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My Simple Habit for Smarter Book Reading - Scott H Young

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A single habit has improved the quality of my book reading more than anything else: reading rebuttals. To explain, let me first give some context. I’ve long enjoyed reading big-idea books in science, business or self-improvement. These books range from mega-bestsellers (The Tipping Point; Guns, Germs and Steel) to the relatively obscure (The Enigma of Reason; How Asia Works). In most cases, I don’t have deep expertise in the topic I’m reading about. The research literature the authors cite is unfamiliar to me. I don’t know whether the proposed idea is a near-consensus opinion or some quirky theory held by a fringe minority. As a result, reading big-idea books can lead to a common pattern: If you’ve been through this cycle a few times, it’s hard not to become cynical. What’s the point of reading books if you frequently end up getting suckered in by bad ideas? How can you learn new things without getting seduced by misleading arguments? The classic advice for dealing with this problem is

A single habit has improved the quality of my book reading more than anything else: reading rebuttals. To explain, let me first give some context. I’ve long enjoyed reading big-idea books in science, business or self-improvement. These books range from mega-bestsellers ( The Tipping Point ; Guns, Germs and Steel ) to the relatively obscure ( The Enigma of Reason ; How Asia Works ). In most cases, I don’t have deep expertise in the topic I’m reading about. The research literature the authors cite is unfamiliar to me. I don’t know whether the proposed idea is a near-consensus opinion or some qui

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