First, just in time manufacturing has the noted weakness of having no slack or resilience in the system. This is part of why we experienced supply chain disruption during the pandemic.
Second, it is assuming that knowledge that's not being 'used' right now in production environment is useless.
For example, the way people avoid scam and snake-oil medicine is not by directly knowing every single piece of science but having a broad knowledge enough of the world to know that it's probably scammy. I don't need to know much about virology to understand that drinking bleach is probably a bad idea for fighting viral infection.
Third, most of what he's going to read is probably not real knowledge, or difficult to obtain unless experienced or acquired directly. Some things you can only learn via doing. Some things you can only learn through systemized research. How many of these books about entrepeneurship only apply to their specific situation, or specific context? How many are simply scam?
What I think is helpful, however, is to cultivate curiosity about the world, in all things that you can. It's probably helpful to your career if you focus your curiosity on specific things you need to do, but that's not the only thing worth learning. I think I want to focus on things that make me a better engineer and build a successful business, so maybe 60-70% for that, and the rest for play and passion and just love of learning.
Edit: added a missing no as pointed out by someone.
I've only read the first part of the article, but something struck me here:
: Over the next 6 months, I read 30+ books on entrepreneurship, startups, marketing, “growth hacking,” and everything tangentially related I could find. And that doesn’t include the countless blog posts, articles, reddit threads, and whatever else I could get my hands on.
: A good plan, right? No, 80% of it was a waste of time, and most people make the same mistake with how they consume information every day.
Well, yes, because a great deal would be repeated even on tangential subjects as the authors aren't necessarily assuming you've read anything else on the topic.
and here:
: Getting in shape requires doing a few very simple things every day for months, not finding a new 13 minute 6 step workout every day so you can have a butt like today’s hot celebrity.
No, but it may take experimentation and reading to find a routine that works for you.
: You don’t need an entire site on lasting longer in bed or water fasting, you just need one or a couple really good articles.
Again, people vary. Why not cover them all, and the unforeseen events, instead of just outputting what worked in your particular case as if you're everyone?
I think there's even more to unpack, though. Yes, there will be a fair bit of repeated knowledge, but what the 30+ books do is cement your mental map and expose the common agreement and disagreements in the general field. From there, additional work may not be novel because there are a handful of insights and 200 pages of rehash once you have that mental map, but there is no single book developed that can implant that mental map.
And that is true in most fields. It takes seeing multiple perspectives to figure out what will "stick" with you. Tiago Forte's "Building a Second Brain" stuck with me because I had already read "Getting Things Done" and a number of other productivity books. (As but one example.)
: A good plan, right? No, 80% of it was a waste of time, and most people make the same mistake with how they consume information every day.
>Well, yes, because a great deal would be repeated even on tangential subjects as the authors aren't necessarily assuming you've read anything else on the topic.
I also read a lot of these books and I can confirm that 70-80% of the content is unnecessary. It's mostly the author boasting about how great they or their methods are and stories about someone who implemented the method successfully. It seems that every book has to hit 200/300+ pages mark. Most of the content is just filler.
> just in time manufacturing has the noted weakness of having slack or resilience in the system
Did you mean 'having no slack or resilience'?
Assuming you did and I understand your point, I disagree with it insofar as it applies to knowledge. Yes, JIT manufacturing of real things can be easily tripped up and it screwed us during the pandemic, but does that apply here? The author is saying "when you figure out what you need to read, go out and get it" rather than "keep a bunch of tabs and bookmarks hanging around in case you need them".
I mean, yeah, I guess if you only read things you can get from the library or in dead tree form, but if you really want to read something there's ebooks and audiobooks galore out there, and if we have a supply chain mess that's so bad that you can't get an electronic book, we're all kinda screwed anyways.
Assuming you did and I understand your point, I disagree with it insofar as it applies to knowledge. Yes, JIT manufacturing of real things can be easily tripped up and it screwed us during the pandemic, but does that apply here? The author is saying "when you figure out what you need to read, go out and get it" rather than "keep a bunch of tabs and bookmarks hanging around in case you need them".
