For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books

More relevant: many textbooks are straightforwardly badly written, to the point that the thirty-year-old conference papers in the citations are actually more accurate. Another factor which the classics-are-screened-off-by-moderns argument may miss is the degree to which poor work reduces the value of a reference.

Would this be a fair summary?

Old books can be useful, but for the old books in a field to be essential reading today, something must have gone badly wrong with the field. Some fields have indeed gone badly wrong.

in order to recognize systemic errors of your own era it is useful to return to a time before the current dominant paradigm was in effect. even better if you can find first hand accounts of when the current paradigm started becoming fashionable and was regarded as strange and alien.

I disagree with a few points

1 ) Most people do not have enormous amount of time to read, so the question is always if one should NOT read something actual and read a classic instead.

2) People who Do have lots of time end up reading Both actual and classic material, which is probably why you find those who read the classics superior, it's just they are more into it.

3) Academics advise towards reading the classics among other reasons because they have been advised the same way, and chosen the same way, so Choice supportive bias plays a role there.

4) In addition, they prefer that their students read something they are already familiar with than something they themselves will have to become acquainted with in order to judge. It's easier to judge Hegel than Bostrom.

5) Very motivated people tend to lose motivation when not allowed to have their own ideas, and with time become meme-copies of classic people, in part this happens because they are obligated to read Plato, Aristotle, etc... and end up losing faith in the intellectual world. High young achievers such as Feynman, Eliezer, Russell, Kripke, Wittgenstein and others take deep pride in having been outsiders in their studying methods.

5) To Dodge the Nearest Mistakes: We are all mistakers, trying to fit the map more and more to the territory. If I read Plato, I'll be reading an old scrapped map made with coal in a rush by someone with alzheimer. If I read Feynman, I'm using satellite technology to provide a three dimensional visualization that scales up to centimeter range.

Typo - you want "vale of tears", not "veil".

(I'm now on record with several comments like this one. Please let me know if they annoy. It's a quirk of mine that egregious misspellings bias me toward thinking less of the writer and the writing, but it seems to be a widely shared one.)

I think this post overstates the case a bit. My general impression is that the scientific method "wins" even in economics and that later works are better than earlier works.

Now it might be true that the average macro-economist of today understands less than Keynes did but I'd be hard pressed to say that the best don't understand more. Moreover, there are really great distillers. In macro for example, Hicks distilled Keynes into something that I would consider more useful that the original.

Nonetheless, I think it is correct that someone should be reading the originals. If not there is the propensity for a particular distiller to miss an important insight and then for everyone else to go one missing it.

What this says to me is that there should be rewards to re-discovery. Suppose that I read Adam Smith and rediscover something great. I should be rewarded for that just as much as if I had come up with the idea myself. Afterall, it has the same effect on the current state of knowledge. However, that will not happen.

Rediscovering is not as prestigious as discovering, because it is not as difficult and does not signal intellectual greatness.

An excerpt from the Amazon description of Plausible Reasoning: "This work might have been called "How to Become a Good Guesser"."

Polya's How to Solve It is a great little text he wrote for teachers and students of mathematics. Polya's Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning is even better. There's lots of great problem-solving techniques for non-mathematicians in there too. I recommend it to everyone, it's the best example I've ever seen of someone writing down their techniques.

Edit: cleared up the reference of the quote, it originally looked like I was quoting the article, sorry about that!

One might argue that Newton didn't use any technique to invent calculus, just a very high IQ or some other unusual set of biological traits.

That would be a non-explanation in any case. However high Newton's IQ may have been, his brain was still operating by lawful processes within the physical universe. By the sheer improbability of inventing calculus by chance, there is bound to exist some general technique used by Newton for doing things like inventing calculus, for all that that technique may have been opaque to Newton's own conscious introspection. Perhaps someone else may be able to formulate this technique in explicit generality (in the same way that Newton himself formulated the methods of calculus, already known in special cases, in explicit generality).

"High IQ" probably doesn't mean more than something like high processing speed and copious amounts of RAM. The algorithms (at least in their essence) can still be run, less efficiently, on inferior hardware.

This recent blog post

Updated link:

Reading Originals

I read old books of astronomy and I found it very helpful for understanding new books of astronomy.

Outside of physics, the evidence for progress is far weaker.

The economic growth of the last few decades suggests that some people, somewhere, are gradually getting more things right more often. Those genomes aren't sequencing themselves. Or have I misunderstood you?

progress means replacing one pile of sludge with another fashionable sludge-pile of similar quality.

