Well taken and it goes for podcasts too! My rule of thumb is that no podcast episode contains more than ten minutes of useful information. This leads me to avoid producers like Scott Adams, who always runs an hour and a half because he's so impressed with the sound of his own voice. YMMV.
Unless you're listening back at a fast speed (and perhaps even then), audio is a slow way to consume information. But I find the advantage is that if I'm listening to it in the background the speakers slowly move around the central idea at different angles, which probably is good for retaining the central message.
"I believe that 99 percent of nonfiction authors should not be writing books. They should write essays on Substack" Bravo! I could not agree more.
This thought has been brought to the fore recently by the clutch of recent books about 'Wokeness' (Hanania, Rufo, Henderson et al). I don't thinks there's anything you can usefully say about this subject that cannot be said in a 3000 word essay. People who want to learn more about society works should read good novels....and (somewhat amazingly given the times we live in) these are still being written in quantity.
Best novelists for helping us understand the political social world? Late 20th/21st century only. I'll start with my favorites: Tom Wolfe, Saul Bellow, Michel Houellebecq...
No one shows off on a video chat by making the background look full of screens open to substacks they never read. Wait a minute. "Hello, Chris Best? Get this: 'SuperStack' it's like substack, but for bookshelves! Yeah, exactly, you print out best-of-the-week chrestomathies, and people can use them like US Reports to fill up the background! Hello? Chris?"
Love the framing of reading from the outside in. Scott Sumner had a recent post about the background info we need before really understanding and evaluating an economic claim. The best writers, like Arnold, raise these iceberg intuitions into the light. Often they can be suggested effectively in bumper sticker form, despite the complexity around them.
Quoting Sumner here because I love this example. Using the example of price gouging, Sumner writes,
"I can explain to the man on the street why price gouging is actually a good thing, but my explanation won’t sink in. It requires too much background information. Here’s just a portion of what you need to know—and I mean really know in your bones:
1. Supply and demand elasticities are far greater than common sense suggests.
2. Public policy is a repeat game—policies need to be evaluated as a long run regime, not as an ad hoc decision.
3. Retailing is a highly competitive industry, with zero economic profits in the long run.
4. Willingness to pay is far less correlated with wealth than you might assume.
5. Price controls are not an effective way to redistribute income.
6. The economy is not a zero sum game.
All of these ideas (and many more) need to be understood before considering the question of price gouging. And not just “understood” in the sense that someone tells you the words; you need to understand the ideas well enough so that you could persuasively explain the claims to your friends."
Check out "Inferential Distance" at LessWrong, which is a better term for the idea.
Mere info is something anyone can understand and learn in the time it takes to communicate it. "Background Info" is what you are going to be forced to endure for 20 minutes if you overheard your wife say, "Oh no, she found out and now she's going to kill him!" four seasons into binging some show, and before you could catch yourself, you blurted out, "And why is that?"
But the idea of inferential distance implies a sequence of steps each of which can represent large and often prohibitively difficult conceptual leaps, familiarity with the specialized terminology and structure of a whole system with its model, patterns, and worldview, and comfort working with cognitive tools and manipulating relationships between symbolic abstractions and metaphysical constructs.
It would be nice non-fiction substack writers could be more... dialogical? (I can't think of a better word.) Daniel Kahneman's "Adversarial Collaboration" comes to mind as a decent model... basically, we not only need shorter essays, but essayists who are responding directly to those with alternative viewpoints.
Sometimes yes. I’ve read many a business book that is one good lesson wrapped in self indulgent biography and a selection of pop-psych anecdotes.
But I am also reminded of the Econtalk with Adam Mastroianni on how we learn. So much of schooling is being able to parrot responses without internalizing the lesson. If someone can explain the efficient market hypothesis but still follows stock-picking shows, do they really know it?
Learning is deeper than recitation. Sure, someone might just be able to recite the bumper-sticker lesson of GGS, but it’s possible the bumper sticker is (to use an overused metaphor) the tip of an iceberg of changed thinking about history in a way that makes the mind less susceptible to arguments that contradict GGN’s lessons. Learning requires marinating the brain in an idea, which good books do well.
