>> A lot of it is cruft and motivation for the underlying core ideas.
Someone else made the exact same remark about Cal Newport's book "Deep Work" earlier this week in another thread.
I find this to be true about a lot of books/courses/content of a "self-help" nature that are designed to be practical and applicable - the real helpful stuff boiled down to its essence could fit in a tri-fold pamphlet (or a 350-line pastebin), but you can't make money selling a tri-fold pamphlet, so the content gets augmented with tons of case studies and variations on variations on variations of the core ideas to justify 200 pages or a multi-week course.
I stopped buying these kinds of books. Every one turned into "thumb to about page 60 to skip the intro/life story/motivating metaphor, read a few pages, and skim the beginning of each chapter after that."
The Learning How to Learn course is free. They're not making money from it.
They are arguably gaining reputation from it.
However, I do not think it's true that they're making the same point over and over again. There is little repeated content, and what is repeated is done in a way that triggers recall.
It is a content-dense course, and to put this in the same bucket as an airport best-seller self-help book is deeply unfair.
Agreed. There's a serious problem of information density in content these days. Most publisher-driven content is almost intentionally sparse. It takes tremendous expertise to weld information with context in a way that doesn't feel hollow and commercial.
Two books I've come across recently that do well to circumvent that problem: Sapiens by Yuval Harari and Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. In both cases, you get a sense of the author distilling a lifetime's worth of knowledge and expertise into a form that seems hopelessly condensed, and in fact provokes you into further study. That's the mark of excellent exposition in my opinion.
The problem of low information density isn't new. Most of the "classics" of western literature have the same problem. We're just more attuned to it now because we've been trained by internet articles to expect an idea to be introduced, explored and concluded in 1000-2000 words. Beyond that, these days many people won't even bother with that if there isn't a quick hook or a TL;DR that sucks them into reading further.
I think one good test is actually the table of contents.
Some older books which were content-rich had the feature of "descriptive" TOCs. They would not only have a clear headline, but also a sort of teaser description of what that chapter would tell you. So you could use that to get a high level understanding of what the book is about and what it would tell or teach you without even having to skim the actual content.
On the other side of the spectrum, many of those sparse business/popsci/etc books often have extremely cryptic TOCs. That's a good sign to just ignore that book.
> The problem of low information density isn't new. Most of the "classics" of western literature have the same problem.
I would submit that you may not be tuned into the value in them, if you think that. Maybe it's true of some, but most are just an acquired taste of the same sort as, say, the freer-form varieties of jazz, or classical music. It takes some work and some experience before you get what they're doing, before you understand their rhythms, learn to recognize when they're telling you to pay attention (and to what, which may not be obvious at first), when and how they're simply playing and what about the particular play they're engaging in makes it remarkable and worthwhile, and so on.
There's a sensitivity required for much (not all) of the body of classic literature that most people have to work to develop before they really get it, and lots of allusions that have the chicken/egg problem of requiring you already to be familiar with a lot of literature before they start to land with any frequency—again, same as some genres of music, like classical and jazz again, hip hop especially, others too, but usually not as much as those. Just because you can read doesn't mean you get literature, just like being able to see doesn't mean you get fine art, though in either case you might still enjoy at least some of it, and you might still develop strong opinions about the works you don't enjoy.
Movies and TV are similar. You're not born recognizing good film-making, understanding why it's good, how the way the camera moved in that shot actually contributed meaning rather than just being an artifact of the medium, how that shot was a reference to some DW Griffith movie and what purpose that might have, how that shot is weak and works against the tone or action of the scene in a way that makes it bad, and so on. Most people who watch and enjoy film never bother to develop an actual understanding of it, but that doesn't mean the things that go over their heads are bad.
That's just how all art is, really. Sure there's some posturing and BS mixed in with it all, but you in fact do have to put some serious hours and effort into arts to get the most out of them that you can—even just on a critical or enjoyment or character/intellect/empathy-building level, not even getting into making art—and very probably by the time you've done that a bunch of things that seemed like worthless overrated crap when you started won't seem that way anymore.
I've spent a lot of time digging through the major works of post enlightenment philosophers. Even fairly "concise" (by the standards of the day) writers like Hume, Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell belabor points far beyond what was necessary for me to apprehend their meaning.
I'm of the opinion that if you have to be "trained" to find a work aesthetically appealing, it isn't inherently aesthetic. By analogy, some women find pretend rape and pain sexually gratifying, but I don't think anyone would argue those acts are inherently erotic.
Minus the weird and out-of-place analogy about sexual role playing and bdsm, this kinda sounds like a child talking about the bitter taste of coffee or beer, when soda is so much sweeter.