The methods available to test these various hypotheses seem to have more of an impact on their prominence, than any objective measure of truth. Classical mechanics conformed to observations and could be confirmed by various tests. This led to widespread adoption until, observations were be made that did not fit the theories. Often the theories are available and cover various possible outcomes, all justified by the intuition offered by the current, yet untestable, theories.

This is where the social sciences run into difficulty. Predictions made by the social sciences are confirmed or disproved by the available methods of verification, at the time the predictions are made. These methods of verification evolve at a slower rate than the theories, and are always limited by the dynamic nature of human actors in large groups. Even if we could determine the utility function for everyone in the world, by the time that utility function had been applied and used to test various SS theories, they would have already changed.

It is unlikely that the LHC will produce results, not yet predicted by various physicists. When it does produce results, some thoeries will be proved and some will be disproved. The confirmation of the correct theory, however, is more valuable than 100 potentially correct yet untestable theories.

Mathematics has evolved quickly, for the same reasons that language has evolved, it is testable in its immediate ability to express and be understood. It has a very clean and objective measurement of success.

This somewhat echos The Value of Nature and Old Books. Sometimes, older books can be quite effective at explaining things that do not depend on the latest research -- the books by e.g. Knuth, Feynman, Abelson/Susskind are good examples, and I would hearthily recommend those, even if there are newer works on similar subjects.

I'd like to quote this argument from here:

Distillation works best in very exact sciences, such as physics and mathematics. If you rely on distillation for an inexact science, you will do best at capturing its exact parts. You will be left with a systematic bias, and knowledge gap, regarding its inexact parts.

Likewise, much in Darwin is part of contemporary evolutionary theory but was virtually unknown by evolutionary biologists half a century ago.

I disagree with the statement that evolutionary biology isn't making clear progress. I'm guessing you're talking about punctuated equilibrium, which was part of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (albeit not by that name), deemphasized by later evolutionary biologists, and later assertively brought back by Gould et al. However, this hypothesis is only vacillating in and out of 'style' because it 1) has scientific merit and 2) is difficult to prove. Other aspects of Darwin's theory have been easier to validate or disprove and so have been retained or decisively refuted over the years. On the whole modern evolutionists have a vastly more complete understanding of their subject than Darwin did. The entire new fields of genetics and molecular biology have opened up since Darwin's day, expanding on Darwin's theory as well as explaining the mechanics that underlie it.

Ultimately one has to look at the empirical question of the relative per-capita intellectual impressiveness of people who study only condensations and people who study original works. To me, the latter looks much much greater in most fields, OK, in every field that I can quickly think of except for astronomy.

Who says derivative works are always condensations? To continue with the Darwin example, On the Origin of Species was a seminal work, to be sure, but it doesn't explain many necessary modern concepts, such as sexual selection, kin selection, silent mutations, genetic drift, etc. If you are an evolutionary biologist then you should clearly read On the Origin of Species, among other things. But if you are an interested amateur and only have time to read one book then you should read a modern evolution textbook, in the same way you would read a modern medical textbook instead of one written in the 19th century. The old texts would contain some discredited concepts and be missing a lot of substantiated ones.

an assumption not generally found outside of the Anglo-American Enlightenment intellectual tradition

Is this actually true?

I have to admit that personally I don't see a golden thread in the post. What was the core argument? As far as I understood it the pot reasons about "relative per-capita intellectual impressiveness of people who study only condensations and people who study original works".

Which is... to be honest, just a mockup. Who cares about the "impressiveness" while studying? Why should one optimize "impressiveness" in ones study?

Personally I think that original works carry a lot of baggage. For example the language is older, the theories sometimes incredibly outdated, ... etc. It's fun to read about this "new discovered oil" and that "this black oil will never run out!" but tbh not all books age the same. Plato ages well but 500 year old books on eye surgery are probably completely useless by now.

So I'd argue that there's value in the "modern, condensed" form. Some expert which tells me "this obscure line has the meaning of x. Don't mistake it for an y".

This recent blog post

Link to infiniteinjury.org seems to be down.

Books are written sometimes about "The Great Ideas Of The Past", sometimes about that great thinker of former times, and the public reads these books written by a someone else, but not the works of "The Great Man or Woman" himself/herself.

There is nothing that so greatly recreates the mind as the works of the old classic writers. Directly one has been taken up, even if it is only for half-an-hour, one feels as quickly refreshed, relieved, purified, elevated, and strengthened as if one had refreshed oneself at a mountain stream.

