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Comment by Lisdexamfeta | Hacker News Reader

I think the essay is really speaking to a particular type of person, one whom is described in Tyler Cowen's book The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy. This sort of person is probably reasonably common on HN (and that help explain the upvotes for the essay) but not super common in the broader and larger population.

The real kind of underlying question is about how to be most effective.

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I believe that's generally referred to as the "assumed similarity bias", and does appear to be what's going on here.

I recently read someplace that only 54% of Americans read at least one full book last year, and that includes audiobooks. It doesn't seem to me like a world full of infovores.

That assumes reading a book is the sole source of information. While it's true that books are a treasure trove of information, someone that scours the Internet all day long for bits of information and reads zero books would be an uncounted infovore in that statistic.

I don't mean to imply that books are the ONLY way to consume information, just that reading correlates strongly with being an information addict and that many people don't read at all. Therefore, it seems to me, many people are not infovores.

Sure, many people don't read books, and thus many people are not infovores, but I think that most people are, or a larger percentage than you think, when you consider how much different information is out there. The Earth's radius being roughly 6400 Km is one kind of information, but so is knowing which of my friends is selling a washer/dryer. Even if they're not reading a book but listening to a video on tiktok, or a picture on Instagram, they're still picking up information like which celebrity is dating whom, and who's wearing which brand of luxury handbag, or which sports team beat the other sports team, and while you may not value that information highly, it's information that's valuable in their world.

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