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The Case Against (Most) Books

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Many effective altruists and rationalists oppose reading books. This position is easily mocked, but as someone who is familiar with the way academia and publishing work, I think it has a lot to recommend to it. According to the great moral leader Sam Bankman-Fried, I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post. Ideally, one would like to think that if someone has written a 300-page book, it means that they have 300 pages worth of things to say. My experience is that is rarely the case. People generally have an idea that can be expressed in terms much shorter than that, but extending your idea into a book looks impressive on a CV and gets you invited on TV shows and podcasts. To take one example, the last book I finished was David Sinclair’s Lifespan. It has three parts, and the last of them is nothing but two chapters about his political an

Essays The Case Against (Most) Books Taking opportunity costs seriously in the quest for knowledge Richard Hanania May 10, 2023 261 159 28 Share Many effective altruists and rationalists oppose reading books. This position is easily mocked, but as someone who is familiar with the way academia and publishing work, I think it has a lot to recommend to it. According to the great moral leader Sam Bankman-Fried, I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog

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