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.

In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.

It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents. To desire that a person should retain everything he has ever read, is the same as wishing him/her to retain in his stomach all that he has ever eaten. He has been bodily nourished on what he has eaten, and mentally on what he has read, and through them become what he is.

It is because people will only read what is the newest instead of what is the best, that writers remain in the narrow circle of prevailing ideas, and that we sometimes feel that the age sinks deeper and deeper in its own mire.

Putting China on BLAST!

"A good analysis book doesn’t summarize Newton it digests his insights and presents them as part of a grander theory. "

Exactly. And I want to be in charge of doing that for myself, so I suppose I'll continue to read original sources.

Finally I just want to say that surely you don't disagree that there is something different about what happens in physics than what happens in astrology do you? I don't care about deep principled distinctions here but just at a purely practical level physics (and the other sciences) let us make strictly more things now than they did 10, 50 or 100 years ago.

The notion of progress I had in mind is much much weaker than yours. I just mean that sometimes we discover shit that we find very useful (transistor technology) and that the useful consequences of scientific discoveries (be it new theories or just accurate measurements of molecular weight) are rarely lost.

In other words all I'm saying is that if you wanted nifty fun gadgets to play with or technologies to save your sick wife or the like and you had the chance to pluck 10 great scientists from any time in history to help you out during development you'd pick them from the future not the past. That is physicists can now give engineers theories that let them build both chips and buildings while before they only gave them building theories.

Ultimately, however, the aim of my post was to establish that there isn't some kind of important knowledge best gained through the reading of original sources. The target of my argument was the frequently given argument that somehow spurning these great original works puts you at some kind of real (not just bad taste) intellectual disadvantage in terms of learning/knowledge relative to those who do.

Given that new 'great' originals continue to be published albeit quite slowly one can immediately conclude that either we are making progress or that there is no reason to believe reading great originals gives you a boost (i.e. helps you make progress). After all if we aren't making progress then these new books can't give later generations a boost (that would be progress) hence, one can't justifiably claim that reading great originals is an aid to academic/intellectual progress.

Given that my claim is an entirely negative one I need not make any assumptions as you allege. Rather I'm just offering a reducto of position that you are simply dismissing from the start.

Ultimately, however, the aim of my post was to establish that there isn't some kind of important knowledge best gained through the reading of original sources. The target of my argument was the frequently given argument that somehow spurning these great original works puts you at some kind of 'objective' disadvantage in terms of learning/knowledge relative to those who do. Sure these are fuzzy terms and I think most of them aren't even really meaningful but the idea the advocates of this position have in mind is that somehow reading literature classics and other 'great' originals somehow helps you make intellectual contributions more than reading more recent works instead.

Given that new 'great' originals continue to be published albeit quite slowly one can immediately conclude that either we are making progress or that there is no reason to believe reading great originals gives you a boost (i.e. helps you make progress). After all if we aren't making progress then these new books can't give later generations a boost (that would be progress) hence, one can't justifiably claim that reading great originals is an aid to academic/intellectual progress.

Given that my claim is an entirely negative one I need not make any assumptions as you allege. Rather I'm just offering a reducto of position that you are simply dismissing from the start.

Very weakly related to the post: I surprised Eliezer Yudkowsky last October with a quote showing off Galileo's rationality.

You make decent points about the lack of evidence for 'progress' in methodology. I think it's quite possible that we don't significantly improve the process by which we go from the current best theory to it's successor. Of course to make sense of this notion you would need a more precise notion of what it means to have a better methodology for generating scientific theories. I mean the first natural way to do this might be to somehow try and measure the percent of the physical world we can explain/predict from initial conditions (many complications with random events etc..) but that yields a decreasing rate of methodological progress as a matter of pure mathematics.

If f(t) is a bounded monotonically increasing differentiable function then the limit of f'(t) (f prime) as x goes to infinity is 0. So if f is some measure of the percent of the world physics has explained then it's rate of increase has to eventually go to 0 since there is only so much world to explain.

More generally saying that a particular scientific methodology works or works better than another is equivalent to asserting that induction works and works better with respect to such and such measure of simplicity. All you can do is assume your notion of simplicity gives rise to a good scientific methodology (you can't gain inductive evidence for it) so it doesn't really make sense to measure our progress in scientific methodology.

So if I don't believe in the idea of progress in the scientific method what did I mean by progress in my post? I put that in another comment since I felt it better to divide them up.