"Too many books" was apparently a problem already 2000 years ago; here's Seneca advising his friend against it, in his letter-2:
[quote]
Be careful, though, about your reading in many authors and every type of book. It may be that there is something wayward and unstable in it. You must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you. One who is everywhere is nowhere. Those who travel all the time find that they have many places to stay, but no friendships. The same thing necessarily happens to those who do not become intimate with any one author, but let everything rush right through them. [...]
'But I want to read different books at different times,' you say. The person of delicate digestion nibbles at this and that; when the diet is too varied, though, food does not nourish but only upsets the stomach. So read always from authors of proven worth; and if ever you are inclined to turn aside to others, return afterward to the previous ones. Obtain each day some aid against poverty, something against death, and likewise against other calamities. And when you have moved rapidly through many topics, select one to ponder that day and digest. This is what I do as well [...]
This is a sentiment that resonates strongly with me. I've tried to keep up with the latest - whether it's books, movies, or programming libraries - and inevitably, I spread my attention too thin and learn too little about too much.
Now, I've swung the other direction, and begun really dedicating my attention to a narrow set of things in just about every facet of my life.
Fully agree. It's a thoroughly losing game to "try to keep up" on many fronts anyway.
In general, I suggest to embrace "JOMO" (joy of missing out) — a killer feature that helps keep our resting heart-rate remarkably consistent and healthy.
It's been a journey rather than a clearly defined process. Easing back on TV/movies, for example, has been just as much about self-discovery ("what do I actually enjoy?" is a surprisingly difficult question to answer) as it has about choosing what to watch and when.
Fear of missing out has been a struggle, but not as much of one as it used to be. Learning to accept that I won't have context for things others are talking about has been difficult, and sometimes I still feel left out when some friends are gushing about a show I have no interest in watching. On the other hand, being able to have really deep conversations about the specific shows/movies I devote time to is, in my opinion, worth the trade off. It just feels better.
Outside of pop culture it gets more nuanced, but a few things seem universal. I get more satisfaction out of the things I devote time to. I feel less rushed. I feel more confident talking about the subjects I'm familiar with.
Reading "always from authors of proven worth" raises the question of how new authors might come to develop proven worth.
Most, obviously, wont. Some, however, will. Seneca himself was one of them.
But this remains an interesting problem and question:
- How do we assess quality?
- How do we cope with a superfluity of new information?
- What are the costs of failed assessments and promotion (and there will be failures).
- How many 2nd chances should be afforded to those who've betrayed trust, and worse, attention?
- How do we cultivate new and good interpreters and fabricators of the universe we find ourselves in?
I often call this the vetting problem. There's an essay by Arthur C. Clarke in which he discussed "the servant problem, Sri Lankan style", of how to offer (and interpret) letters of recommendation for household help. (The post-script to the essay is both amusing and insightful.) This appeared in one of his essay collections, though I don't recall which one.
It's also a problem in any activity in which agents and agency exist: the principle-agent problem, regulatory capture, corruption, infidelity, betrayal, and the like. Initial assessments are useful but not definitive; ground truths may change and mistaken assessments may prove durable and even potentially valid. Some truths are self-generating ("if you want to have trust, give it", and rather similarly for distrust), some are self-defeating.
Thank you for the essay reference. You raise many excellent points.
I don't have answers to all the nuanced questions you ask, but on evaluating quality: my approach is to research how involved and "invested" the author is on the topic they're talking about. Also, I'll simply read some articles and chunks of paragraphs from their book to get a sense of tone and competency. I realize these are all value judgments of some kind; but it is inescapable.
A journalist writing about "the benefits of neuroscience"? I'll skip it. I'd rather put the likes of Antonio Damasio, Robert Sapolsky, or Michael Gazzaniga—all of whom have spent decades studying cognitive science—under the rubric of "proven worth". Also, their writing is accessible for the non-specialist and specialist reader alike. Note though, this doesn't mean that the journalist's writing doesn't have any value. It simply doesn't meet my bar of quality (again, value judgement).
Another rough rule of thumb is, usually, books from academic presses have better value-to-noise ratio than popular presses. Even this is slowly degrading, with universities having heavy-duty marketing departments to drum up their books.
I'm somewhat hesitant to invest too deeply in a now-stale HN discussion (a site dynamic I ... dislike), but another element I use, and one that addresses TFA's focus, is what I've been calling "BOTI": Best of the interval.
That borrows from a 43 Folders / Ticker File model (or more generally, a round-robin database). The idea is that after a given interval (hour, day, week, month, year, decade ...), you review a list of possible candidates and select which you think are best. Ideally, there's some opportunity to revisit earlier potential candidates, and there should be an option for hidden gems to enter the pile as well --- items originally passed over but on consideration found deserving attention.