I am an advocate of learning broadly, instead of being narrow. That's not to say you shouldn't learn only the things you found that you need, but that it shouldn't be the only thing you're doing.
Books, I assumed, will be there if you need it.
The just in time example is a great example of why you need to read broadly. If you read about logistics about the pandemic, you would have learned about the weakness of just in time.
To anyone entering a new topic for themselves, not knowing what you don’t know is the biggest barrier and risk. This is why, for example, cargo cult style development is so fraught with issues.
> Over the next 6 months, I read 30+ books on entrepreneurship, startups, marketing, “growth hacking,” and everything tangentially related I could find. And that doesn’t include the countless blog posts, articles, reddit threads, and whatever else I could get my hands on.
Self-help books in general (and entrepreneur porn books in particular) are notoriously thin on substance. It's no wonder that most of this was a waste of time. It's like saying that eating is a waste of time because once I ate nothing but peanut m&ms for a whole month and found that most of the calories were unnecessary for survival.
Most of these self-help books are made because publishers can sell them, mostly on the name of the author.
At the same time, most authors could condense their “insights” into a 3-4 page article. The issue is publishing a 4 page article is not profitable, there’s too much fixed cost, and too little market price to absorb it.
The logical result is publishers that insist that a book must be extended to ~300 pages to be really profitable, and authors that pad their books with cherry-picked examples, anecdotes, “case studies”, and whatever else they can to get the book published.
I wonder if ebooks would help with length of books. There are short stories, to novellas, to novels on Amazon for fiction. Novels are definitely more popular partly people complain about the value of shorter fiction.
Self-help books could try having shorter ebooks. They would have to forgo printed copies since pamphlets don't work in the store.
You're right, most nonfiction books read like they are just adding fluff to justify a full book. I normally just their summaries on Littler Books or something.
Read “infomania” as insomnia and skimmed the whole damn thing (or 80% if it) before figuring out this didn’t have the cure for insomnia (unless it’s caused by infomania, which is plausible).
Consistent sleep schedule (+/- 15 minutes morning and evening)
Get your room cool, dark, and quiet
No caffeine after morning. No alcohol in the evening. Cleanup your diet.
Quiet your mind. This isn't just an "at night" thing. In my experience people who lose sleep worrying are the same people worrying all day. Try therapy as needed.
Screen time hasn't really impacted my sleep, but I don't have any social apps on my phone, period. Listening to a podcast or reading (on the phone, with "night mode") never seemed to be an issue.
Exercise regularly, whenever works for you. Moderate/Zone 2 is a good place to start.
What worked for me was having two part time jobs and college at the same time in my 20s. Prior to that I had occasional difficulty with insomnia. After almost 6 months averaging 3.5 hours of sleep per day (except Sundays) I've only rarely had difficulty sleeping since, and am now in my 40s.
Does reading have to be "productive" in order to be worthwhile? I would argue that reading is an enjoyable activity regardless of whether there are any tangible benefits. Similar to how it's enjoyable to go on a meandering walk. Even though there are more efficient forms of cardio and you could get to where your going faster by driving, that doesn't keep the activity from being enjoyable in and of itself.
I've probably forgotten 95% of everything I've ever read. But I certainly don't feel like all that time was wasted.
As a dyslexic person, I can assure you that reading is not a universally enjoyable activity. You should enjoy your gifts, though. I do enjoy a good walk.
I was nodding along right until the rule… it allows for “entertainment” as part of your informational consumption. That’s a bit strange to me as I’d classify all of my “just in case” reading as entertainment.
Yeah, at one point the person talks about staying power and says "Are we going to be reading Aristotle in 2000 years? Probably." and then follows by comparing to some pop culture thing but I felt it would've been both factual and prudent to say "Will anyone be reading my blog in 2000 years? Probably not."
It's not even rude it's just reality. This post is 1 in a billion and it isn't written very well nor does it really give you anything new. Putting it up next to historical philosophy it's definitely the potato chip of blog posts.
