"...reading actual books in full might now be more valuable than it ever has been..."

Call me old fashioned, but when has this been ever not true? Like yeah, does someone read cliffs notes and go, "that was really edifying and I gleaned incredible insights into myself and the world!!!".

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socalgal2 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

depends on the book? I've read lots of books where it turned out the author had effectively one idea, it should have been 1 chapter, but they turned it into a book with 24 chapters of filler.

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jraby3 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've thought about this a lot. But my conclusion is that many times the base idea is valuable but the author spends time using examples and different use cases to show you the effectiveness of the idea and a wider range of uses.

Of course this isn't always true but it's true quite often.

Take one random example - Spark: The Revolutionary Science of Exercise and the Brain.

The idea is in the title. You don't need to read more than that to benefit from the idea. But all the different varieties of benefit and pathways and studies the author sites are still valuable.

	▲	sidrag22 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		another example Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World idea is also in the title,and it displays so many different scenarios of people engaging with specialized fields and interacting with them in ways that relate to their past experiences.

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throw4847285 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So you've read a lot of bad books.

Productivity hacks and pop psychology are not what we're talking about here. We're talking about interesting works of non-fiction. And if it's fiction, and you think that there is "one idea" and you can skip the rest, I don't know what to tell you.

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JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> when has this been ever not true?

We had a literary explosion in the last few decades where the competitive advantage of reading may have reached its nadir. (The supply side also screwed the pooch. Recent non-fiction has been polluted with fluff. Literature, on the other hand, is in a renaissance.)

In the last two years, on the other hand, I’ve found significant advantage in being able to speak, write and read clearly. The only thing I can think of is people marking themselves through LLM use, directly and indirectly.

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dkdcio 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

this is my constant take with “AI”…if you were lazy before, you’re lazy now. if you were producing slop before, you’re producing slop now

I think this just widens the gap between people who give a shit and those who don’t

the big thing that changes are the economics of laziness and slop