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Comment by stephc_int13 | Hacker News Reader

This is not much different than binge watching/consuming any cultural product.

Reading is still considered more high-brow than, say, playing videogames, and for the most part it is, simply because our species have been producing literature for quite some time, and we have a large amount of masterpieces and real gems.

But I've seen people reading dumb shit at a rapid pace, bad literature is not better than bad TV/Radio/Comics/Games/Youtube/Etc.

I hope that at some point we'll stop sacralizing things because they are old.

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> I hope that at some point we'll stop sacralizing things because they are old.

The Lindy effect is in play though. People don't consider The Brothers Karamazov classical canon merely because it is 140 years old, because there were many other books published at the same time. There's typically a reason why particular works survive to have cultural relevance today.

In the same way house construction wasn't by and large more durable 700 years ago, but the houses from 700 years ago that still stand today are very sturdy.

Why are people saying Lindy over survivorship bias these days?

They are unrelated things. The lindy effect says the future lifespan is proportional to how long it’s been around already (The Bible writings have been around 2000 years, so it will probably be around for another 2000 years). Survivorship bias is saying that things that survive are representative of the whole sample (saying the The Brothers Karamazov was typical for literature of that period without other evidence would be an example of survivorship bias).

Similar but not the same concept. Lindy is that age predicts life expectancy for non-perishable items. Survivorship bias has nothing to do with the future.

I could have used survivorship bias in that post and lost little, but the implication is that Dostoyevsky is highly likely to have more staying power than a randomly selected novel published 142 years later.

I think those two are related, but survivorship bias seems more random.

What about, say, studying for an hour a half a day? Would that be not so different from binging any cultural product?

If there is a difference, then what is it?

Do you mean specifically studying literature (in this case the books themselves, and their authors/period etc.) or trying to acquire knowledge from a scientific work?

In any case, I don't think that rushing the process is helpful, it might depends on individual factors.

I used to read very quickly as a teen, a trick to impress friends or to skim through boring books. I did not find it enjoyable, at all.

The nicest part about reading (for me) is the thinking part, when I stop reading and reflect on an interesting/surprising idea, taking the time to write mental or literal notes.

You're saying rushing. But where is the rush here? An hour a half a day. That leaves more than enough time to stop and reflect and go for a walk and write notes.

One hour a day is not binging then…

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