I've been struggling to read nonfiction lately because so much of the content seems to be rehashed from other sources and leans heavily into persuasion of some greater point that gets bashed into your brain for 400 pages. It's like every book copied Malcolm Gladwell's style and it's too much for me. Am I just reading the wrong books?
Something by, say, Stephen Walt. Or autobiographies.
The trouble with nonfiction is that the really informative stuff tends to be radical or dry or otherwise challenging to read, which makes it unpopular compared to the vibes-based stuff that will end up on Obama's and Gates' annual lists.
I snagged a cheap bench press and squat rack and a huge set of weights on Craigslist. I decided I would get back into a basic lifting routine I did in high school and asked some friends who do that. I quickly was engulfed with endless articles and information.
I have decided to eschew any learning and stick with "Me big caveman. lift big rock get stronger" approach and it's working fine. Taking it easy, enjoying it, and not worrying too much about anything else.
It's more refreshing to REFUSE information than to consume it.
"Thats a whole lotta words, to bad I ain't reading them"
> It's more refreshing to REFUSE information than to consume it.
I did something similar when I was powerlifting. Basics worked very well. I'm also doing the same thing as I learn jiu-jitsu. There's so much crazy stuff on social, but much of it is for show. And, to get good at something takes time. If someone is trying a new move every week they are never really getting good at anything.
I read a lot like for instance on this website and some nonfiction literature but I stay away from the news and mainstream media, so I'm usually quite out of the loop and I like it here.
Now, I'm certain that this article is about frustration at self-improvement/fitness buzz-feed "listicles" and the author may have had a passing glance about Deming's Management Cycle and connected these two ideas. Good for him, it's this kind of creative thinking that I want to talk about.
Though there are several reasons to agree and disagree with the author, the thing that's been left out of the comments so far is that: making connections between ideas is absolutely essential. It's not that I strictly need to know the things I know, but the ability to draw on a variety of mental resources from a variety of fields is what makes me useful and exceptional at my job.
Given that the author readily admits to only having interned at a major company once and is now looking to start their own business is the big giveaway that they lack the life experience to be able to apricate the difference between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. This is not shocking, most young folks are eager to rise up in the world and are sick of school, but, if I could give some unsolicited advice: keep learning. When you stop moving, you'll notice that the world stops moving around you too.
It's the ability to draw connections between unrelated ideas that makes creativity and innovation possible. If you only have a few ideas in your head, then you are absolutely impairing your ability to think. Similarly, if you become too fixated on, well, anything... than you're going to miss the big picture. Outsourcing your mind to Teh Internets reduces your mind to only that which can be google'd, and even if that's acceptable to you than you still have to know what to put into that search-box.
It's a balance. If you only read what you think you should read, you're exposed to "you don't know what you don't know"-effect. If all you do is read stuff (an albeit fun activity), you risk not doing much with the knowledge you acquired.
If you feel like 80% of what you read is a waste of time, just, erm, don't do it.
In a lot of cases you can get what you don't know by doing a consultation with an expert/specialist. The older I've got the more I value such consultations, maybe because I also have more money to dish out.
So if you have a project, then first consult with different people, I would also consider that "just in time".
Reminds me of my own approach of RINORIN (read it now or read it never) which I've written about on HN before and led me to cancel all my RIL app subscriptions and create https://notado.app for my own personal needs instead.
I leave up articles for days hoping I'll read them, they pile up in my tabs— wasting so much memory. A lot of pc memory is wasted from just this on my end and I know I'm not the only one.
It's interesting to think about how much wasted energy comes from tabs you're leaving open, hoping you'll get back to them one day.
Use the Onetab extension. Click the button and it stuffs all tabs into a big list, which you can go back to (ha! yeah right) or export to a text file that let's you ignore it for the rest of time without triggering the anxiety of having to decide to throw away information.
I currently have 45 tabs open, and for me, that's a really good, low number. My record is - no kidding - 1000 tabs. Kudos Firefox! I still have the tab stash saved on my hard drive. It's 470kb in size. A lot of research on renewable energy and nuclear power. I couldn't process all the information for a paper and still feel like I haven't found the most valuable ones again.
