep empathy with your negotiating partner". On some level this makes intuitive sense; people who empathize with you will help you solve your problems, and empathizing with other will help you tailor your solutions to their concerns. But when you sit down to pull this off, you run into two major problems. What is the strategy for doing this? Some phrases tend to antagonize people, while others help build rapport. There are often emotional stages that relationships have to go through, so you need to behave appropriately at each stage, but also you need to move the relationship to the point that is beneficial for you. The second major hurdle is actually implementing these strategies. Even with the head knowledge, when the pressure to perform is on, you may not behave appropriately.
- kieckerjan 8y agoI guess many journalists view themselves as the ideal outsider. If you deny them a place on your reading list (or demand that they only write about their job) you deny that whole vocation. The world would be a poorer place if we all did that.
- cryptosteve 8y agoI love reading nonfiction. But, as I am sure you can relate, I only have limited time. Even if we were able to make enough time to read one book a week on average—certainly not the case for me right now—we would still only be able to read around 3,000 books in our entire adult lives. At my current pace, the real number will likely end up being far lower.
- thecleaner 8y agoDo we really need to read a book a week ? I mean just reading a book once wont really help much. Isnt it better to read less but read those books deeply ?
- munificent 8y agoI like reading non-fiction. I think my rough heuristics for picking books are: 1. Aim for topics I was already interested in before I knew the book existed. There is something to be said for books so good they draw attention to the topic, but that also increases the odds of the book's rating being based on popularity and not quality. I'd rather read a good book about niche topic that is particularly meaningful to me than a better book that just happens to hit the zeitgeist. In other words, I pick a topic and hunt for books. My most recent non-fiction books were Derek Wu's book on Spelunky, Chapman Piloting & Seamanship, and Thinking with Type. None of those are going to make Oprah's Book Club, but all were very enchriching for me because they aligned with areas that matter to me. 2. Aim for books that are "canonical" according to people in the field. Signals for this are lots of reviews, especially many reviews over a period of years because that shows consistent relevance. When people I respect that I share interests with mention a book, that's a strong signal. When reviews of other similar books mention as a point of reference, that's a strong signal. 3. Read a few pages and judge the quality of writing. I have read very very few books where the underlying concepts were valuable enough to be worth wading through bad writing. On the contrary, my experience is that deep, clear thinkers produce quality at all levels of exposition. They wrap their good ideas in good chapters with good paragraphs full of good sentences. Life is too short for shitty prose. I also have a simple rule for how to increase the quantity of non-fiction I read: Put it in the bathroom and don't bring my phone in there. You'd be surprised how much text you can get through one poop at a time. This is great for books where reading it is not super engaging but I want to have read it.
- James_Owens_69 8y agoCarl Sagan on why you shouldn't read shit books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JTN7YnM72A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JTN7YnM72A
- gruppen 8y ago#2 shouldn't be a hard and fast rule, especially, with respect to textbooks and, especially, when it comes to subjects like math. A student rating a phenomenal book 2 stars because "...it was assigned and we had to buy our book. But the book is too hard to understand, explains jack shit and totally worthless. I give it two stars only because I bought it at 1/4 the price on sale, otherwise this book barely deserves 1/2 star at most. Believe me, I am not dumb - I sometimes even read straight out the textbook." is not rare. I read comments only after I'm done with the book.
- scandox 8y agoWait. Good books stick around. 10 years is a reasonable minimum delay. What are you going to miss? And yes this does not apply to books about JavaScript.
- meijer 8y agoWrt to "How the Mind works": The beginning is really pretty dry, but it gets a lot more interesting in the later chapters.
