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Books Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews be
by eliben 5y ago
Books
Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews before committing to read one.
- baron816 5y agoHow about audiobooks? Had I had the option to listen to audiobooks while I was in school, I would’ve been a much better student. I never read any of the assigned reading when I was in school because I couldn’t keep my focus on the words, but I’m finding myself cruising through about one very long book per month. Most of the books had been non-fiction (social science and history mostly), but more recently I’ve been getting into novels. They’re just so easy to listen to at the gym, or while driving, or while playing video games. For all of you who have kids, please encourage them to listen to audiobooks if they don’t like reading paper books. That is, unless you think it’s a valuable skill to know how to bullshit their way through a paper on a book they haven’t read…
- causi 5y agoAudiobooks are my saving grace when it comes to my daily commute and doing boring chores at home.
- hardlianotion 5y agoAgreed on the commute. I find that, having stopped commuting, I cannot follow an audiobook any more.
- eliben 5y agoA lot of my reading is audiobooks. I love audiobooks - they enabled my reading levels to go way up in the last few years. Some more details about this here: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2020/my-reading-habits/ https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2020/my-reading-habits/
- czottmann 5y agoBy definition, you're not reading. It's called "listening", as in "I listen to a lot of audiobooks".
- wolverine876 5y agoNo question about it. There are more than enough great, great books that we waste our time (if our intention is to learn) reading much else. You don't have time to read them all. Nothing in a blog will compare. More broadly, I find a strong correlation between the amount of time it takes to write something and the value, which shouldn't surprise us: The product of years of study and writing and rewriting should be far superior to the same person's hot take on social media. Books > quarterly journals > monthlies > weeklies > dailies > 24/7 hot takes.
- ismail 5y agoHow do you avoid the problem of low signal to noise ratio? Some books in the popular business press can be reduced to several pages, with the core idea, rationale, and examples. Yet they all end up being longer than needed with tons of exposition.
- WA 5y agoI’m curious too. I’m at the point where I stop reading books of some categories altogether. I read a bunch and they have all the same message. Such books about: - "the economy is shit and we are just waiting for the mega crash" (popular in Germany) - books about sustainability (buy less shit, don’t waste so much) - anti-consumerism (we consume to much stuff, but buy this book) - minimalism (own less stuff) - bootstrapping a software company (find an audience, build a product, release, iterate) - nutrition (eat food, mostly plants, not too much, everything else can’t be properly researched because of long time horizons and an incapability to find causation) - correlation is not causation (and here are one hundred examples, Freakonomics style) - success (all survivorship bias)
- throwaway984393 5y agoJudicious online research will give you a much better signal than any single book will. But the book may engross you in a narrative or walk you through complex topics in stages. Read books because it's fun, not to accomplish a goal.
- harshreality 5y agoGet it from a pirate site (l--g--, zlib----), survey the sections, and skim a few pages. That'll let you know if it's 90% filler or 90% useful content for you. One person's useful content is another person's filler. It depends on how familiar or agreeable you already are with the material or advice in the book, and how difficult a read you're willing to tolerate.
- j7ake 5y agoRead old books that have stood the test of time.
- 5y ago
- pasadenabound 5y agoI’d like there to be a “reader sophistication” metric that works similar to “you may also like” recommendations, e.g., if I look up Gene Wolfe, it gives me sci-fi authors in his vicinity of reading level or greater. I know that some have done this with lexical analysis of the text itself via LSA, but the results produce many false positives (i.e., high proximity).