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What counts as 'reading books'? Textbooks? Self help guides? Tourist guides? Comics? The protocols of the Elders of Zion? It's not all Dostoyevsky and Kant. My
by t_mann 5y ago
What counts as 'reading books'? Textbooks? Self help guides? Tourist guides? Comics? The protocols of the Elders of Zion? It's not all Dostoyevsky and Kant.
My hinge: you just divided your friends arbitrarily into 'blue-pilled' and 'red-pilled' and used some metric (probably observed with errors) to make one group look better.
- infamouscow 5y agoThey've been divided into those with ampliative knowledge and those lacking it.
- lhorie 5y agoYeah, as a rule of thumb for rationality, if you only have two buckets, you haven't thought about the topic critically enough. For books, there's a fairly simple explanation for a mental divide: elitism. Maybe you correlate ability to memorize trivia (which tends to be plentiful in books trying to illustrate some overarching point) with "culturedness". Or maybe the correlation comes from name dropping prolific authors (common in humanities, because certain authors "represent" certain schools of thought). Etc. In my personal experience, the book reading anecdote doesn't really hold because a lot of people I know simply have complex backgrounds (e.g. living large portions of their lives in two or more different countries) and that alone can bring a lot of color to discussions.
- uoaei 5y agoAs a rule of thumb for rationality, buckets are mental models -- tools -- and can be treated as such. Drawing a dichotomy, while incomplete, can be useful given the balance between accuracy and parsimony.
- plaguepilled 5y agoThis is not rationality, this extrapolation on your part. It would be more rational to have requested sources, or provide your own.