MondSemmel comments on How habits work and how you may control them - Less Wrong

64 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 12 October 2013 12:17PM

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Comment author: MondSemmel 07 January 2014 04:41:47PM *  3 points [-]

Book summaries are always appreciated, but I don't understand your high praise of the book. I was disappointed with it for several reasons:

  • I wanted a book on how to change habits. In fact, my edition has the subtitle "Why we do what we do and how to change". I didn't really get much of that. There's abstract theory and even seemingly concrete advice, but I never got said advice to work.

  • I hated the book's structure, which required grinding through filler stories to get at interspersed facts. Most of these stories have hardly anything to do with habits.

  • To fit these stories into the book, the author uses terrible, strained metaphors like 'social habits' or 'organizational habits' over and over. The latter should have been left out. So I consider a huge chunk of the book to be useless.

  • Without all the waffling, the author could have made his points in half the space. Tangents lead to tangents-within-tangents. Low information density. Not zero, but low.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 07 January 2014 06:30:43PM 1 point [-]

Personally I enjoyed stories and felt that even the "social habits" and "organizational habits" parts were interesting. Though it's true that the stories led to a somewhat low information density, and that the social/organizational habits were actually a somewhat different topic from what the subtitle said.

But I did find the advice on how to actually change habits to be useful, and feel like it was a major factor in helping bring my social media addiction under control.