To elaborate on what @oneplane said, and in response to OP:
> I spend most of my day reading online articles/conversations, watching videos, and listening to podcasts [...] I assume that the best part of the best books will surface in daily conversations, YouTube videos, CliffsNotes, podcasts, Reddit posts/comments, blog articles, etc. I even find myself reading the comments and not reading the article most of the time. I'm fine with bullet point style summaries and don't care much about the fluff that fills most books I've read in the past.
Unless you find a really good community, most online discussions are largely banal. It is possible to occasionally find good discussions about fairly concrete topics (technical, or one-step away from technical), but for everything else, it is largely a crapshoot.
The quality distribution of content is such a sharp power law that it might be enough to read a couple of dozen good books in one's life to get that value -- but read them thoroughly and actively reflect on the message, rather than rifling through them for "collecting information". Really good ideas (deep truths) and really good communication tend to stay good for a long time (decades... centuries... millenia). The longer they've lasted the more likely they are to have true lasting value (otherwise why would anyone have bothered passing them down generations!? Check out the "Lindy effect"). Most new books haven't yet had the chance to get called out on -- assuming they are even interesting enough for that. I would rather spend more time listening to and thinking deeply about those messages from people who have thought as/more deeply about the topic.
Since it takes very low-effort to post on the internet (relative to the effort to understand a subject), and it takes an order-of-magnitude more effort to cut through bullshit than to create it, online discussions will typically be dominated by bullshit (unless the community has exceptionally good regulating mechanisms). Since (most) people today are conditioned to be driven by convenience and novelty (rather than quality), forums are not particularly good even for curation -- I would rather trust specific individuals.
For that reason, and the ubiquitous "sales culture" that has come about, I find contemporary discussions (including most contemporary books) to largely be undigested opinions spewed by people who have not thought deeply enough -- it's the Red Queen effect with people mostly trying to sell their messages (optimised for "engagement") better rather than actually improving the quality of their thinking. And advertizing is a very poor proxy for quality (irrespective of what market economists might try to argue).
Any reference to "content" or "engagement" in the contemporary sense---the very notion that one can generalize across all ideas/messages, without thoughtful discrimination---makes me want to puke.
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For 90% of the gain with 10% of the effort, how to find 2-5 good books to read each year? Here's the strategy which has worked for me so far:
1. Find a few authors (on the internet, or otherwise) whose thinking I admire/respect, and who I find to be speaking deeper truths than others.
2. Look at what they list as their most influential books; go read those books.
Those books typically turn out to be faaaaar better than generic online "content". Digesting ideas from reading is much like a muscle to be built by exercise, to it gets easier after the first few books.
You are comparing average (or worse) internet content to the best books out there. That's basically a straw man argument. The question "Are any books worth it?" is an obvious "yes" and not worth discussion.
I submit that you can find good blogs, podcasts, etc., and find out what their creators are inspired by and consume that content.
I also contend that the whole thing is a false dichotomy. There's no particular reason to just read books or just listen to podcasts. Do both, obviously. Sort by more interesting criteria than the delivery medium.
What do you want, fiction? Non fiction, self help. Entertaining or thought providing or challenging?
Your question is insanely broad. Also what is the longest single work you have read? Many of the best reads take forever to get going. Also they are insanly long and thus intimidating
Sometimes you can combine an answer to such a question by getting someone to read a relatively compact one like "The Physics of Star Trek". That won't work for people that don't like technology or science, but there are similar examples on other subjects. Works well for people who haven't started asking detailed questions yet, but may expect a fitting answer anyway.
If after starting or even finishing such a book and they like it, it gets a lot easier to recommend more specifically after that. If they don't like it, it either means the book needs to be less complex, or more single-topic and perhaps even non-fiction to remove more unknown elements.
Interesting that The Second Sex is included in this list, given that its author believed that women are generally too stupid to choose what's best for them in life.
> No woman should be authorized to stay home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
You left out the next sentence, so in context it reads “ ... because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.“
> “ ... women are generally too stupid to choose what’s best for them in life.”
Those are your words, not Simone de Beauvoirs.
I haven’t read “The Second Sex” yet but I have read “The Ethics of Ambiguity” by her.
I would bet a dollar though that Beauvoir considers stupidity an individual human trait generously distributed across all genders.
Here are some other quotes from The Second Sex.
"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it."
"To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form."
I know those are my words, but this is the implicit message I interpret from hers. One must think rather lowly of others (and/or extremely highly of oneself and/or one’s ideology) to claim to know what’s best for those others.
> I spend most of my day reading online articles/conversations, watching videos, and listening to podcasts [...] I assume that the best part of the best books will surface in daily conversations, YouTube videos, CliffsNotes, podcasts, Reddit posts/comments, blog articles, etc. I even find myself reading the comments and not reading the article most of the time. I'm fine with bullet point style summaries and don't care much about the fluff that fills most books I've read in the past.
Unless you find a really good community, most online discussions are largely banal. It is possible to occasionally find good discussions about fairly concrete topics (technical, or one-step away from technical), but for everything else, it is largely a crapshoot.
The quality distribution of content is such a sharp power law that it might be enough to read a couple of dozen good books in one's life to get that value -- but read them thoroughly and actively reflect on the message, rather than rifling through them for "collecting information". Really good ideas (deep truths) and really good communication tend to stay good for a long time (decades... centuries... millenia). The longer they've lasted the more likely they are to have true lasting value (otherwise why would anyone have bothered passing them down generations!? Check out the "Lindy effect"). Most new books haven't yet had the chance to get called out on -- assuming they are even interesting enough for that. I would rather spend more time listening to and thinking deeply about those messages from people who have thought as/more deeply about the topic.
Since it takes very low-effort to post on the internet (relative to the effort to understand a subject), and it takes an order-of-magnitude more effort to cut through bullshit than to create it, online discussions will typically be dominated by bullshit (unless the community has exceptionally good regulating mechanisms). Since (most) people today are conditioned to be driven by convenience and novelty (rather than quality), forums are not particularly good even for curation -- I would rather trust specific individuals.
For that reason, and the ubiquitous "sales culture" that has come about, I find contemporary discussions (including most contemporary books) to largely be undigested opinions spewed by people who have not thought deeply enough -- it's the Red Queen effect with people mostly trying to sell their messages (optimised for "engagement") better rather than actually improving the quality of their thinking. And advertizing is a very poor proxy for quality (irrespective of what market economists might try to argue).
Any reference to "content" or "engagement" in the contemporary sense---the very notion that one can generalize across all ideas/messages, without thoughtful discrimination---makes me want to puke.
----
For 90% of the gain with 10% of the effort, how to find 2-5 good books to read each year? Here's the strategy which has worked for me so far:
1. Find a few authors (on the internet, or otherwise) whose thinking I admire/respect, and who I find to be speaking deeper truths than others.
2. Look at what they list as their most influential books; go read those books.
Those books typically turn out to be faaaaar better than generic online "content". Digesting ideas from reading is much like a muscle to be built by exercise, to it gets easier after the first few books.