I can still remember when having more than one window in the browser was first possible and how cool we all thought it was.
"Tab hell" is hell on earth. It also makes you mentally ill.
Then, if you're like me, at some point your browser runs out of space for tabs and you end up having to randomly close a bunch of tabs to reclaim. So you just indiscriminately close things and realize you won't miss them and you should've probably just not opened them to begin with.
Agree on the idea of 'infomania' that overtakes us at certain times. But everything requires balance; read too much and you spend too little time thinking and building a base of experience doing. Not a great way to get knowledge OR wisdom. To understand things you have spending time cultivating your own understanding, and that involves writing and doing.
The biggest issue with leaning into just in time reading is you absolutely miss out on knowing whether to pay attention to something.
I completely disagree with the article’s core premise. I have read voraciously for my entire life since I was a little kid. Maybe much of it wasted, yet tidbits of knowledge I have gained over the years of reading come up constantly, and give me a bit of a leg up in conversations.
HN is a big part of that, I can read about a wide array of technologies and processes and science that I normally would never encounter. And without fail, some number of those topics will come up in work conversations and I can speak somewhat intelligently on the topic.
The same is true even for fiction. Having read some semi-obscure book long ago may be a connection I have with a new acquaintance.
Again, a lot of it is wasted, it there’s no way to know exactly which bits will never come up, and which will.
The articles point is that this time spent has a horrible roi, which I tend to agree with. You should acknowledge that time spent on Hacker News is entertainment, not education. If you really want to get better at something you should just do it. Only place I disagree is that I think studying one or two good books on a topic can give you a good foundation to start on. Like, if you have no experience with starting a business, maybe something like "Small Business for Dummies" just to get started would be a good idea. Def not 30 meme books and blogs.
I am a technology consultant with mid sized global consulting services firm. Reading Hacker News is both entertainment and professional research. I get tremendous hands on insight into technology that directly informs my own thinking on various technologies, and have served as a great early warning system of “here there be dragons” in various products.
It sounds like you may have just read the title. The article seems to be specifically about the tendency to use information seeking as a means of procrastination.
> "Anything you could possibly want to learn you could figure out the basics of in an afternoon with a WiFi connection. You don’t have to worry about front loading everything because you’ll hardly ever be in a situation where you can’t look up the answers."
Once you get past the educational phase, in which teachers present you with problems to which they have answers written down somewhere, you enter the real-world phase, in which you have to come up with and test the solutions yourself, as nobody has them written down anywhere. That's when already having a working knowledge of similar problems and situations will be of great benefit, particularly time-wise.
I buy the author's point that we should minimize the time on tactical knowledge, but the following particular point seems over generalized:
> The school model focuses on just in case knowledge.
Take my math education, for instance, I may have wasted a bit time on all kinds of trigonometry tricks and way too much time on conic sections in the analytic geometry classes before learning calculus. But "focuses on just in case knowledge"? Really? What else is really wasted? Most of my math concepts are inter-connected and I used them directly or indirectly on a daily basis. Given range and depth of our education, we really just learn the minimum concepts.
I'm pretty sure 95% - 99% of my school education was useless. Most of it went from one ear to the other as well, because I had no interest in something I couldn't apply.
If I needed to do something I was much more effective when I learnt "just in time".
But I had no problems building a web/full stack application when I was 13, despite nothing really preparing me for it.
For most things especially in times today, all you have to do is Google and/or combine Google with GPT.
I've learned much more coding and actual real life problem solving than I learned in school, because it's much more stimulating as an exercise.
