Hacker News Reader

Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

My question is this- Would reading 200 books per year make you better off than whatever social media you read? I probably only read a handful of books every year, but I read hundreds if not thousands of HN linked articles. I think there is some sort mystique around books like they magically are all sound, enlightened content and other forms of reading are junk food for the brain.

OK, skimmed the article- The central theme appears to be that you are rotting your brain for wasting time on social media. What if instead of social media you read 200 erotic romance novels, are you better off?

View on HN

Descartes wrote that reading great books is like having a conversation with the greatest minds who have ever lived - and even at that, hearing only the absolute best of their thinking.

I think it's a matter of filters. On Twitter where there is almost no filter, you will be reading almost exclusively garbage. You may just be better off reading erotic romance novels than reading unfiltered Twitter. HN is a little more tightly filtered, the quality of stuff posted is generally higher, and it's probably more worth your time.

But it's hard to beat hundreds or thousands of years of filtering through the best thoughts of the best minds. When you pick up the plays of Sophocles or the writings of Cicero you know that people from radically different societies and ages of history have found wisdom and insight in their thoughts. So I think there is some "magic" in books in that they have had time to age, and that thousands of very smart people have found value there.

If you would read 200 great books by the greatest minds, you would probably be done after one year.

Descartes lived in a time when most people couldn't even read and therefore the people who actually wrote books might well have been some of "the greatest minds who ever lived". Today almost everyone can read and almost everyone has the potential to write a book. So if we are talking about baseline quality, the magic of books has decreased a lot since the enlightenment. Today a book is just an indication of quantity of writing and not necessarily an indication of quality. And it isn't like the "great minds" aren't also on Twitter or writing shorter form articles. The quality is there too, it just might take a little extra effort to find it.

One solution is to read books that have survived the test of time (e.g., Descartes).

The problem is many many books survived the test of time and a lot of such non-fiction books are outdated/incorrect by modern standards.

I’ve found that the classic fiction books have revealed more fundamental truths than modern non fiction books.

Even scientific books that are out of date have deep insights into nature for example the origin of species, what is life?, and origin and history of conscientious.

Also my sentiment. Good fictional storytelling describes the corners and in-betweens of human experience; non-fiction typically describes a mix of technical tools(basically trade skills and weaponizable knowledge) and self-promotion(the book was in some fashion written for a career purpose).

The exceptions abound, of course, but categorically speaking, you only need some technical knowledge. It's the "how to lead your life" knowledge that is harder to glean, and one most resistant to taking a head-on approach like studying all the philosophers and then ranking their greatness in a spreadsheet.

I've got to say this: reading fiction that survived the test of time was like having thousands of substitute parents who were better at raising me than my own.

You're right and it's something that's related to the Lindy effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect). "The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy."

Devil's advocate:

I read some Plato earlier this year, and I confess I was unimpressed. I had always been taught that he was a great philosopher, but apparently his philosophy was: if you don't know something, just make it up, in exquisite detail. I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, except how much the ancient Greeks loved mathematical purity, and didn't have the scientific method.

What we know in modern terms from modern books is the best thoughts of the best minds filtered down through the ages. I don't need to read the rough drafts.

Fair enough, I'm just glad you put forth the effort and then came to your own conclusions about what you read instead of thinking what everyone told you to think.

Your observation that the Greeks didn't have "the" scientific method is, to me, what makes them so very interesting and what made their thought so original. Plato was one of the very first people writing down his answers to the question "How do we know things?", which is the same question that the scientific method tries to answer. You can trace his ideas throughout history and it's really astonishing to think about. Plato's thought heavily influenced early Christian theology, then you move on to people like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who influenced the monastic orders where some of the first properly "modern" scientific experimentation began taking place in the middle ages and we move on to the Enlightenment from there. I think the value of reading the guy who started all that speaks for itself.

If you don't believe me, there is always Alfred North Whitehead's famous quote to the effect that all of Western philosophy is essentially a series of footnotes on Plato.

Some "footnotes"! Yes, I agree that "original" would be an apt description.

Plato: Fire is obviously made of tiny tetrahedrons, because it feels sharp and stabby when you touch it, and tetrahedrons also have sharp points, QED.†

† Everyone else, after Chemistry: OK so that didn't turn out to be true at all.

Yes, Original, exactly! Original denotes something very powerful, a beginning which sets things off, which branches off into a bunch of other things that are only iterations of that first thing. You can draw a line through history from the ancient Greek philosophers, who in your view were so ignorant as not to deserve any consideration, directly to the first chemist who discovered what fire is actually made of.

Maybe Plato's hypothesis about fire was incorrect, but you don't think it prompted the next guy to try and find a better answer? And then the next guy, and so on? You don't see any value in knowing where we have all come from intellectually?

If that's what you got from reading Plato than it sounds like you read a different Plato from the Plato read by most other Philosophy students

Plato was a "great philosopher", in the sense of the how philosophers tend to approach things: propose an abstract concept and then contemplate its consequences. The initial abstraction doesn't necessarily have to be tethered to reality and in some cases doesn't need to be internally consistent (at least at the outset, sometimes philosophers will then try to refine).

If you tend to gravitate towards either a mathematical thinking style or a scientific thinking style, Plato and Aristotle will probably underwhelm.

(And actually you'll probably find that a great deal of modern philosophers, Kant, Nietsche, Foucault, etc. are not that much more up your alley.)

I laughed out loud at "200 erotic romance novels" :)

Of course you're right about that. But the conclusion should not be "continue rotting away on social networks", the conclusion should be "read 200 good books".

Or even just 2 good books would be an improvement for many people.

> Of course you're right about that. But the conclusion should not be "continue rotting away on social networks", the conclusion should be "read 200 good books".

"Good book" is extremely subjective category. But I imagine that with such consumption, they would become boring and repetitive quickly.

You are absolutely right. Even 2 good books are a huge improvement, and reading quality should be the takeaway. I will even admit that my romance novels is a bit of a straw man, but I think what bothers me about articles like this is the amount of assumptions that go into it. Is social media the only reason they arent reading? If it went away magically would the world be better because we all read and gained knowledge? I will even backtrack a bit and say maybe this article is good in that it does the math of what is theoretically possible if you do reject social media. At the end of the day though someone has to want to do better to make this change.

> the conclusion should be "read 200 good books"

200 books of any type sounds like too much time in one activity for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com