1) There is a very strong relationship between the length of time it takes to compose something and its 'value'. [0] That shouldn't be a surprise. Twitter is on one end of that spectrum, books are on the other.
2) The range of value is far wider than people can conceive of. I know this fact yet in my tiny human mind I can't conceive of the entire breadth of that spectrum, and I inevitably lose perspective and get wrapped up in my what I'm currently reading.
3) The highest value content , addressing the same topic as lower value content, has entirely different things to say, different questions to ask, different (i.e., real) knowledge. When I read it (I tend to forget otherwise; see #2), I am reminded that the lower value content - and I mean 99% of what's out there - is bad information; it either addresses the wrong questions, is based on the wrong knowledge, or is flat out ignorant and/or deceitful.
EDIT: 3.5) High value content is far more efficient and rewarding: One good high-value book saves you far more time sifting through 99% of the rest. Also, the pleasure and reward of interacting with humanities geniuses through their words far exceeds that of reading hyperbolic tweets by the 99.9999% who have far less talent and knowledge (not excluding myself). Finally, you absorb some of the habits of what you read; read the best and you absorb the best - great writing, high standards, clear thinking, etc.
4) There exists is far more of the highest value content than I have time to read in my life.
So why read anything else?
....
[0] Value: For lack of a better term, I'll use value: It can include anything from directly applicable information to deep knowledge to artistic beauty.
An excellent comment and thread (particularly your reply below). I can only add:
I've been reading books -- lots of books, some recent, many not. Most not what you'll find on the shelves of your local bookstore (if you're lucky enough to have one) or even at a reasonably well-stocked library, but books I've specifically sought out, often through references in other books.
Libraries have been useful, inter-library loan even more so. But most especially, it's been services, some not fully above-board, though others are, which provide direct access to material, often only of limited availability. In the case of The Internet Archive, these can include a great many public-domain works. For any materials published after the copyright blackout year of 1924 -- and a great deal of what I'm interested in falls betwen 1924 and 1958, which is to say, is material which under the copyright laws extant at the time would now be public domain -- Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are tremendously useful. The ability to carry around what amounts to a considerable library in my hand is also quite powerful (though the tools for organising, managing, accessing, and annotating such a library on Android are entirely insufficient).
But yes: read books. Real books. Good books. Get the fuck off the Web and away from the idiots. Myself included.
Yes, it's hard. Yes, I struggle with that all the time (and rather particularly over the past few weeks what with a Recent Very Bad Collective Decision).
A book, a book worth writing, a book well-considered, well-conceived, well-planned, well-researched, and well-written, is an absolute gem. This is not an obsolete data format by any means.
What you say sounds intriguing. Do you have any examples of the wide gap between high-value content vs. low-value mentioned in 3? Any pointers to high-value content since you mention there is much?
I have many ideas on this subject; I'm going to spend more time writing this than editing it, but I'll try to structure it so it's easier to skim ... I hope it's helpful and not too long!
> any examples of the wide gap between high-value content vs. low-value
A few spring to mind:
* Science: Compare IPCC reports with almost any discussion on climate change. If you take the time to read just the IPCC 'summary reports for policy makers', you quickly learn that almost all popular discussion of it is nonsense - the wrong questions based on wrong information, like discussing the quality of ice fishing in the Sahara - a waste of your time and worse, misinformation. A related example: Publications such as Nature and Science are so different than popular coverage of science, it's as if they are covering a different field of human knowledge.
* International relations (i.e., foreign policy, etc.): I've taken the time to find the expert publications and, as in other fields, you quickly realize that they are a goldmine of knowledge and almost everything else - even 'experts' writing editorials in the NYT or WSJ - is ignorant and/or deceitful. The non-partisan think tanks are very good: Brookings, Carnegie Endowment, CSIS, the Lowy Institute in Australia is great and a different perspective ... I have a much longer list if you re interested, and I next mean to look into the leading academic publications.
* Think of a field you have deep expertise in; do outsiders really have a clue? For example, IT security: Even IT pros on HN have large blind spots and most of the public is clueless. The language spoken by IT security experts, the questions asked, the solutions, are very different than what everyone else says. You need to read the right books, not just any book, to gain real knowledge.
* Next time you need to research something, look at the usual sources via Google web search, then look at scholarly publications (e.g., via Google Scholar). IME, often the former seems valuable and persuasive until I read the latter, and then the popular stuff seems frighteningly misinformed.
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> Any pointers to high-value content since you mention there is much?
