Still need some solutions: How do you find the absolute gems?
That they exist - of course - is no more helpful than pointing someone to a library of 100 million books and telling them there are some gems in there.
I think people are happy to scroll/browse around. Our time is very limited; if we read the 0.001% 'best' (however defined) material, we'd never come close to finishing. I don't want to spend much time on anything remotely average.
What is "remotely average" to you may be completely exceptional to someone else.
I just finished a book about Andrée de Jongh, a 23 year old Belgium woman who lead the Comet Line, one of the largest escape networks in Europe during WW2 helping return some of the men left behind at Dunkirk and other downed pilots and aircrew.
She personally took ~24 round trips from Brussles, Belgium to Gibralter, Spain thorugh Nazi occupied France. A one-way distance of over 1300 miles, crossing the Pyrenees.
I found the actual book not the best, but the story was amazing. I've since done a deep dive on the Comet Line and more about de Jongh.
Would you have read something like this? What % best would this be to you? I don't think I would be able to find anything similar in a research paper or anything in academia. Its the most interesting thing I've consumed in the last few months.
To answer your main question though:
> How do you find the absolute gems?
I consume a lot, and of those, some are excellent. Some are bad. I wouldn't know though unless I checked myself.
I understand your approach, and I think everyone does that to some extent, and most people do it to a great extent. I try to impose more discipline on my content choices, not always succeessfully. For me, it's paid off very well.
> What is "remotely average" to you may be completely exceptional to someone else.
I think that's taking relativism to a point of paralyzation. While judgments will differ between people, that clearly doesn't make them useless.
> I found the actual book not the best, but the story was amazing. I've since done a deep dive on the Comet Line and more about de Jongh.
IMHO, that curiosity and exploration is the most important thing.
> Would you have read something like this? What % best would this be to you? I don't think I would be able to find anything similar in a research paper or anything in academia. Its the most interesting thing I've consumed in the last few months.
Honestly, I'm tempted by the story, but because you said it wasn't the best, probably not. Also, I work hard to limit my history and biography to serious, scholarly sources: I want to understand and learn as much of the reality of things as possible; we never actually perceive reality, of course, even in front of our noses (or especially then), but I find a lot of popular histories/etc are sensationalized or more biased.
You'd be amazed what you can find in scholarly sources. It's incredibly rich, fertile, beautiful, exciting stuff - if you're the curious type, far more than the popular sources. People just used the tools their habituated to, and those lead to the 'popular' stuff - that was my situation too. Fortunately, I knew I just needed new habits and it would be just as easy.
So here's some tips if you are interested or if anyone is (written assuming no familiarity):
* For browsing books, look at what university presses publish - which includes the pinnicales of the most brilliant people's life works, and which covers all sorts of fantastic ground you hardly know about. You can usually find reviews.
* Also, to learn about something in particular, use Google Scholar to look up research. Start with literature reviews - the expert reviews all that is relevant and presents it to you. From the reader's point of view, it's incredible - they do your homework for you, and they are experts in the field. There are entire review articles (Google Scholar has a filter for them), and the beginning of any scholarly paper has a literature review - just pick a recent one. Then you will know the landscape and can proceed from there.
* To skim a book, etc.; join the Internet Archive's lending library (free, quick signup), Hathi Trust, and Libby (via your local library) - all offer immediate, free checkout of electronic versions of books.
