2 ms·

Nowadays, reading is mostly a meditative exercise for me. I'm not an "infovore" so I don't care about the velocity of ideas entering my head. Otherwise why not

Nowadays, reading is mostly a meditative exercise for me. I'm not an "infovore" so I don't care about the velocity of ideas entering my head. Otherwise why not just go on Blinkist and read (or better yet listen to) book summaries. I also get the sense that the 300-page book that takes a week to read probably sinks into my brain better than a 100-pager; perhaps for the simple fact that the 300-pager takes longer to finish so I wrestle with the ideas for longer. That being said, I do appreciate concisely written books. I wonder if our preference for shorter, more succinct writings is an inevitable outcome of the information age. So much data enter our eyeballs every day. Maybe we just have less tolerance for "fluff" compared to our ancestors. Older writings tend to be much "wordier". One example that comes to mind is the Einstein quote about simplicity from 1933: "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience". I prefer the condensed version: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".

sharmi 2y ago
I think problem is not as much as wordier sentences as sentences devoid of meaning or the same stuff repeated too many times to fill a 300 page book. I still prefer the original version of the classics to abridged versions.
Unearned5161 2y ago
Yes! I have a completely unfounded theory that sounds right to my gut that basically all that matters is time and focus. If you want to learn something all you need is time and focus, you can't get there with just one of those two, you need both. The night before an exam, I can focus really hard and get a bunch of info crammed into my head, but it's all gone a week later. I haven't tried Blinkist but I struggle to imagine how it's any different. A long books beauty is the path one takes to get to the conclusion the auther arrived at (over a much larger period of time themselves!), the debate, the details, the story, that's where the real "lessons" are. You can't just rip a page out of here and there, read them and call it a day. I mean you can, you just need to be honest with yourself in terms of what you're really doing. There are no shortcuts to learning, you are always trading something away.
- incognito124 2y ago
  You might be interested in Attention Economy: > Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.
cushychicken 2y ago
Blinkist is fabulous for mgmt and idea type books that the author talks about. Those are the ones I think tend to bloat with repetitive idea rehashing.

sharmi 2y ago

I think problem is not as much as wordier sentences as sentences devoid of meaning or the same stuff repeated too many times to fill a 300 page book. I still prefer the original version of the classics to abridged versions.

Unearned5161 2y ago

Yes! I have a completely unfounded theory that sounds right to my gut that basically all that matters is time and focus. If you want to learn something all you need is time and focus, you can't get there with just one of those two, you need both. The night before an exam, I can focus really hard and get a bunch of info crammed into my head, but it's all gone a week later. I haven't tried Blinkist but I struggle to imagine how it's any different. A long books beauty is the path one takes to get to the conclusion the auther arrived at (over a much larger period of time themselves!), the debate, the details, the story, that's where the real "lessons" are. You can't just rip a page out of here and there, read them and call it a day. I mean you can, you just need to be honest with yourself in terms of what you're really doing. There are no shortcuts to learning, you are always trading something away.

incognito124 2y ago
You might be interested in Attention Economy: > Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.

cushychicken 2y ago

Blinkist is fabulous for mgmt and idea type books that the author talks about. Those are the ones I think tend to bloat with repetitive idea rehashing.