Of course it depends on the field you are interested in; there is far more to read in any field than you have time for, unless you want a masters degree in it. There are more great works of literature than we have time to read; why read anything less? (There are reasons, but you get my point.) Examples:
* In the last few years I decided to read Confucius' Analects, an obvious example of a high-value book - why read about it and about Chinese culture when I can just read the Master himself? - but which translation? Great writers are subtle and likely have a breadth and depth of ideas far beyond their translator's grasp (unless their translator also is a genius and expert in the same field). Amazon reviewers seemed persuasive and helpful - until I turned to journal articles by experts in the field. Then I learned once and for all that Amazon reviewers often sound good but have no clue; the Amazon reviews turned out to almost all useless or worse - I almost believed them.
* I'm reading The Inferno by Dante now (translated by John Sinclair, as recommended by a professor in the field). It's one of the most beautiful, moving, exceptional works of art I've ever encountered. It's a loss to the world that anyone doesn't get to see what I see.
* I recently bought the Koran (after researching translations). A billion people are talking about Islam; hardly any have a clue about what they are saying - they just repeat low-value information. Rather than spending hours reading all that, I'll spend it on one high value book and know far, far more. And I'll also need to find a high-value book, maybe sociology, on how Islam actually is understood and practiced today.
(Certainly not all high-value works are 'classic' books like the Analects, Inferno, or Koran, though consider that there are thousands of years of writing by smart people to mine; if you picked the best of each century you'd have a lot of reading to do.)
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A few tips based on my experience (low-value info, but I've never seen anything good on the subject!):
* Much of the high value stuff can be intimidating, has bad associations (from when you were forced to read it in school before you were ready) or has a status that overwhelms the ability to see it for the flawed, human genius that it is. Get by those issues, form your own opinion with fresh eyes, and you usually discover that, hey, this is flawed but is indeed absolutely brilliant and wonderful. Much is a great pleasure to read (see Dante, above) - extremely talented people tend to master writing well too, and there is a reason so many love it. Some is indeed dry and much of it is challenging - but I've become more accustomed to that and find low-value stuff often lacks the richness, depth and brilliance I've come to expect.
* Follow your nose; be opportunistic; keep asking questions about the world: When I'm asking the questions that the book also asks or addresses, that's a good time to start reading it. Also, my instincts about what I'm interested in also are a good guide to what I'm ready for; or if a work angers me then usually that's because it's challenging me and I really need to read it. If I don't grasp some art-form or artist, I keep my eyes open for when it suddenly resonates and then read/watch/etc. I get much less out of randomly chosen books, no matter how brilliant.
* Unless you are superhuman, low-value stuff can be very persuasive without high-value stuff to compare it to (see my Confucius example, above). Humans just have very limited ability to see through nonsense. If you've never been to Fiji, how could you tell if someone is giving you good or bad information about it?
* Try not to settle for less than the best: Knowledge based on research and above all, expertise; art from the true geniuses. Unless you are diving deep, the settled knowledge of a field is the best starting place - imperfect like all human knowledge, but far better than the alternatives. Amateurs, even smart, studied ones, have gaping blind spots. The high-value experts aren't gods, but when I approach them with healthy skepticism I find I appreciate them even more: They often turn out to be real people who achieved true genius and who created amazing works of art and knowledge.
* Most people have developed the skills and resources to quickly find and evaluate low-value information, such as using Google web search and knowing Quora from Reddit from StackExchange. You'll need to develop the skills and resources for high-value stuff (see below) but once you do using them becomes far more efficient.
* The best resources on general topics that I've found (I'm still a bit of a novice myself): Google Scholar, JSTOR (if you can get access; it usually requires privileges at a university library), and most valuable in their way, reference specialists at university (not public) libraries (for example, there may be a Russian history reference specialist): They can immediately tell you which book or paper is the leader in its field, its strengths and weaknesses, etc., and can distinguish between books that are fringe ideas, experts' advocacy of their pet hypotheses, and settled knowledge. Most will help the public but you need to respect their time: Do your homework, carefully prepare your question, be patient, and don't expect many followups.
I have another example of this sort of thing that I came across recently.
There is much talk here in New Zealand, as there is in the US, about the possibility of a Universal Basic Income.
Looking it up, I found a relatively short investigation into the idea commissioned by the government back in 2010[1], that has more real statistics and conclusions than all the other talk I've ever seen put together.
What you call "high-value" writing still, of course, has the possibility of errors, bias, etc. But man is it still more informative to read than everything else.
Of course the punishment for reading this stuff is the pain of living in a world full of people commenting who "didn't read the article." :p
This sort of thing pops up everywhere, I'm glad you pointed it out in words here because it's made me think about it a bit more clearly myself.
For instance you get programming threads where people will spend pages arguing about whether something is more efficient than something else, hours of their time, before someone finally spends five minutes running an actual benchmark.
One further thing I do with regards to Google Scholar: I add the term "(intitle:review OR intitle:summary)" and that offers only reviews , which are a good way to understand the key things about a field ,what's established and not , etc.