- minouye 8y agoHere's what I do. If I get a book recommendation, I immediately buy it and put it on a bookshelf. Every time I walk by, I scan the shelf and pick what speaks to me at that given time: fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, science, history, classics, short-story collections, biographies, etc. If you match your what you read to your mood and frame of mind, you can consume and retain information much more quickly and enjoyably. And having the book on hand is really important since my interests and mood change from day to day. I also try follow some other general rules, that work for me: * Read several books at once, esp. across disciplines. * Read paper books. * You don't need to finish books. Stopping mid-way is fine (still have problems with this!) * Seek out durable works over bestsellers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect) * Read across disciplines * Write in books and make notes. Write up notes a couple of weeks after finishing (create your own commonplace book) * Avoid audiobooks (if you want to retain the content). I just can't retain when I listen while driving/multitasking, but like listening to fiction for fun. * Tag interesting books/papers cited in the books you like. Look them up and read them too. * Find interesting/prolific readers on Goodreads. Lookup the books they read, esp. the ones you've never heard of. * Let other people know that you like reading, and ask what they've read recently. When they read interesting books, they'll recommend them to you.
- madcaptenor 8y agoOne problem with buying books when they're recommended is that it's a lot easier to buy books than read them. I recently went through my shelves and counted the books I owned but have not read and was shocked. So my current method is now to read the books that past-me thought sounded interesting.
- minouye 8y agoYeah that's true. And having a small apartment makes that problematic as well. I like this Umberto Eco anecdote: https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/ https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/. Having a lot of unread books around is a good reminder of how much there is to read, learn, and experience. And it makes reading instead of turning to Netflix an easier decision.
- urubu 8y agoRule #1 should probably be complemented with Tyler Cowen's proviso: If the book lists PhD after the author's name, run the other way.
- int_19h 8y ago#1 is kinda tricky to apply to books that take down pseudo-science. In those cases, who is and isn't an "expert in the field" (and whether the field even meaningfully exists) is exactly the question.
- Emma_Goldman 8y agoIn my experience, the best way of finding good books has been: 1) Find authors and intellectual subcultures that you are interested in, and follow what they are doing. 2) Read intelligent long-form reviews of books. Most good intellectual magazines and journals have a review section. 3) Read whatever you can on Amazon preview and Google Books before buying a book.
- padolsey 8y agoFor lack of ideal heuristics, I recently built myself a tool to find books that "people like me" read most. This is similar to the rating heuristic, except it relies on a collaborative filtering & clustering of sorts. The internet is full of people who have reviewed and curated lists of books, books that can thus be associated with each-other. And so now I can ask my tool the simple question: For people who enjoyed these N books, what other books did they most enjoy? This is something I've found incredibly lacking on the likes of Amazon/GR/etc. recommendation mechanisms, hence why I built the tool. I won't plug it here since I don't want to be spammy but I can share directly with people if they'd like.
- fitzroy 8y agoPaul Fussell's book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is one of my favorite non-fiction books. I consider myself lucky to have discovered a copy at a used book store 20+ years ago. Unfortunately, it only has a 3.95 on Goodreads, so I guess it's going in the trash. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison only has a 3.63 and I don't think she's really an "expert" in any of the specific topics she writes about. It's brilliant ...but maybe I can still return it? This system is a great way to hyper-optimize for narrow-mindedness.
- jawns 8y agoI am an author of several nonfiction (pop-sci) books. I am also a former journalist. I readily acknowledge that I am not an expert in the fields I write about. That is why the bulk of my work is finding out who the experts are and presenting their work in an accessible way. (Granted, once you've been writing about a certain area for long enough, you do tend to become educated about it.) One of the things that makes me feel good about what I do is that I am able to expose readers to intriguing information they might otherwise never encounter, unless they've got subscriptions to a bunch of academic journals in fields of study outside of their own. Keep in mind, it's not a given that people who are the most well-respected experts in their field are also talented writers. People like Douglas Hofstadter certainly are both, but not every expert is like him. And if you follow Rule #1 religiously, it sounds as if you're limiting yourself to experts who are both. In the process, you're likely missing out on a lot of cool information, just because you are only willing to read first-hand accounts.
- specialist 8y agoI'm a big fan of science writers. There's a lot of day light between journalists and celebrity pundits.