The trouble is conceptual cargo culting. You can give someone a bumper sticker, and they can parrot it back to you, but they haven't learned anything. You may be fooled into thinking they understand it, and they may think so too, but all they have really learned is how to imitate the patterns of speech used by the people who actually understand the concept. When they actually have to do something new on their own and their understanding is weighed and measured, it is found wanting.
Most people are not able to really understand new concepts, use them effectively and consistently, and internalize and integrate them into an updated worldview, without spending a lot of time "hanging around with them", seeing them over and over and from different angles. A lot of that time may seem like filler or a pointless waste. It's not. What it takes to get really familiar with an idea is like what it takes to get really familiar with your girlfriend.
If non-fiction books are full of padding, signaling, and beside-the-point-ism, what about documentary films? I find them even more padded, and information-sparse, and unnecessarily long.
Agreed! Good documentaries should be entertainment or drama, not just information. See for example Ken Burns's documentaries about baseball or the Civil War. He brings old photographs, letters and (written) interviews to life to evoke a sense of going back in time.
I think if I read the essay-length version of Thinking Fast and Slow I would not remember a word of it. Maybe information density trades off against effective audience uptake.
One thing I disagree with is information density. The problem isn't that books aren't information
Non-fiction books are made to be written, not read.
I think of them as showing your work. If you have a serious idea, you need to write a book about it to think through and document the implications. Anyone can make an idea sound good in a blog post. It's harder to make it work in a longer form. Doing the work of writing it out is crucial to vetting and creating workable ideas. Thus, books are made to be written.
The reasons to read books are kind of ancillary to this. You want to learn an idea in depth to be able to do more than just recite the basic concepts. You might want to do this for training about the topic, or to better support or criticize the idea, or learn how to write a book of your own on the topic.
Most non-fiction authors do condense their book into one short essay - the introduction. Most of the time you can even find the intro free on Google Books.
"If you have one really important idea, why does it require a whole book?"
Amen to that.
Compared to a book-length treatment, most good ideas would benefit from being refined to a killer essay/article/blog post, with links to supporting evidence, research, and other essays on related ideas. Assembling all of that for a book means having to cut some of the supporting info out (or else the book is too unwieldy).
I did undergraduate studies in both history & economics. At that time, for a history professor to get tenure they needed to publish one or two books. Not true in economics. As a result, the syllabus was crammed with books for a history course, but an economics course syllabus was largely articles. I wonder if the proliferation of books rather essays was due to many disciplines also requiring books for tenure.
Sometimes fiction can be a more interesting and compelling way to present ideas. Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, for example, is a weird yet fascinating work about scientific discovery, unintended consequences and ethics. This is one of the reasons I enjoy fiction as much as nonfiction.
Books are not about reading or writing but signaling culture and that you fit in to this clique or that. The "two or three sentences" is all you're supposed to retain.
"more short essays and fewer books." << yes, this is why YOUR links, and often their links, is where I'm happier spending most of limited time.
Despite thinking that my other favorite blogger, https://www.thenewneo.com/, is more accurate - I'm less interested in most politics now, and more in culture & economics.
Most good writers spend too much time on non-essential parts of the thought, or digressions. I like Freddie's writing style (de Boer's offering to do ghostwriting for others), but he's too voluminous. So are Scott Alexander & the Zvi.
But it's the book that supports the book tour and interviews and more serious discussion of The Idea. Tho Rob Henderson's "Luxury Belief" idea is so powerful, and more accurately explanatory, that he's gotten a good amount of publicity before his book, now available for pre-order "Troubled". Plus his upbringing is different than most upper middle class writers, as was JD Vance, who's fame did follow his book. And biographies, in general, have more human interest than ideas so their added length, when interesting, is fine.
On "Guns, Germs, and Steel", it's at least a few different bumper stickers and far better/ more important than many more recent books, tho missing the genetics of Razib.
A big essay, like what Robert Wrangham wrote before "The Goodness Paradox", is likely 80% of the important thinking, but possibly 120% of what is remembered.