I'm not sure why people find studying fundamentals in school useless. And I don't think ChatGPT is the answer to in-depth learning. My experience is that it is the fundamentals that are the most valuable that a college can give to its students. A smart person can learn anything on her own, but for an ordinary student like me, what school teaches is invaluable as it is so hard to learn such fundamentals on my own. A few examples in my line of work:
- Systems. Yes, you can read papers and case studies and what not. But it will not be easy for one to even tell which part of a paper is the essence, which paragraph needs deep dive, or which claim needs close examination. In a seminar, a professor will work with students to critique papers, to cross examine multiple systems on related ideas, to deeply understand the theoretical bounds and the practical implications, and etc. That kind of experience is just not easily available in other places. Besides, it's just miles easier for someone to tech Lynch's book on distributed algorithms, for instance, with properly designed hand-outs and homework than reading the tomb by oneself. Similarly, it's not that easy to grasp the idea of program analysis if one wants to get in the trench of writing a compiler backend. I got seriously confused in an introduction course on program analysis for all the concepts about lattices, partial orders, abstract interpretations and etc. It's hard to imagine that I'd have the same access or even energy to study such stuff out of school.
- High-dimensional stats and probabilities. Again, I'm sure a brilliant student can teach herself, but man, even finding the right accessible material can be hard, let alone digest the fundamental ideas and concepts in such readings without the help of my professors and classmates.
- Math, all kinds of math. I'm not sure about you, but math matters in software development. Understanding temporal logic and mathematical logic in general makes doing formal verification much easier. Understanding probability and queuing theory enables me to test and diagnose my systems at a whole new level. Understanding combinatorics makes it really easy to learn data structures and algorithms rigorously. Understanding formal reasoning in general makes it easy to follow the books and papers on distributed algorithms. Linear algebra and numerical optimization and calculus are also important but hard to learn by oneself if a person wants to tap into ML sys.
The bottom line is, fundamentals expand one's conceptual depth and breadth, as well as the ability to abstract and to dive deep, which in turn gives a person more choices. I didn't start as a system engineer, nor did I know that I would work on internals of ML algorithms. But when opportunities called, I could jump on it. And in the meantime, I regretted that I didn't learn more fundamentals when I could, which made it hard for me to dive to the desired levels.
Besides, even the fun of studying STEM topics is hard to get outside of school. I'm sure one can read about physics and chemistry and what not, but man, having labs and professors who can give you guidance... That makes a whole world of difference.
> And I don't think ChatGPT is the answer to in-depth learning.
I think ChatGPT is perfect for learning. Specifically because if you don't get something, you can keep asking it infinitely without worrying about seeming stupid. You could never do something like that in a classroom. Perhaps you could do it if your parents hired a special tutor with infinite patience for you.
In school my main issue was - my mind wandered for a moment - and now I'm all out of sync and without context. Everything from that point on is just a complete waste of time. And this happened every few minutes, so it's impossible to learn something in school.
> Math, all kinds of math. I'm not sure about you, but math matters in software development.
This is something that I largely disagree with. 99% of common software development doesn't rely on math at all. Or any knowledge of math. And I enjoy maths. Math was my favourite subject in school. Most I've touched maths is if I have tried to do game development or some sort of simulation software for my side projects, but everyday professional work - I have really never needed math beyond the simplest.
> Understanding temporal logic and mathematical logic in general makes doing formal verification much easier.
I think this type of logic is completely unrelated to what is being taught at school which is rote learning of formulas and NOT problem solving. What is being taught at schools is not true problem solving.
> The bottom line is, fundamentals expand one's conceptual depth and breadth, as well as the ability to abstract and to dive deep, which in turn gives a person more choices. I didn't start as a system engineer, nor did I know that I would work on internals of ML algorithms.
I see, if you are working more on that side, it may be true, that you are using more maths there - I've been doing mostly common full stack development, which really just doesn't require maths. While I've tried different ML things, which haven't really required maths at all, I assume you might need maths if you are developing some cutting edge algorithms. But usual ML that I have tried seems to be mostly about trial and error to find the correct parameters intuitively.
> Besides, even the fun of studying STEM topics is hard to get outside of school. I'm sure one can read about physics and chemistry and what not, but man, having labs and professors who can give you guidance... That makes a whole world of difference.
I've found it more fun outside school without the forced pressures and with natural interest...
I usually get stuck on "trust whatever it says". Maybe I'm wrong, but I find myself unable to get over the hump of trust in generated text at all. I shudder to think of the coming decades when a large portion of available information online is created from such systems.
