Being able to discern what makes someone an expert at X is a skill, Y.
People who are good at X aren’t necessarily good at Y; Y is a separate skill.
(- Skill in Y generalizes across different values of X somewhat)
One needs to look for authors that somehow are good at Y; I didn’t specify how you could do this, and maybe there’s not a very good way in general. (But I do like the Caro biographies. But also, maybe I like them for their entertainment value.)
Re: self-help books, I mostly share your position in thinking that ~80% of such books could be a paragraph to a page, ~18% of them could be blog posts of varying length, and only the remaining ~2% have something substantial to say from a pure informational standpoint. (Worse, in many cases, padding the length of a self help book actively makes it worse/less coherent.) Moreover, I agree that of the good-ish 20%, there is a lot of overlap in the prescriptions given, implied or otherwise. I think that even when a book of this type is done “well”, the purpose of most of the text isn’t for it to be of maximum entropy or something in distinguishing world models, but in giving a bunch of perspectives on a small set of ideas in the hopes that one of them sticks particularly well, or the cumulative exposure makes the idea stick with you better. Spaced repetition or other ritualistic behaviors might achieve the same thing, but require more active agency on your part.
I happen to like the inner game of tennis in particular, and feel that its overlap in useful advice with other books in the genre is relatively low, though I might have a hard time defending my taste explicitly.
On that explanation, yes that makes it much clearer. And it’s interesting to reflect on how identifying expertise in a given domain—be it tennis, or comedy, or soccer—may require a specialized skill. A great soccer player may not be very good at identifying what is unique or specific it is about his rival’s training and thinking and approach even if he heaps praise on them and the “grace” of their playing. Obviously, this is where there is a niche for a coach.
On the relative utility on books and padding: I stress again, that title could be an exception. Not to put you on the spot, but if you did have to summarize the unique and useful advice in the Inner Game of Tennis what would it be?
I remember many years ago reading a chapter of it and finding a very interesting observation about “Who is doing what to whom?”. the reason that interested me is I’m a armchair comedy nerd, and the exact same expression was used in Jerry Lewis’s book on filmmaking which, I’m paraphrasing here, he described as the closest to a theory about comedy he had. (Even now I can think of a plethora of tenuous analogies). I can’t remember the chapter in Inner Game… so I’d be interested to hear what your take out from it was.
And yes, spaced repetition by reading across multiple books does sound like a reasonable phenomenon.
Sorry, yeah, it was badly worded.
Being able to discern what makes someone an expert at X is a skill, Y.
People who are good at X aren’t necessarily good at Y; Y is a separate skill. (- Skill in Y generalizes across different values of X somewhat)
One needs to look for authors that somehow are good at Y; I didn’t specify how you could do this, and maybe there’s not a very good way in general. (But I do like the Caro biographies. But also, maybe I like them for their entertainment value.)
Re: self-help books, I mostly share your position in thinking that ~80% of such books could be a paragraph to a page, ~18% of them could be blog posts of varying length, and only the remaining ~2% have something substantial to say from a pure informational standpoint. (Worse, in many cases, padding the length of a self help book actively makes it worse/less coherent.) Moreover, I agree that of the good-ish 20%, there is a lot of overlap in the prescriptions given, implied or otherwise. I think that even when a book of this type is done “well”, the purpose of most of the text isn’t for it to be of maximum entropy or something in distinguishing world models, but in giving a bunch of perspectives on a small set of ideas in the hopes that one of them sticks particularly well, or the cumulative exposure makes the idea stick with you better. Spaced repetition or other ritualistic behaviors might achieve the same thing, but require more active agency on your part.
I happen to like the inner game of tennis in particular, and feel that its overlap in useful advice with other books in the genre is relatively low, though I might have a hard time defending my taste explicitly.
On that explanation, yes that makes it much clearer. And it’s interesting to reflect on how identifying expertise in a given domain—be it tennis, or comedy, or soccer—may require a specialized skill. A great soccer player may not be very good at identifying what is unique or specific it is about his rival’s training and thinking and approach even if he heaps praise on them and the “grace” of their playing. Obviously, this is where there is a niche for a coach.
On the relative utility on books and padding:
I stress again, that title could be an exception.
Not to put you on the spot, but if you did have to summarize the unique and useful advice in the Inner Game of Tennis what would it be?
I remember many years ago reading a chapter of it and finding a very interesting observation about “Who is doing what to whom?”. the reason that interested me is I’m a armchair comedy nerd, and the exact same expression was used in Jerry Lewis’s book on filmmaking which, I’m paraphrasing here, he described as the closest to a theory about comedy he had. (Even now I can think of a plethora of tenuous analogies).
I can’t remember the chapter in Inner Game… so I’d be interested to hear what your take out from it was.
And yes, spaced repetition by reading across multiple books does sound like a reasonable phenomenon.