-
Robert Wright's post on the Jobocalypse seems mostly right, but fails to mention some groups like middle managers who collect info from frontline workers and summarize the important points in reports & meetings (& ppt) to the higher VPs. Internal summaries of info used in decision making is what lots of VPs see managers as doing, and mgrBot.ai will soon be able to do that better, faster, more accurately, and more up-to-date.
Another group is gov't employees - the gov't needs programmers to make self-service for citizens better, and to make the laws and the programs more understandable - but it's supposed to be politicians who drive the bigger changes.
I'm looking forward to more e-gov't and less gov't employees.
Will be lots of manual work for humans - for lower pay. Non-STEM college grad "elite overproduction" will become an increasing problem. We need more middle class folk to ... start creating new, small companies. Many won't be so successful, but many of the future upwardly mobile folk will be small business owners, despite Dem policies which make it more difficult to start and run small companies.
"I like Freddie's writing style (de Boer's offering to do ghostwriting for others), but he's too voluminous. So are Scott Alexander & the Zvi."
I think they know it's good to write shorter, and that they'd prefer to write shorter, but they can't.
People think the internet punishes long. But just as often, it punishes short. When you get tired of getting punished for short, you learn to go longer that you'd like to.
The internet can be a really hostile scene: unfair, unjust, brutal, merciless. Almost as bad as going to court. Still, outside the American legal system, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Anyone who has survived and even thrived for a long time in that Mad Max Beyond Cyberdome has done so by learning to always build up and keep up the strongest defenses. And "Security Eats Efficiency."
It's like a mass-public-space security problem. If you are regularly going to a place with 10,000 friends and only one determined assassin, then you still need to deploy the whole Secret Service protection machine every time.
The law is made of words, and so there is no better example of how this framework of incentives forces long length. Motion, Opinions, Contracts, legislation, regulatory issuances, and all manner of legal documents became so absurdly over-long over time that no one can or does actually read them anymore. And that was because every time some lawyer decided to leave some minor and reasonably-excludable detail out of the previous version of that document, some determined and motivated hostile opponent used that omission as an opportunity for attack.
Well, the internet is like that too. People get used to the most common typical attacks - mostly unjust and stupid - and they put extra work into forestalling them.
It's not just about length, detail, completeness, etc.
There are so many ways """discourse""" on the internet goes bad that eventually people adjusted and settled into a new cultural equilibrium of typical patterns of interaction and performance. A really crappy equilibrium. Read Lili Loofbourow's "Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate".
One interesting thing that happened is the emergence of different platforms with different typical forms and ranges of text. Shortest-form is phone texting followed closely by X (TSMPFKA Twitter) or now Mastadon or whatever, Short-to-Medium on Blogs and Reddit, Medium for Papers and some light Journals (e.g., The Atlantic) Long-form for the more thoughtful online Magazines and Journals, that kind of thing.
Whatever you want to say about tweeting, one advantage people have is that, when criticized for not being more complete or fleshing out all the details, they have the socially acceptable excuse of being able to say, "Oh come on! What do you expect, idiot? It's Twitter! It's stupid to try and hold me to that standard when I only get enough room for a few words!"
As such, you see people spread out their interactions and commentary across various platforms with the differently ranged text forms and with different expectations for rigor and formality. That reminds me of Howard Stern's old "King of All Media" boast, but today's top commentators seem to all have to be "Princes of All Platforms".
What is the goal of the author? If the only goal were to disseminate knowledge, then maybe the Substack essay is best. But if you're a Nobel prize winner, you write the book.
Personally, I'm mostly interested in non-fiction books that seem to run counter to my intuition. And even in that case I'd rather read a review first to make sure the arguments of the book are reasonable and supported by data before spending my time reading it.
If a book makes a case for something I already believe in or intuitively think is right, I'll do the mental exercise of arguing for it myself (citing data, not books or authors!) to check whether I'm actually deceiving myself. Maybe I think I can already argue for that case convincingly when I actually can't.
Well taken and it goes for podcasts too! My rule of thumb is that no podcast episode contains more than ten minutes of useful information. This leads me to avoid producers like Scott Adams, who always runs an hour and a half because he's so impressed with the sound of his own voice. YMMV.
