hypothesis: the wrong reason to read books is to feel a need to read books because you’re supposed to have read them as an educated person, or as some kind of weird status thing of being part of the ingroup, or a general need to feel well read and worldly. the right reason is to feel a burning passion to find a specific piece of knowledge that will finally answer a question you are curious about that happens to be locked inside a specific book, or a gnawing pain in your heart that can only be quelled by knowing that it’s a universal problem that someone out there across space and time understands and has fixed in themselves.
I don’t really think there are right or wrong reasons to read books, just like there aren’t right or wrong reasons to exercise. The benefits will accrue either way. Consider book clubs as analogous to running clubs in producing social pressure to keep reading.
is reading as good for you as running is? we have pretty strong evidence that exercise is good for you. do you not run the risk of generalizing from the wrong fictional evidence, or at least from cherry picked real evidence that is not representative of the real world?
There’s two questions here, then: is reading good for you in general, and are the positive effects attenuated if the motivation is wrong. I think the answer to the second one is very likely “no” as long as you are, in fact, actually reading to a similar depth (compare: if you’re unmotivated to run so you half-ass it, you won’t get the same benefits). I wasn’t aware you were actually questioning the first one, and there isn’t much hard RCT evidence so if your priors are that reading isn’t very useful then, uh, don’t bother I guess.
i read almost no books throughout my entire education. the median number of books i have read per year in my life is probably literally zero, maybe one or two at most. i don’t feel like this substantially hurts my ability to do the things i care about. though tbc maybe this is a bad decision and i’m just incorrectly evaluating the counterfactual
Less bluntly: native language proficiency is one of the most obvious cases of, “you need to have started this at a very young age for it to have worked well,” and if you did then either you were goaded into doing so, or had an astounding amount of personal responsibility and interest in studying as a child
This is maybe offtopic to the thread, but I think the impression of language proficiency depends a lot on accent, and adults learning a foreign language don’t spend nearly enough time on accent. A few weeks of watching youtube videos in the target language, trying to imitate the sounds exactly right, is a small effort which will yield amazing results at any age. But for some reason adults don’t do it.
I mostly agree, except one doesn’t need a specific question. One can have a vague desire, like “I want to learn algorithmic information theory” or “This sci-fi book seems interenting”. Specific questions ane great too! But often I start vaguer.
hypothesis: the wrong reason to read books is to feel a need to read books because you’re supposed to have read them as an educated person, or as some kind of weird status thing of being part of the ingroup, or a general need to feel well read and worldly. the right reason is to feel a burning passion to find a specific piece of knowledge that will finally answer a question you are curious about that happens to be locked inside a specific book, or a gnawing pain in your heart that can only be quelled by knowing that it’s a universal problem that someone out there across space and time understands and has fixed in themselves.
I don’t really think there are right or wrong reasons to read books, just like there aren’t right or wrong reasons to exercise. The benefits will accrue either way. Consider book clubs as analogous to running clubs in producing social pressure to keep reading.
is reading as good for you as running is? we have pretty strong evidence that exercise is good for you. do you not run the risk of generalizing from the wrong fictional evidence, or at least from cherry picked real evidence that is not representative of the real world?
There’s two questions here, then: is reading good for you in general, and are the positive effects attenuated if the motivation is wrong. I think the answer to the second one is very likely “no” as long as you are, in fact, actually reading to a similar depth (compare: if you’re unmotivated to run so you half-ass it, you won’t get the same benefits). I wasn’t aware you were actually questioning the first one, and there isn’t much hard RCT evidence so if your priors are that reading isn’t very useful then, uh, don’t bother I guess.
I just want to catch when someone else drops a My Immortal reference.
I think it is good and necessary for education to involve some amount of compulsory book reading.
i read almost no books throughout my entire education. the median number of books i have read per year in my life is probably literally zero, maybe one or two at most. i don’t feel like this substantially hurts my ability to do the things i care about. though tbc maybe this is a bad decision and i’m just incorrectly evaluating the counterfactual
who made you a polyglot?
Less bluntly: native language proficiency is one of the most obvious cases of, “you need to have started this at a very young age for it to have worked well,” and if you did then either you were goaded into doing so, or had an astounding amount of personal responsibility and interest in studying as a child
This is maybe offtopic to the thread, but I think the impression of language proficiency depends a lot on accent, and adults learning a foreign language don’t spend nearly enough time on accent. A few weeks of watching youtube videos in the target language, trying to imitate the sounds exactly right, is a small effort which will yield amazing results at any age. But for some reason adults don’t do it.
Because it feels low-status. Imitating sounds is what small children do.
I mostly agree, except one doesn’t need a specific question. One can have a vague desire, like “I want to learn algorithmic information theory” or “This sci-fi book seems interenting”. Specific questions ane great too! But often I start vaguer.