Selecting Books to Read

This blog will be more relevant to those who like reading.

I read a lot. And the more I read, the less I know. The linear increase in information and/or knowledge is accompanied by an exponential increase in the known unknown universe of ideas. I avoid fiction, but read anything and everything in all other domains. But I give the credit of my reading habit to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, it actually was magical. Naturally, I am a member of the library, it’s only logical.

There is a phase, early during the development of the reading habit, when we get highly influenced by the central idea of every book we read. We recommend it to all our friends and use its reference wherever possible. It is only after one has read sufficient books that he understands the underling writing methods and influencing techniques used by authors to infect the mind with their idea. And once this level is reached, when one can objectively read something and can validate the strength of its idea in different contexts, then one actually starts learning something. And add to that the understanding and power of probability and statistics, one can become immune to a lot of crappy, fake and incorrect material available in abundance in today’s digital age.

I usually become half-blind when I am collecting books in the library. I ignore to a large extent the name of book, author, color, size and smell of the book while collecting. I usually collect 7-10 books from different domains at a go and keep them on the desk and then sit. The collection ranges from business, management, philosophy, psychology, history, religion, economics and auto/biographies. Being blind at the collection stage helps avoiding type-2 errors, so you don’t miss a potential gold mine.

Then comes filtering. And this has come with experience. Any book which satisfies the Lindy Effect is always on my radar. The older the book (decades, even centuries), the stronger is the evidence that it has faced the tests of time and survived, and must not be ignored. The same is not true with many (most) recent publications, where the initial euphoria and success is very short lived (< 1 year).

There were some criteria I used to do filtering before, but now I don’t, because of high type-2 errors. We have a list of authors we admire, and with time this list increases. If any of these authors have said anything positive about the book in hand, then it usually is a good-to-go book for me. But as said, I don’t use this criteria anymore, it’s just an added bonus if available. Similarly, reviews are very narrow tools to filter. Rejecting a book on the basis of reading someone’s view about it is perhaps even worse that judging it by its cover.  Also now I don’t give too much heap to the recently published material, references of which are easy to find in newspapers (along with paid reviews). It’s amazing to observe how time can convert so much text invalid within short duration. Aging of material is one of the best tests for its validity.

So once we are past the acknowledgement, preface and table of contents, the actual content starts. One common thread among many classics is that each sentence has a lot of meaning and invokes thinking. More and more knowledge/information in lesser words. The trend is somewhat changing. There have been many books I have read where even after reading the entire page, there was no worthy piece of knowledge which I could condense in a single sentence. They are so superficial and generic, it’s a pain to turn pages of such books to find more and more of blabbering.

In order to hide their incompetence and crappy work, we find many authors keep throwing various references of other research works sprinkled throughout the book to give a more “data-backed” and “scientific” feel to their own work, which is actually more like “data-showoff” and “scientifism”. I think that easily 30% of the text in their book are just references. They confuse Science with Social Science. There are no Laws in social science, only theories. And theories are never certain, they are only a provisional best explanation supported by some evidence under a given set of assumptions and constraints. So the amount of error which gets introduced when a theory in social science is used in a plug-and-play fashion is exponential. By drawing tables and graphs of data they try to avoid any questioning of their work by the general reader. A one-level-down analysis of the same data by someone who works with data can land them in the soup.

Many “self-help” books and other motivational books try to center their entire stand on one single point/idea/change. They suggest that if you implement that one single thing in your life, everything will fall in place and all problems will get solved. And they give many examples of the same. It’s very tempting to buy this kind of shit, partly due to human nature which believes such one-universal-answer exists and partly due to the simplicity of the idea. We don’t like complexity. It’s human nature to break complex things down and make them simpler and shorter to understand and retain. But that doesn’t mean that the original complexity out there vanishes. No, only we distill the information/situation so that we can process and remember it, and in the process a lot of data is lost. Oversimplification of things and narrative fallacy (the obsession to fit in some logic to events when in fact there is none) causes a lot of errors in our understanding of the reality.

If I see too much of political correctness in the word choice of the author, then I feel that he doesn’t have the guts to speak his mind out, that too in his own book. He might be more concerned about how his work will be perceived by the reader and will try to adjust it accordingly. All this may point to his primary intention of monetary gains from the work than any other thing.

The avalanche of digital articles is causing more confusion than clarity. They seem to be oversimplifications of complex matters. Their promises for quick fix of problems are generally worded like ‘5 ways to manage your time’ ‘What you should be doing for getting XYZ’. These are small and ineffective band aids created by doctors who have studied at IIN for patients having deep wounds.

So these are some of the criteria I use to filter. However, more so recently, I have developed more and more resistance to the bullshit that some books offer. And this helps in one great way. All crappy work does have references to some good and original research works to make their own work seem data-backed. So a crappy book has the potential to refer to 10 original and useful books! Happy Reading.