Podcast I found information dense of the top of my head:
1) old hardcore history
2) age of napoleon (I recommend the latest one about napoleonic art)
3) revolutions by mike Duncan, despite his feeling it went long
Stuff with lots of filler:
1) new hardcore history
2) all those wondery shows
Unless you're listening back at a fast speed (and perhaps even then), audio is a slow way to consume information. But I find the advantage is that if I'm listening to it in the background the speakers slowly move around the central idea at different angles, which probably is good for retaining the central message.
The 80,000 Hours podcast has very long interviews but I find them to be relatively information dense.
"I believe that 99 percent of nonfiction authors should not be writing books. They should write essays on Substack" Bravo! I could not agree more.
This thought has been brought to the fore recently by the clutch of recent books about 'Wokeness' (Hanania, Rufo, Henderson et al). I don't thinks there's anything you can usefully say about this subject that cannot be said in a 3000 word essay. People who want to learn more about society works should read good novels....and (somewhat amazingly given the times we live in) these are still being written in quantity.
Best novelists for helping us understand the political social world? Late 20th/21st century only. I'll start with my favorites: Tom Wolfe, Saul Bellow, Michel Houellebecq...
No one shows off on a video chat by making the background look full of screens open to substacks they never read. Wait a minute. "Hello, Chris Best? Get this: 'SuperStack' it's like substack, but for bookshelves! Yeah, exactly, you print out best-of-the-week chrestomathies, and people can use them like US Reports to fill up the background! Hello? Chris?"
Eh?
Love the framing of reading from the outside in. Scott Sumner had a recent post about the background info we need before really understanding and evaluating an economic claim. The best writers, like Arnold, raise these iceberg intuitions into the light. Often they can be suggested effectively in bumper sticker form, despite the complexity around them.
Quoting Sumner here because I love this example. Using the example of price gouging, Sumner writes,
"I can explain to the man on the street why price gouging is actually a good thing, but my explanation won’t sink in. It requires too much background information. Here’s just a portion of what you need to know—and I mean really know in your bones:
1. Supply and demand elasticities are far greater than common sense suggests.
2. Public policy is a repeat game—policies need to be evaluated as a long run regime, not as an ad hoc decision.
3. Retailing is a highly competitive industry, with zero economic profits in the long run.
4. Willingness to pay is far less correlated with wealth than you might assume.
5. Price controls are not an effective way to redistribute income.
6. The economy is not a zero sum game.
All of these ideas (and many more) need to be understood before considering the question of price gouging. And not just “understood” in the sense that someone tells you the words; you need to understand the ideas well enough so that you could persuasively explain the claims to your friends."
Check out "Inferential Distance" at LessWrong, which is a better term for the idea.
Mere info is something anyone can understand and learn in the time it takes to communicate it. "Background Info" is what you are going to be forced to endure for 20 minutes if you overheard your wife say, "Oh no, she found out and now she's going to kill him!" four seasons into binging some show, and before you could catch yourself, you blurted out, "And why is that?"
But the idea of inferential distance implies a sequence of steps each of which can represent large and often prohibitively difficult conceptual leaps, familiarity with the specialized terminology and structure of a whole system with its model, patterns, and worldview, and comfort working with cognitive tools and manipulating relationships between symbolic abstractions and metaphysical constructs.
"2. Public policy is a repeat game—policies need to be evaluated as a long run regime, not as an ad hoc decision."
Thank you for posting this. I should probably read Sumner more often.
It would be nice non-fiction substack writers could be more... dialogical? (I can't think of a better word.) Daniel Kahneman's "Adversarial Collaboration" comes to mind as a decent model... basically, we not only need shorter essays, but essayists who are responding directly to those with alternative viewpoints.
In the blogging days Trackback served that function
Sometimes yes. I’ve read many a business book that is one good lesson wrapped in self indulgent biography and a selection of pop-psych anecdotes.
But I am also reminded of the Econtalk with Adam Mastroianni on how we learn. So much of schooling is being able to parrot responses without internalizing the lesson. If someone can explain the efficient market hypothesis but still follows stock-picking shows, do they really know it?
