This advice is probably good in most social contexts -- but I really appreciate the rationalist norm of taking deception very seriously. I resolve this class of conflict by being much more apprehensive than usual about casually misleading my rationalist-adjacent friends and business associates.

I have the sense that if you did shorten (some) books to a blog post, the result would contain all the important points, and most readers would miss or misunderstand them. All the less-relevant-to-the-core-idea bits in a book are often there to fill space, but ideally are there because different people will be receptive to (and will intuitively grasp) different examples, arguments, styles, and contexts. So really what you'd want are potentially dozens of blog posts that all say the same thing in different ways, but somehow target it so each person sees the one best suited to them. I don't think this is a thing you can do, at least not with any available tools I'm aware of.

I agree with some of it. There are definitely too many books. (Disclaimer: I used to sell them).

I have just recently read Inventing Medieval Czechoslovakia 1918-1968: Between Slavs, Germans, and Totalitarian Regimes, a collection of essays. It is not quite targeted at laypeople. Highly recommended.

Perhaps it is more interesting if you already know something about the place and time. I personally was lured in by unspecific positive feelings from reading fiction about Medieval Europe in general; think The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak (of which I have only the vaguest impression left, 20+ years after reading), Notre-Dame des Paris, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Thomas Mallory, Serbian folk songs, that sort of thing. Of Czechoslovakia proper I'd had only some memory of Jan Hus. (Because they burned him at a stake.) Sure, I had read nonfiction about "Medieval" "Europe", but it was way more narrow and random: something about science, something about commerce, etc. Pieces of a puzzle that are not supposed to give you the whole picture. I prefer it that way; for a deeper understanding, there are scientific papers anyway.

(I am sure that I don't have a good idea of where the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance began. It is too jumbled together in one myth.)

But back to the book. The thing it describes is how different scholars interpreted the same pieces of culture. Some of them were Germans and wanted to stress "the Germanic influence" or lack of it, or something. Some were Czech, some were Polish, some were Soviet, some were Russians-but-not-Soviet. (The story of Institutum Kondakovianum reads like a black comedy - for me personally, blacker than black, but all the funnier for it.) Everyone wanted something for their own agendas and some were in correspondence. It was like they all had one claw to reconstruct the dinosaur, only it happened to be a political animal. (Kidding. It's way more complex than that.) They wanted to find the meaning of the art... and they were also prepared to read the meaning into the art.

So on the one hand, my expectations were wrong. The book did not have a "let's invent the Middle Ages!" motif. But I am glad I was wrong. Because I used to value my nonfictional "pieces of a puzzle" simply for being nonfictional. I would never have thought in any depth about the history of historiography. I just kinda thought that yes, some people lied, but surely everyone knew what was propaganda and what was honest science. It was an expectation I had never questioned.

I still have my fictional Europe. I would be glad to rid myself of an old myth, but it seems easier, in terms of time and money, to add a new one as a counterbalance.

So - what I mean to say: read everything and digest what you can. It's too late to get picky.

There are two reasons I like books:

1. Many books I read are pretty good, they aren't dense with new information, but they are dense with justifications for the information they're giving. Much of the time I am not super surprised about the evidence presented after hearing the claim, but it makes later analysis not computationally intractable. This is important when trying to change your mind in light of contradictory arguments & necessary when approaching the claims with a critical eye^[1].

2. As I said after the Hanania post

I would add textbooks to the list of books that are worth reading. Not always, but often its the best way to learn a complex new field. Open to suggestions of alternative formats, like reading papers--though if you want an intro & problems, textbooks are still great.

Of course, if you have access to the person making the argument, or aren't mainly trying to learn a technical subject, books are probably inefficient.

Good point about mostly not remembering things. Summaries and reviews are probably often a better use of time. But I use those when I can find them before choosing what to read next.

On the other hand, I learned several programming languages from textbooks, including some I still use professionally, so I think textbooks that teach particular skills can be worth it. I would not have gotten the same depth of understanding from scattered blog posts.

In the case of fiction, the point isn't so much to learn things, but to enjoy the reading. But even that does have side benefits of improving language skill. Habitually reading even fiction is going to result in a larger vocabulary, and probably better writing skills, because you become used to the "sound" of quality writing. There may be more subtle benefits from expanded philosophy and perspective.

Agreed with 1 and 2. Human forgetfulness is yikes, and there's a kind of existential dread in re-reading a book after a few years and not recognizing any of it.

I'm skeptical of 3, however. I don't necessarily see your examples as demonstrating that the act of reading books is intrinsically high status. An alternative interpretation is that people who earn money by writing and being read, and whose readers likely read a lot, make bids to raise the status of reading. And relatedly, the act of publically dissing books is either considered low status, or these people make bids to lower its status. All this would be consistent with book-reading being, among the broader population, ~irrelevant for status.

I don't approve of suggestions to lie (and I would've upvoted the post if not for the parts which advocated for lying). But I don't think the lying is necessary, either. Assuming the aforementioned status benefits even exist, here are some virtuous alternative strategies to gain (or lose less) status on this topic:

• Make bids to lower the status of (reading) books. The OP seems like a good example of this (again, except for the suggestion to lie). Another way would be to associate reading with passive consumption of content, and contrast it with the more virtuous acts of creating content or otherwise achieving real-world outcomes.
• Make bids to increase the status of skimming books. E.g. signal-boost people who advocate for skimming books.
• Demonstrate the virtues of skimming books by visibly deriving outsized benefits from your book-skimming habit. Even quicker, refer to famous productive people who habitually skim books.
• If you don't like books, don't diss them in the presence of people who would lower your status for this. Same for not liking to read books. There's no need to have a public opinion on every issue. (That said, I wonder how unpopular your position on books even is. It seems too popular for the 10th Dentist subreddit, for example.)
• SBF-related: Probably nobody will care about your controversial statements one way or another, until you commit a crime which makes you national news. At that point any controversial statement, no matter how mild, will be held against you. This suggests a strategy of not making the controversial statements, and/or of not commiting the crime...

I'm writing a book [? · GW], and I'm very cognizant of these issues as I write. It's academic nonfiction, so basically the worst of the worst. I don't read these sorts of books myself normally and prefer to find summaries. There's only rare books in this genre where reading the whole thing is worthwhile, and that's mostly because it's a way to get you to think in depth about something.

So what am I doing in response as I write? I'm keeping the book dense and short. I'm aiming for <50k words and am more likely to hit 30k. That means it has higher density than typical academic nonfiction.

Why write a book, though? I am posting the draft chapters here as I write them. But books have a few nice properties:

• Perceived by others as prestigious so they are more willing to trust you might have something worthwhile to say.
• The format forces a different style of writing that has to be more self contained and can't lean as easily on references to explain things.
• Even though I could explain the main ideas of the book in just a few paragraphs, some of the arguments take time to develop if you disagree, so the book in part serves to develop those arguments and make the case in enough detail that more people will be convinced.

There’s a dead zone between skimming and scrutiny where you could play slow games without analyzing them and get neither the immediate benefits of cognitively-demanding analysis nor enough information to gain a passive understanding of the underlying patterns.

I think this is a good point. I think there's a lot to be said for being intentional about how/what you're consuming. It's kind of easy for me to fall into a pit of "kind of paying attention" where I'm spending mental energy, but not retaining anything, but not really skimming either. I think it is less cognitively demanding per unit time, but gives you way worse learning-bang for your mental-energy-buck.

I don't think I fully understand this dead zone or why it happens, but I am suspicious that it also plays a pretty large role in a lot of ineffective/mainstream education.