- baddspellar 8y agoI would argue that goodreads is not a particularly good way to determine whether a non-fiction book is worth reading. goodreads reviewers are just regular people who evaluate books based on how much they enjoyed them, not how accurate of useful the books are. If I'm looking for a book I want to learn from, I scout recommendations from journals, magazines, blogs, respected radio programs/podcasts. End of year "best of" lists are also a good source of ideas. Then I read some in-depth reviews of books that strike my fancy by reviewers who have reason to know what they're talking about. Many of these have 4+ star ratings in goodreads, some don't. Also, a blanket rejection of books by journalists or other non-experts is going to lead you to miss some really good books. That rule immediately called to mind Tracy Kidder. So, "The Soul of a New Machine" is off limits. Really? No thanks. I can think of many others.
- mtVessel 8y agoTracy Kidder was the immediate counterpoint that came to my mind, as well. "The Soul of a New Machine" probably is (or should be) on every HNer's bookshelf. "Mountains Beyond Mountains" was also a fascinating read about an entirely different subject -- a doctor's humanitarian work. Also agree that Goodreads reviews require a healthy dose of caveat lector.
- hermanschaaf 8y agoAlthough I haven't read Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine", Google categorizes it as Biography, so if you buy that then by the rule of thumb it would not be off limits. And thanks, I have added it to my to-read list!
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- CharlesColeman 8y agoMy rules: be interested in some topic, ask around for recommendations, then pick one or two of the recommended titles based on how people described them in the responses you got.
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- yesenadam 8y agoSounds like what humans do. We notice features in our world that we're looking for or just learnt about, patterns we've noticed before, things we're attuned to, things that produce emotion - these seem significant - and don't notice others at all. (This is called "cherry-picking" when other people do it.) Over time, we come by a lot of evidence for our private pet theories. Some people write that all down and make books from them. Good luck to them.
- yoz-y 8y agoFor non fiction I only read what was directly recommended by somebody whose taste I already know. It takes discovery out of the equation and I definitely miss good books, but since I do not read that many non-fiction books this method is highly efficient.
- awillen 8y agoI think the journalist rule is good for books that go deep into a topic, like many of the ones you've cited here. On the other hand, I would expand your caveat around biographies to say that journalists are generally very good when it comes to writing about events. Barbarians at the Gate is a good example of this - it required authors who were able to dig deep into _what_ happened. There's obviously some info on why things happened there as well, but the primary purpose of the book is to inform the reader of what occurred, which is a good use of the journalistic skill set.
- leopoldsw 8y agoJust follow Bill Gates' blog. Lol.
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- hoytech 8y ago"When I'm in a book store nowadays, or when I'm at a conference looking at a table full of new books, I try to gauge how good the books are by picking them up and -- yes, I guess it's okay to reveal the secret -- I turn to page 316. I try to read that page rather carefully, and this gives me an impression of the whole book. (Often the book is too short; then I use page 100. Authors, take note if you expect me to buy anything you've written.) This system works quite well, I think." -- Donald Knuth in "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About"
- jcoleh 8y agoI would recommend still reading books written by journalists since some can be very good. But for these books adjust your Goodreads rating threshold to something more like 4.2 or 4.3 for journalist-written books.
- dlkf 8y ago> Malcolm Gladwell’s books are enjoyable—there is no denying he tells compelling stories—but ultimately they rely heavily on anecdotal evidence. In general, I find that books by journalists cherry-pick examples to fit the argument, and gloss over (or completely ignore) evidence to the contrary. The irony.
- veddox 8y agoAddendum to rule 1: Browse through the bibliography. Quick but effective heuristic to gauge how serious the book is, and how well the author knows his field. If there isn't one, don't bother buying it. If it's a 20 page list of citations from reputable journals (or original sources, if you're reading a history book), then the author doesn't have to be a professor to be believable.
- droithomme 8y ago> no books by journalists, unless it’s about journalism Charles Mann's 1491 and 1493 remain the best books on the topic. Robert Whitaker's Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic likewise.