Learning is deeper than recitation. Sure, someone might just be able to recite the bumper-sticker lesson of GGS, but it’s possible the bumper sticker is (to use an overused metaphor) the tip of an iceberg of changed thinking about history in a way that makes the mind less susceptible to arguments that contradict GGN’s lessons. Learning requires marinating the brain in an idea, which good books do well.
The trouble is conceptual cargo culting. You can give someone a bumper sticker, and they can parrot it back to you, but they haven't learned anything. You may be fooled into thinking they understand it, and they may think so too, but all they have really learned is how to imitate the patterns of speech used by the people who actually understand the concept. When they actually have to do something new on their own and their understanding is weighed and measured, it is found wanting.
Most people are not able to really understand new concepts, use them effectively and consistently, and internalize and integrate them into an updated worldview, without spending a lot of time "hanging around with them", seeing them over and over and from different angles. A lot of that time may seem like filler or a pointless waste. It's not. What it takes to get really familiar with an idea is like what it takes to get really familiar with your girlfriend.
If non-fiction books are full of padding, signaling, and beside-the-point-ism, what about documentary films? I find them even more padded, and information-sparse, and unnecessarily long.
Agreed! Good documentaries should be entertainment or drama, not just information. See for example Ken Burns's documentaries about baseball or the Civil War. He brings old photographs, letters and (written) interviews to life to evoke a sense of going back in time.
What's worse, documentary films have a marked tendency to go toward propaganda. I blame Michael Moore, but he's certainly not the only one.
I think if I read the essay-length version of Thinking Fast and Slow I would not remember a word of it. Maybe information density trades off against effective audience uptake.
One thing I disagree with is information density. The problem isn't that books aren't information
Non-fiction books are made to be written, not read.
I think of them as showing your work. If you have a serious idea, you need to write a book about it to think through and document the implications. Anyone can make an idea sound good in a blog post. It's harder to make it work in a longer form. Doing the work of writing it out is crucial to vetting and creating workable ideas. Thus, books are made to be written.
The reasons to read books are kind of ancillary to this. You want to learn an idea in depth to be able to do more than just recite the basic concepts. You might want to do this for training about the topic, or to better support or criticize the idea, or learn how to write a book of your own on the topic.
Most non-fiction authors do condense their book into one short essay - the introduction. Most of the time you can even find the intro free on Google Books.
"If you have one really important idea, why does it require a whole book?"
Amen to that.
Compared to a book-length treatment, most good ideas would benefit from being refined to a killer essay/article/blog post, with links to supporting evidence, research, and other essays on related ideas. Assembling all of that for a book means having to cut some of the supporting info out (or else the book is too unwieldy).
I did undergraduate studies in both history & economics. At that time, for a history professor to get tenure they needed to publish one or two books. Not true in economics. As a result, the syllabus was crammed with books for a history course, but an economics course syllabus was largely articles. I wonder if the proliferation of books rather essays was due to many disciplines also requiring books for tenure.
Sometimes fiction can be a more interesting and compelling way to present ideas. Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, for example, is a weird yet fascinating work about scientific discovery, unintended consequences and ethics. This is one of the reasons I enjoy fiction as much as nonfiction.
Books are not about reading or writing but signaling culture and that you fit in to this clique or that. The "two or three sentences" is all you're supposed to retain.
"more short essays and fewer books." << yes, this is why YOUR links, and often their links, is where I'm happier spending most of limited time.
Despite thinking that my other favorite blogger, https://www.thenewneo.com/, is more accurate - I'm less interested in most politics now, and more in culture & economics.
Most good writers spend too much time on non-essential parts of the thought, or digressions. I like Freddie's writing style (de Boer's offering to do ghostwriting for others), but he's too voluminous. So are Scott Alexander & the Zvi.
But it's the book that supports the book tour and interviews and more serious discussion of The Idea. Tho Rob Henderson's "Luxury Belief" idea is so powerful, and more accurately explanatory, that he's gotten a good amount of publicity before his book, now available for pre-order "Troubled". Plus his upbringing is different than most upper middle class writers, as was JD Vance, who's fame did follow his book. And biographies, in general, have more human interest than ideas so their added length, when interesting, is fine.
On "Guns, Germs, and Steel", it's at least a few different bumper stickers and far better/ more important than many more recent books, tho missing the genetics of Razib.
