SarahC comments on Rational Reading: Thoughts On Prioritizing Books - Less Wrong

27 Post author: patrissimo 27 March 2011 07:54PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 27 March 2011 10:39:51PM 3 points [-]

How do I decide what to read? Here's one, non-optimized, person's response.

For practical subjects, it's pretty obvious within a short period of nosing around what the standard texts are. I also have access to some very knowledgeable individuals whose book recommendations I'd take unquestioningly. I recently decided what Python book to learn from; it wasn't a particularly tricky process, since the consensus on StackExchange and among my friends happened to agree with my own assessment of which books covered the topics I'd need. In my experience, the question "What's the best book to learn X?" usually has one or two clear right answers, and if there's disagreement, then you haven't defined "X" precisely enough. (Occasionally, my favorite textbook is not the standard one, because I'm biased towards simplicity/ease of learning more than most people, so sometimes I have to account for that.)

For pleasure reading, I've developed a pretty fine ability to be sensitive to what I like and only read what I like. I don't find myself mired in crud I don't enjoy. It may make me a bit lopsided (my non-math bookshelf currently contains mostly science fiction) but as long as it's pleasure reading, it ought to be pleasurable, right?

I've kind of refined my internet reading to be in that intermediate place, "good for me in the long run but not immediately goal-oriented." Politics is out -- gives the illusion of learning but I'll never use it down the road. My Google Reader is mostly blogs on technical subjects now -- learning, compressed sensing, that kinda thing. When I'm too tired to think, and I want the internet to soothe my weary brain, I go for a short story or BoingBoing.

I've never really read life-improvement books. I'm don't take advice readily; part of that is just stubbornness, and part is that I suspect that successful people don't usually know why they succeeded, and so they don't know how to tell you how to reproduce it.