That's the basic idea.
In practice, review itself turns out to be difficult, though there are shortcuts. On HN (using Algolia), you can enter a blank time-limited search to return the top submissions of the previous day, week, month, or year. Or specific earlier periods can be constructed (I've posted a shell script that will generate the URLs for this using Algolia's seconds-since-the-epoch timestamps). HN's choices aren't always optimal, but they're OK, and are cheaply accessible.
I'd like to have a number of filters and systems I could tap similarly.
The other element I'd like to include is reputation-grading sources. That is, which consistently turn out high-quality content, and which either don't, are variable, or straight up contribute noise?[1] So sources (authors, editors, translators, other contributors, publishers) accrue a reputation over time, and can see that admusted.
What happens with repeated selection, filtering, and assessment tends to be quite high quality.
That said, there's still far more published in a year (or posted online in a day) than could be read in a lifetime. Roughly 1 million books/year, and 5 billion Facebook items/day.[2] A well-read person likely reads on the order of 10 books per year over the course of their life (some read more, many less).[3]
An interesting question in an age of abundant ... culture / entertainment / literature / drama / documentary ... becomes what constitutes a common cultural heritage or touchstone? Is it ... the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Star Wars? Shakespeare? The Bible, Koran, Torah, Tao Te Ching, or Upanishads? And how criticial is it that there is, or is not one? (I suspect that this was the bigger question that TFA was leaning at but never quite got 'round to.)
My own awareness of my limited capacity to assimilate culture occurred as I walked into my univerity library the first time. Its local phyisical collection then numbered about 5 million volumes (with 15--20 million or so across multiple affiliated campuses), and ... I was never going to access more than a small set of those. What I realised and discovered was that a mix of intentional seach and serendipitous sampling could prove quite rewarding. Some sections of that collection I came to know fairly well, most I utterly ignored.
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Notes:
1. Some noise is tolerable, and none probably means a source isn't trying. But an indifference or insensitivity to error also indicates a source is highly inconsistent, if not outright deceptive. I'm inclined to the view that intentional noise and deception are quite probably worse than no information (especially if the source is aware of how to mask that deception). Dante put liars in the penultimate circle of Hell for a reason.
2. Just for grins: if a typical FB post contains 120 characters of text (I'd found similar results on Google+ a couple of years ago, and Twitter-length posts seem ... frequent), and we have 6 characters per word, then 5 billion items -> 100 billion words. At 500 words/page, that's 200 million pages, and at 250 pages/book, about 800,000 books' worth of content posted to Facebook daily. (How much of that is original or nonduplicate content is another matter, and much of it, likely about 1/3, is predominantly visual w/ images or video). By comparison, "traditional" publishers in the English language were publishing about 300,000 books/year from the 1950s through the 2010s (Bowker, assignee of ISBNs, keeps statistics).
3. At a book a day, from age 10 to 85, or a reading career of 75 years, an ambitious reader might complete just under 28,000 books. Or less than one tenth of one year's traditional publishing output.
Very interesting find which can have one ponder about some ideas on the perspective that nothing is really new, just changing shapes. Even if you consider the advent of AI and us striving to build higher intelligence models to me it all just seems to be stemming from solving problems via abstractions (shortcuts) using evolving frameworks of logic and math. Eventually our interest to automate things and discover all the secret sauce of problem solving got us here. However regarding Seneca you might imagine that a long while ago information retrieval wasn't that efficient and required significant amount of patience and planning which one might argue is being "optimized away" with the technology nowadays. This seems to correspond to how our brain works by optimizing energy expenditure. I remember reading somewhere that such optimization is in principle what causes us to make premature assumptions so that we don't have to do the heavy lifting by thoroughly digesting all the information that is being presented to us which is probably what we can experience in peer interactions or just skimming through those articles and comments daily.
[quote]
Be careful, though, about your reading in many authors and every type of book. It may be that there is something wayward and unstable in it. You must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you. One who is everywhere is nowhere. Those who travel all the time find that they have many places to stay, but no friendships. The same thing necessarily happens to those who do not become intimate with any one author, but let everything rush right through them. [...]
'But I want to read different books at different times,' you say. The person of delicate digestion nibbles at this and that; when the diet is too varied, though, food does not nourish but only upsets the stomach. So read always from authors of proven worth; and if ever you are inclined to turn aside to others, return afterward to the previous ones. Obtain each day some aid against poverty, something against death, and likewise against other calamities. And when you have moved rapidly through many topics, select one to ponder that day and digest. This is what I do as well [...]
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