> The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.

> The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.

You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid:

  I would never read a book. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

Not reading books because of "information denisty" is a lazy rationalization for dumbing yourself down. Wikipedia is good as a quick reference if you already understand something, but a disaster for learning.

I do read huge swaths of information, just directly relevant to the questions that I have, and the things required to understand that information.

Don’t have to read a book on every US president to understand what happened during the Reagan administration. And if I’m primarily interested in the Cold War, I can focus on that subject and skip out on when Reagan was governor of California, or how he met his wife.

More than that I can get information from a variety of sources, including ones that disagree with each other and have different perspectives. That has absolutely enormous value when trying to comprehend something new…and isn’t often available in a single book.

You still can’t be lazy. Laziness is antithetical to truly acquiring knowledge. But it definitely can’t only come from a book.

There are very few non-fiction books that actually need their space to communicate their idea, instead of doing it in a chapter and filling the rest of it to reach some word-count target.

I've read plenty of scientific articles that read like the author is trying to fulfill a word count. There's definitely something to be said for brevity.