And if I'm interested in medical research , I go into pubmed , they have something called "clinical queries" which offers only reviews and the like, which is even more important in medicine, because of the statistical nature of knowledge there, and complexity of experimentation.
Btw, you gave good tips on how to find high quality knowledge, but probably there's more on that subject. Is there some source that teaches that ?
Great post - and very accurate, if a bit black on white on the difference between low/high value content. Why do you think it is that 'low' value content is so prevalent - and we fail to refer to refer to actually high value content?
Do you think a service like a distilled wikipedia would be value - which would aggregate indisputable facts about the world around us. Both the IPCC reports on climate change and the Koran are very high value sources of information, and even offer summarized versions and lessons... yet people still don't refer to them whatsoever. Personally, it makes everyday conversation very frustrating as people continually fail to ground their stances in any semblance of fact or reality - and don't even begin to make an effort to do so.
I also currently resort to 'doing my homework' for researching these issues, but it seems like there has to be an easier way in a landscape with wikipedia, thousands of fact checking services, and access to high quality information in the form of reports academia that fails to materialize in conversation, policy, and isn't even aggregated if you aren't determined or an expert.
Thanks. I feel like I rambled on far too long, but I'm very glad if it's helpful to anyone.
> a bit black on white on the difference between low/high value content
Agreed. I was simplifying - it was long enough as is! And it is already so speculative (it's almost embarrassing - ironically low-value) that I would hesitate to try to add nuance.
> Why do you think it is that 'low' value content is so prevalent - and we fail to refer to refer to actually high value content?
My personal hypotheses:
1) Few people care enough about the world to even consider making an effort to be better informed
2) Of those who care, few even consider that low-value content is so unreliable and high-value content exists (as I said in #2 in my original post)
3) Of those who care and know what they are missing, few want to make an effort to find and read the high-value content. People are lazy (me too!)
4) The low-value content establishes the norms: People read it and believe it, and therefore anything that contradicts it - especially from a whole different perspective - seems wrong, ridiculous, and at best challenges their worldview - not something many people will accept. If everyone thinks the Sun orbits the Earth, the person telling the truth is ridiculed.
> Do you think a service like a distilled wikipedia would be value
Absolutely, but it takes time and skilled labor. I've often thought about how to get the high-value content into the public conversation.
But there are good online resources: Try Encyclopedia Britannica, for example. It's what you describe, though necessarily smaller than Wikipedia.
Of course it depends on your current level of knowledge and your goals.
I'd look at syllabi for IT security courses from leading schools as a start, or maybe ask a specialist reference librarian at a college or university (after researching the question on your own). There may be a widely accepted IT Security 101 textbook.
If you really want to be a professional computer security expert, you'll need to take courses from experts - the novice lacks the context to interpret the books, to understand them in context (e.g., 'this is one side of a long-running argument'), or to know what gaps they leave (e.g., 'there's a newer theory on this issue', 'this omits a whole field of knowledge', etc.) and to fill them. And you'll need real world experience, of course; learn from and make connections with the best people you can.
Thanks! I'm actually an old-time geek and IETF person, and do some work on security, but would like to get some better grounding. I sometimes find that other security people in the IETF have what appear to me to be naive views on things like usability, and seem to be making the wrong tradeoffs because of that, but they are "better educated" than I am, so figuring out how to become more educated myself is a priority.
1) There is a very strong relationship between the length of time it takes to compose something and its 'value'. [0] That shouldn't be a surprise. Twitter is on one end of that spectrum, books are on the other.
2) The range of value is far wider than people can conceive of. I know this fact yet in my tiny human mind I can't conceive of the entire breadth of that spectrum, and I inevitably lose perspective and get wrapped up in my what I'm currently reading.
3) The highest value content , addressing the same topic as lower value content, has entirely different things to say, different questions to ask, different (i.e., real) knowledge. When I read it (I tend to forget otherwise; see #2), I am reminded that the lower value content - and I mean 99% of what's out there - is bad information; it either addresses the wrong questions, is based on the wrong knowledge, or is flat out ignorant and/or deceitful.
EDIT: 3.5) High value content is far more efficient and rewarding: One good high-value book saves you far more time sifting through 99% of the rest. Also, the pleasure and reward of interacting with humanities geniuses through their words far exceeds that of reading hyperbolic tweets by the 99.9999% who have far less talent and knowledge (not excluding myself). Finally, you absorb some of the habits of what you read; read the best and you absorb the best - great writing, high standards, clear thinking, etc.
4) There exists is far more of the highest value content than I have time to read in my life.
So why read anything else?
....
[0] Value: For lack of a better term, I'll use value: It can include anything from directly applicable information to deep knowledge to artistic beauty.