7 September 2020
0109
I’m always surprised by how little I’m able to recall of books I’ve read, even if I’m able to recall feeling while reading them that I’ve absorbed plenty of appropriately-contextualised salient points with examples and analogies in mind. I’m often left feeling like most of these books really ought to have been essays.*
I usually just remember a couple of compelling sentences that encapsulate a couple of big ideas, and I’m often left to fill in the blanks on my own when bragging shamelessly at cocktail parties. What’s interesting is how often I’m able to get away with filling in those blanks with only rudimentary intuition. It’s often relatively straightforward when given the thrust of the argument. You probably do this too. I’m not often that wrong, and you probably aren’t either.
The reason this is worth keeping in mind is because it forces me to hunt immediately for the thesis statement/core idea in any exposition I’m tackling. It’s very easy to get lost in the superfluous detail.
You want to look for the statement of the central idea as first conceived and later formulated in the mind of the author herself. **This is liable to be more amenable to memory and intuition, and importantly, is probably where most of the value is. I think this is at the core of most Pareto optimal ways to read non-fiction***, i.e. to find the thesis statement or core idea framed in the way that it was plausibly first formulated in the mind of the author, and then to try and fill in the blanks yourself by reasoning through the material. Sometimes you will not be able to do this, and when not, you should revisit the source material and look for the missing links. I feel like this process gives me an intuition/feel for the topic at hand.
Your natural next thought here ought to be: if we really just remember a few sentences/key ideas from the books we read and that these could (mostly) be elucidated in essays, then why are most of these books so long?
A lot of it boils down to insurance or self-protection. Most of the waffle that you read are attempts to elicit credence by simulating rigour.
You find this phenomenon to an extreme in academic research papers. The statement of research or the fresh idea is often best encapsulated in the abstract or conclusion and the 40 other pages are often either an attempt to signal credibility by intimidation or to counter anticipated objections to the central thesis. Another amusing place you see this general trend is in computer programs. Often the core logic is nestled somewhere deep, encapsulated in a few lines of code, sandwiched between dozens of lines catering to special cases.
Now these thoughts ought not to be construed as an attack on the value of rigour or precision. I’m simply stating that rigour (or more often, waffle, its paltry imitation) as present in most expositions often detract from rather than aid the understanding of the central point, and that without prior intuition gained from reasoning through the statement of the core idea, most of the details are irrelevant.
Here’s an interesting further idea: I wonder if the prevalence of bullshit waffle in academic papers in a society correlates with the price of liability insurance, the number of characters of small print in tenancy agreements, the average length of footnotes in articles, and more generally whether any of these things correlate negatively with other measures of interpersonal trust within society.
That is, the same way that the prevalence of liability insurance and the ease of litigation inhibits freedom of activity and actually makes it harder to trust people because you no longer need to, I think that all the waffle you find in research or literature inhibits understanding and hurts credence on average, in the long run.
I think what’s going on here, in some abstract sense, is a failure of mutual trust between the writer and the reader. i.e. writing is often much longer than it needs to be in order to tackle anticipated objections from a small subsection of the population, and that this ironically, often makes the core ideas less salient in general****.
I spy with my little eye a prisoner’s dilemma.
PS: These footnotes were intended with mild irony. Look at me, exemplifying the need to counter anticipated objections:
* I think there are a few pointed counter-examples of books that are sufficiently ideas-dense to justify their length. The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb comes to mind as an accessible example.
**I’ve italicised what I think is the central statement here to exemplify the point.
***That is, the Pareto optimal approach of Pareto optimal approaches to reading. (Provided you’re learning for the sake of recall or to learn rather for entertainment or to imbibe style, ofcourse.)
****This is an interesting example of Minority Rule, I think.
Further Reading:
– Farnam Street on Reading
– Frankfurt on Bullshit