A big essay, like what Robert Wrangham wrote before "The Goodness Paradox", is likely 80% of the important thinking, but possibly 120% of what is remembered.
-
Robert Wright's post on the Jobocalypse seems mostly right, but fails to mention some groups like middle managers who collect info from frontline workers and summarize the important points in reports & meetings (& ppt) to the higher VPs. Internal summaries of info used in decision making is what lots of VPs see managers as doing, and mgrBot.ai will soon be able to do that better, faster, more accurately, and more up-to-date.
Another group is gov't employees - the gov't needs programmers to make self-service for citizens better, and to make the laws and the programs more understandable - but it's supposed to be politicians who drive the bigger changes.
I'm looking forward to more e-gov't and less gov't employees.
Will be lots of manual work for humans - for lower pay. Non-STEM college grad "elite overproduction" will become an increasing problem. We need more middle class folk to ... start creating new, small companies. Many won't be so successful, but many of the future upwardly mobile folk will be small business owners, despite Dem policies which make it more difficult to start and run small companies.
"I like Freddie's writing style (de Boer's offering to do ghostwriting for others), but he's too voluminous. So are Scott Alexander & the Zvi."
I think they know it's good to write shorter, and that they'd prefer to write shorter, but they can't.
People think the internet punishes long. But just as often, it punishes short. When you get tired of getting punished for short, you learn to go longer that you'd like to.
The internet can be a really hostile scene: unfair, unjust, brutal, merciless. Almost as bad as going to court. Still, outside the American legal system, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Anyone who has survived and even thrived for a long time in that Mad Max Beyond Cyberdome has done so by learning to always build up and keep up the strongest defenses. And "Security Eats Efficiency."
It's like a mass-public-space security problem. If you are regularly going to a place with 10,000 friends and only one determined assassin, then you still need to deploy the whole Secret Service protection machine every time.
The law is made of words, and so there is no better example of how this framework of incentives forces long length. Motion, Opinions, Contracts, legislation, regulatory issuances, and all manner of legal documents became so absurdly over-long over time that no one can or does actually read them anymore. And that was because every time some lawyer decided to leave some minor and reasonably-excludable detail out of the previous version of that document, some determined and motivated hostile opponent used that omission as an opportunity for attack.
Well, the internet is like that too. People get used to the most common typical attacks - mostly unjust and stupid - and they put extra work into forestalling them.
It's not just about length, detail, completeness, etc.
There are so many ways """discourse""" on the internet goes bad that eventually people adjusted and settled into a new cultural equilibrium of typical patterns of interaction and performance. A really crappy equilibrium. Read Lili Loofbourow's "Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate".
One interesting thing that happened is the emergence of different platforms with different typical forms and ranges of text. Shortest-form is phone texting followed closely by X (TSMPFKA Twitter) or now Mastadon or whatever, Short-to-Medium on Blogs and Reddit, Medium for Papers and some light Journals (e.g., The Atlantic) Long-form for the more thoughtful online Magazines and Journals, that kind of thing.
Whatever you want to say about tweeting, one advantage people have is that, when criticized for not being more complete or fleshing out all the details, they have the socially acceptable excuse of being able to say, "Oh come on! What do you expect, idiot? It's Twitter! It's stupid to try and hold me to that standard when I only get enough room for a few words!"
As such, you see people spread out their interactions and commentary across various platforms with the differently ranged text forms and with different expectations for rigor and formality. That reminds me of Howard Stern's old "King of All Media" boast, but today's top commentators seem to all have to be "Princes of All Platforms".
What is the goal of the author? If the only goal were to disseminate knowledge, then maybe the Substack essay is best. But if you're a Nobel prize winner, you write the book.
Personally, I'm mostly interested in non-fiction books that seem to run counter to my intuition. And even in that case I'd rather read a review first to make sure the arguments of the book are reasonable and supported by data before spending my time reading it.
If a book makes a case for something I already believe in or intuitively think is right, I'll do the mental exercise of arguing for it myself (citing data, not books or authors!) to check whether I'm actually deceiving myself. Maybe I think I can already argue for that case convincingly when I actually can't.