- nearbuy 8y agoI found The Lean Startup relied heavily on anecdotes. The article gives it 5 stars, despite this being one of their main complaints about other books. To give one example, the book talks about how in their 3d virtual chat game, IMVU, as a shortcut, they initially had the characters teleport around because they didn't have time to implement walking animations. They got some positive feedback from users about the teleporting "feature", and concluded teleporting was a great selling point and they shouldn't implement walking. The book then starts teaching what lessons you should take from this story. However, around the same time they were making IMVU, Linden Labs made Second Life which did have walking animations and I believe was more successful than IMVU. It was a common pattern in The Lean Startup to point to a single example that the author thinks worked out well for IMVU and extrapolate advice from it while ignoring any counter-examples.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoThe point of The Lean Startup isn't to give you advice to run a successful VR/gaming company, though. It's to teach you that your assumptions are probably wrong, and you should figure out ways to test them and get feedback as quickly as possible. It's easy to run a bad test or misinterpret your results -- which is I think what you're getting at -- but it's still important to test things, and at least for me, it seemed like that was the main takeaway from the book.
- nearbuy 8y agoI think part of why I didn't enjoy The Lean Startup was because I read it too late. By the time I read it, MVPs, "fail fast", and "make something users want" had been the motto of startups for years, and the points the book was making just seemed obvious. Maybe that wasn't obvious in 2011. (Although Paul Graham's essays have been saying this since at least 2005 and are a much better read IMO.) But the other part was that it was just poor science, relying almost entirely on anecdotes for its claims. Which is not to say his claims are necessarily wrong, just that for any claim that isn't obviously true, there's no convincing data to back it up. There's usually just one success story where it seemed to work, and even within the story, it's hard to know if the strategy was actually successful. Like, as I mentioned before, the book passes off learning the users preferred teleporting to walking in IMVU as a success story, but it may have in reality been the inferior choice. We can't know for sure, but we do at least know other more successful virtual worlds have walking. IMVU never even tested walking. It undermines his credibility when he seems oblivious to his own possible failures. It's a lot of, "this is what we did, and I think it worked out well". Despite advocating split testing, he never split tested the techniques he advocated. There's no control - no baseline to compare to. Or when he prefaces the chapter on small batches with a third-hand story of a father and two daughters who had to address, stuff, and seal a stack of envelopes. The daughters, aged 6 and 9, felt it would be faster to address them all first, then stuff them all, then seal them all. The father thought it would be faster to do them one at a time. So they each took half the envelopes and the father won. I enjoy stories, but a 3rd hand anecdote about a father stuffing envelopes faster than two children is just... why? That's not going to convince anyone. He then calls back to this example several times when explaining how to apply this at a software startup (release frequent small updates, use continuous deployment). But even if one-at-a-time envelope stuffing is faster, and the startup advice is right, one does not imply the other. Just cite an actual study, or do an analysis of what was successful at other companies.
- EastSmith 8y agoI am using the 4 star Goodreads rule and it works pretty well alone (without the rest of the nice suggestions in the article). I also use the 6.5 IMDB rule for movies and the 8.0 IMDB rule for TV shows.
- pcprincipal 8y agoWorth noting that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has some interesting explanations about why practitioners write better and more accurate books than journalists in "Skin in the Game". As you probably guessed from the title, practitioners have a lot to lose by writing a bad book about their practice because it impacts their livelihood. Journalists - while they do face some consequences for bad books - don't pay the same price, and are more likely appealing to a general audience when they write a non-fiction book.
- thisrod 8y agoThe problem I see with these rules is that you're only going to read new books. I use a heuristic that the best book about a given topic was most likely written half as long ago as people have been thinking about that topic. People write more books now, but they get less interested in old topics as time goes by, and those effects tend to cancel out.
- amai 8y agoI know a simpler rule: Just have a look at my list of recommended nonfiction books: https://github.com/asmaier/littlelists/blob/master/books_nonfiction.md https://github.com/asmaier/littlelists/blob/master/books_non... ;-)
- amai 8y agoA simpler rule: Read what nobel prize winners read: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/03/steven-weinberg-13-best-science-books-general-reader https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/03/steven-weinber...