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RolfAndreassen comments on Open thread Jan. 5-11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: polymathwannabe 05 January 2015 12:48PM

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Comment author: RolfAndreassen 06 January 2015 03:42:37AM 3 points [-]

I wish I had your problem; mine is to find books I want to read. I very often re-read ones that are already on my shelves, for lack of anything new. However, this suggests a possible approach to your issue: When buying a book, check whether you are actually and genuinely excited to read it, so that you will open it the minute it arrives from Amazon. If not - put it in a "maybe later" pile. If it's more a case of "sure, sounds good" or, even worse, "I want to signal having read that", then give it a miss.

If you need to read stuff for work or for Serious Social Purposes like a book club, then treat it like work - set aside a certain time of day or week, and during that time, read.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 06 January 2015 11:02:43AM 1 point [-]

I'm not particularly excited to read, say, an intermediate textbook on medical statistics. In spite of this, I'm confident that the world will make more sense after I read it, and I'd like that outcome. This describes my attitude to a significant proportion of the books I intend to read.

This and other interactions have caused me to re-evaluate just how ascetic my reading habits are.