3 ms·
I read a lot more blog posts than books these days, and I wonder if I’m just eating more empty calories instead of nutritious meals. I’m all for the promise of
by smurda 6y ago
I read a lot more blog posts than books these days, and I wonder if I’m just eating more empty calories instead of nutritious meals.
I’m all for the promise of the Internet of giving a voice to the voiceless. But the time and quality of thought required to put words into print was a higher bar, and ostensibly higher quality on average, than the time and quality of thought I put into writing a quick blog post or vapid tweet.
- sriku 6y agoRgd empty calories, most likely yes. So it is good to have a skill to skim a blog post first to determine if it is worth reading. Writer's reputation also helps. Terence Tao's hierarchy helped me here - book > paper > blog post > buzz note > tweet. He once wrote somewhere that he chose his medium depending on how developed the thought he wished to express was (or something to that effect). (Remember "Gooogle Buzz"?)
- ed312 6y agoThis is how a phd friend of mine answered "how do you actually read so many research papers". He developed a really tuned skimming mode - I'm not sure I could apply the same technique to blogs/website due to less consistent format, writing style, etc.
- qznc 6y agoIt depends on how deep you want to go. Sometimes a shallow blog post is fine (e.g. privileges for vaccinated people?) and sometimes you need more.
- roudaki 6y agoA lot of books are empty calories and even good ones can became if you dont internalize it. I reread books over time and every time I get something different out of it but if I force to read something just to cross it of the list I usually forget I read it in couple months
- watwut 6y ago> I’m all for the promise of the Internet of giving a voice to the voiceless. But the time and quality of thought required to put words into print was a higher bar, and ostensibly higher quality on average, than the time and quality of thought I put into writing a quick blog post or vapid tweet. I used to read a lot when I was younger. A lot of it was junk. I enjoyed it, I would not mind if my kids read it, but really, it did not had more quality in it then random blog.
- npsimons 6y ago> But the time and quality of thought required to put words into print was a higher bar, and ostensibly higher quality on average, than the time and quality of thought I put into writing a quick blog post or vapid tweet. Very much so. It took me a long time to figure out why I could never get into podcasts, and even interviews or talks by authors I respect are boring to me. Writing books takes a lot of work, and they are almost always better organized and more coherent than other forms of information (such as forum comments . . . ). You get more "intellectual nourishment" from books, especially good books.