The real child is the person who cultivates "sophisticated" preferences to try and elevate themselves above others. A child that is genuine is ironically being far more emotionally mature.
Things like taste are subjective. I am thirty something and don't like the majority of coffee and I don't drink beer or wine at all. I had a Mexican Coke (so much better than normal coke) in preference to bitter coffee this morning. Does that make me childish?
> I'm of the opinion that if you have to be "trained" to find a work aesthetically appealing, it isn't inherently aesthetic.
I don't see how this is tenable, given how much aesthetic taste is learned regardless.
A lifetime's journey through arts, if done with any thought at all, is certainly a process of learning, of training. Efforts to defend old favorites in light of new knowledge will be attempted, sometimes succeed and allow new levels of appreciation of already-experienced work, sometimes fail when one discovers that the work lacks the substance on which to defend it. Maybe one continues to like the work anyway, but understands its limitations, its shortcomings. Learning, or training, happens, taste refines, horizons widen, new works become accessible, and the process repeats. Sensitivity to the arts develops, informs other areas of life. This doesn't even need to be the result of some kind of formal arts crit/appreciation training; informally and casually but thoughtfully engaging with art will allow (perhaps slower) progress of the same sort.
However, a similar journey taken thoughtlessly is trained just the same, but arrested. The hardened aesthetic taste of the latter is still "trained", just poorly, probably in part accidentally, and with training halted or slowed at some point, leaving the remaining guiding tastes and opinions unchallenged, surviving favorites unexamined and unexaminable as the approaches and knowledge required to even begin are undeveloped and unknown. Why did the author include this particular character? Dunno, never thought about it. Must have wanted to is all. Did you feel the prose itself change pace as the action waxed and waned? Sure didn't, this book sucks and was boring. headdesk. OK, how about Encyclopedia Brown? WTF no, I used to like that but now it's boring too, give me some good fiction for adults like Stephen King. Not Dan Brown though, he's terrible. Oh, and why is he terrible? Just boring is all, and I don't like the way he writes. Ah, OK.
So, trained, advanced to a point, but arrested. Which is fine, we all pick our battles, but I'm not going to take the latter subject's aesthetic judgement very seriously or consider that anything they fail to enjoy is necessarily aesthetically lacking.
I guess we can quibble over your use of "inherent" but I can't see that ending anywhere other than "nothing a 2-year-old doesn't find aesthetically pleasing is inherently aesthetic" which doesn't strike me as a productive direction to go, however valuable the beauty of nature and child-like wonder may be.
Point conceded on philosophy though. Some of the most painful reads I've managed to complete were philosophy—More's Utopia in particular nearly broke me, and definitely wasn't worth the effort.
I wasn't speaking of fiction in my original post. The purpose of fiction is to create an experience in the mind of the reader rather than to convey information. As such, you can't judge a work by an absolute standard, really the only measure of success is how well the writing tends to induce the experience the author intended. This of course will depend on how well the author has anticipated the mind of the reader.
It is true that no preferences exist free of introduced bias. My problem is mainly with things that people train themselves to like in order to appear "sophisticated". It's like an arms race, where people learn to like progressively less pleasant things in order to differentiate themselves. Everyone would be happier if we collectively said "screw sophistication" but nobody wants to be the first person to appear "boorish".
> I wasn't speaking of fiction in my original post. The purpose of fiction is to create an experience in the mind of the reader rather than to convey information. As such, you can't judge a work by an absolute standard, really the only measure of success is how well the writing tends to induce the experience the author intended. This of course will depend on how well the author has anticipated the mind of the reader.
Ah, I misunderstood. I agree with you that redundancy is a common problem even in "good" works of non-fiction, though I think it's sometimes a sign that one has approached a work too late, not that the work is generally poor. I found the oft-recommended A Demon-Haunted World, for instance, to be an over-long, dull, repetitive, low-value work... but if I'd read it when I was 14? Who knows. Judging from others' testimonies I suspect I'd not have had the same complaints if I'd read it at a different time in my life.
Full-on self-help books—to include pop-business books—I would exempt from this cautious judgement, since useless padding is practically a codified, defining property of the genre.
> It is true that no preferences exist free of introduced bias. My problem is mainly with things that people train themselves to like in order to appear "sophisticated". It's like an arms race, where people learn to like progressively less pleasant things in order to differentiate themselves. Everyone would be happier if we collectively said "screw sophistication" but nobody wants to be the first person to appear "boorish".
Absolutely a problem. Humility, compassion, restraint, self-awareness, and plain speaking are everywhere in short supply.