I think there's a substantial difference between "Hey ChatGPT, could you explain Maxwell's Equations" and reading Jackson's textbook and solving the problem sets on the book.
If you have read anything about logistics in the last few year, you would have realized that shifting everything to a just in time logistics is probably a bad idea in case of disruption. It's a spectrum, and it shows by analogy why you want a broad range of knowledge, not just hyper focused on your career.
There's a fundamental challenge in simply not knowing at the reading point in time whether this knowledge will be valuable in the future.
The reason read-it-later apps exist is because we want to buy the insurance policy that IF there is a future situation in which the information is useful, we have it saved somewhere to access it.
The reality is, even if you have saved it at some point, there's no guarantee you'll be able to remember the knowledge when you need it.
This is precisely the problem I'm building a solution for.
Yeah, I generally disagree with this article. I stumbled upon HN in my mid-20s and I absorbed a _lot_ of industry knowledge by osmosis through reading it. I can say confidently that I'd be working a much less interesting job, living someplace much more milquetoast, and making way less money than I do now if I'd followed the advice in the article. Sometimes you need to go out on a limb to see what you're missing.
> When you have a specific question (e.g. how do I grow my Instagram following) that’s when you start digging through the blogs and industry material.
The problem with this is that having information that you don't necessarily need can actually help inspire you and increase creativity. If you always rely on having a specific question first, then you are limiting what you are exposed to. Not necessarily bad, but not good for more open-ended work.
I think the 80% number is accurate. Especially due to the fact that every "author" thinks they have to start everything with some unrelatable personal story or something. How many times have you clicked on a recipe and had to scroll through 8 paragraphs of garbage about the author's childhood to get to the recipe?
"If it doesn’t answer a specific question you’re currently asking, then don’t read it."
I almost never read for entertainment. Audiobooks are better because I can multi-task. And most everything could be considered "philosophical knowledge", so it doesn't filter stuff.
Of course, the rule doesn't apply to HackerNews ;)
It is interesting that an article about the uselessness of reading (of certain books/articles) leads to wasting more time discussing exactly how useless certain books/articles are.
It happens frequently across contexts.
It's interesting to consider that being 'well read' may always be a function of, say, the last 10 books you read (or the number of books your read in the last 3 years, or something like that).
That would be more about philosophical knowledge, not tactical knowledge ?? And on its face, seems to be wrong, care to expand ? (And even some of the greatest fiction might apply here, not only nonfiction, not sure if you were considering that too ?)
Well what I mean is that eventually one forgets most of what was in a book, and all you remember was whether the book was particularly good. I’m thinking more about literature. So who is better read, the professor who read all of Shakespeare, but thirty years ago, or the student who has only read a couple of plays, but recently, and in depth, and can talk about them fluently and connect the to other works they recently read in depth?
Speaking for myself, there are several dozen books that I've read several times, and a few with double digit numbers. It's not just a function of that, of course, but also how memorable the book is to you... but it's certainly possible to remember a book so well that even thirty years later you can still do a coherent retelling of it.
First, just in time manufacturing has the noted weakness of having no slack or resilience in the system. This is part of why we experienced supply chain disruption during the pandemic.
Second, it is assuming that knowledge that's not being 'used' right now in production environment is useless.
For example, the way people avoid scam and snake-oil medicine is not by directly knowing every single piece of science but having a broad knowledge enough of the world to know that it's probably scammy. I don't need to know much about virology to understand that drinking bleach is probably a bad idea for fighting viral infection.
Third, most of what he's going to read is probably not real knowledge, or difficult to obtain unless experienced or acquired directly. Some things you can only learn via doing. Some things you can only learn through systemized research. How many of these books about entrepeneurship only apply to their specific situation, or specific context? How many are simply scam?
What I think is helpful, however, is to cultivate curiosity about the world, in all things that you can. It's probably helpful to your career if you focus your curiosity on specific things you need to do, but that's not the only thing worth learning. I think I want to focus on things that make me a better engineer and build a successful business, so maybe 60-70% for that, and the rest for play and passion and just love of learning.
Edit: added a missing no as pointed out by someone.