[EDIT] looking back, I think I took your words "the 'classics' of western literature" more broadly than you intended them, i.e. to include fiction, verse, et c.
I think this describes a different problem. Sure, people are trained to consume small chunks now - but much of that 1000-2000 word content is also information-light.
Is it possible that the problem isn't publishers or authors, but rather readers and people in general?
I know a retired journalist who worked for 20 something years. When started articles and film pieces used a strategy of jamming as much information in as densely as possible. Towards the end of his career the strategy was making the message as clear as possible so that a few facts could be conveyed accurately and meaningfully.
The average person just isn't ready for dense facts outside their expertise. Things like repetition, dilution and numerous examples make internalizing external information easier.
As a programmer you are probably already an expert at self directed learning and find that method simplistic. How would you want to approach a topic you were inexpert at not planning on pursuing professionally?
I agree in general, but reading 3-page summary will not leave you with deep impression if it is applicable/correct and why. Blog posts are like that and how many you read vs how many you changed your behavior? I tried one of the services that provide summaries for the books but disliked it. But I agree that this books, in general, could have around 100-150 pages, 200 tops.
One of the promises of hypertext was to be able to "dig in" into deeper information if you wanted to. It would be nice to see a single page summary of a book, and then be able to click on hyperlinks to see more details about the interesting bits. Self-help books and textbooks are ideal for this, but I can see that it's a lot of work to structure something like that.
I always found these online versions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus very enlightening, because the entire book is hierarchically structured and thus lends itself to top-down exploration (which doesn't work well in traditional books): http://www.tractatuslogico-philosophicus.com/
Specifically calling out the Deep Work book, I recall after the 6 months of promo, talks, and general marketing of the book the author wrote a blog post calling for participants to actually, well, you know, help test if the ideas in the book actually had any scientific merit.
I was already pretty disillusioned with the self help crowd (even those who claimed a scientific background), but that was the nail in the coffin.
That doesn't make sense. Cal Newport's audience was built from the beginning around one person's efforts to get more work done. It's always been an anecdotal/self-experimental approach. Why quit reading now?
Probably the biggest testable assertion Cal makes is that focus is a muscle that can be strengthened and called on a schedule rather than a depletable, fickle resource. This is consistent with current research: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/03/psychologys-favorite-th...
Do they have any studies where they manipulate people's beliefs about willpower to see if that affects it?
This study has a been confound which is equivalent too "we asked a bunch of people if they thought they were strong. People who said yes we're stronger than people who said no! Therefore believing your strong is how to become stronger!"
My favourite example of this is Harold Pollack who got tonnes of media coverage for coming up with 9 rules for personal finance which fit on an index card. I listened to his interview on Freakonomics, and he's now selling a 256 page book called "The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicate". 256 pages, about his rules that fit on an index card.
As an aside I always hear podcast adverts for https://www.blinkist.com/ which does audio/text summaries of non-fiction books, I haven't tried it yet but it might be worth checking out.
It is like reading a book without all the context. What is the point of takeaways if you don't know when to apply them? I will be wary of people reading summaries.
You're looking for https://www.blinkist.com - I've not bought anything yet but that's what they do.
I do feel a lot of self help books are often hammering home a single point over 500 pages. By the end even the authors tend to seem bored of writing their chapters.
I call these books candy for the brain. That audience just love to feel smart, wise or "aware" (depending on the specific subgenre), and these books give them just that -- pleasant feelings. Napoleon Hill is perhaps the poster child of brain candy, and once you realize a lot of today's books are the (supposedly) backed-by-science versions of the same recipe, the whole genre loses almost all interest.
A more charitable interpretation could be that all that "filler" is used to motivate you, because just reading about this methods won't be enough to actually help most people.
And a less charitable interpretation of that is that reading case studies and backing material makes people feel like they are accomplishing something without actual effort or anxiety, so they prefer reading to actual practice.
"Research by Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues has shown that thinking about the benefits of success can actually make you less likely to achieve your goals. They can reduce the amount of effort that you want to put into achieving your aims."
Someone else made the exact same remark about Cal Newport's book "Deep Work" earlier this week in another thread.
I find this to be true about a lot of books/courses/content of a "self-help" nature that are designed to be practical and applicable - the real helpful stuff boiled down to its essence could fit in a tri-fold pamphlet (or a 350-line pastebin), but you can't make money selling a tri-fold pamphlet, so the content gets augmented with tons of case studies and variations on variations on variations of the core ideas to justify 200 pages or a multi-week course.
I stopped buying these kinds of books. Every one turned into "thumb to about page 60 to skip the intro/life story/motivating metaphor, read a few pages, and skim the beginning of each chapter after that."