Also, if you're really interested in a subject, talking with an expert is fun. You're really missing out on the good stuff if you keep to yourself and your books. I think this goes equally for the arts and the sciences.

There's more to it than that: Books are random access devices. You can skim portions, or re-read potions in great depth, and when you suddenly realize you aren't understanding something it's typically easier to jump back to the place where you now realize you had lost your way. Videos and podcasts lack the necessary affordances for deep understanding.

Blog posts can be deep too, but by their nature are typically so only for single topics. This can be good or bad, though for the point the author was making, yes, not helpful. But I don't dismiss them at all.

> Books are in-depth, and well-organized knowledge. ...

Books can be poorly written too BTW.

Not that books are useless or you shouldn't read them.

It's "more well read about those subjects" :)

I found the premise of the article pretty odd. I enjoy learning, not necessarily reading. When I begin to learn a new topic, it's almost never that I'd rely on a single book. Most books assume certain prerequisites, and are written specifically to that level. But it is highly unlikely I'll have had the same exposure to every topic the book covers. Some I'll find too obscure and need a more basic explanation, and others I'll find too basic and either skip the section altogether, or find a more generalized review of the material. It is almost never that I read every page of a given book.

Granted, I do not read the types of books the article's author used as examples. I'm more likely to read books on topics like computer vision, or computational astronomy. And I don't restrict myself to reading, I'll use any material available like videos or on-line courses.

It's easier than that! Just reading (in full) the Wikipedia article about something you probably makes you more knowledgeable than 90% of the general population. Reading a whole book about it -- maybe 99%.

That said, I agree with you that having more sources of information reduces the risk of falling to the misconceptions of one or a few authors.

I don't think this is true. In theory, you may be able to find all the information contained in the books, but it's drowning in garbage. The benefit of books is that the information has been distilled for you. Good books distill information better than bad books.

> One issue for me is that books are a very big time investment. I read very slowly and I don't remember everything I read either.

I hardly read books any more, though I do enjoy a day of reading in the sun when it's warm. I listen to audiobooks while I'm traveling, working out, or doing housework.

> I have thousands of non-fiction (mostly self-improvement) books in my reading list on GoodReads, but almost never bother to read any.

Different folks will tell you different things, but for me, the following self-help content covered most of what I've read to date:

* Any Alan Watts lecture series - I listened to "Out of your mind" (listen to the whole thing) * The Book of Joy (Dalai Lama and Desmond TuTu) * Never split the Difference (Chris Voss) * The hard thing about hard things (Ben Horowitz)

And then read (or listen to) whatever strikes your fancy.

The concentrated focus of books makes them stick better, in my opinion, than blog posts, online commentary, etc.

As a blanket advice, I really don't agree. It depends on what books, it depends what they're trying to teach you. Huge difference between a reference book and... pretty much any other kind of books.

Many times you don't want to know something, you just want to know something exists/is possible/has already been done. Skimming through books cover to cover is one way to do it.

I'm not sure how true that is anymore. If by "book" you mean "monothematic long-form treatise by a small number of authors" then I have read essentially zero books in the past year, although I have done a great deal of reading otherwise. Research papers, magazines, blog posts, Wikipedia articles, cherry-picked single chapters of books can in aggregate absolutely stand in for a few books. And then there are sources of knowledge that go beyond reading, such as personal experience, original research, attending talks, etc.

I think your test would be more accurate if you asked more generally how they learned what they know about the matter.

If you just have one very specific question, it's often easier to ask ChatGPT and then fact-check its output.

But neither is a blog or reddit post.

I've written two books and read countless others and I strongly believe that books are a much better shape for doing comprehensive justice to a topic.

I've learned a ton from blogs and random articles, of course, but there is nothing quite like the in-depth knowledge you get when a single author has chosen to organize and write an entire book.

The additional use of "books" is further misleading and technically not correct. It is one single book.

Is see no reason to defend this spreading of misinformation. Do you?

I dispute this idea. For some disciplines, this may be so. For other, such as physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, civil engineering, poetry...actually, for most disciplines they aren't based on fundamental books. They're based on a living community of practice.

In these disciplines a book is important only insofar as it can be used to increase your abilities. No one goes and studies the textual details of Landau & Lifshitz as a guide to anything, any more than they do so with TAOCP.

Rather than worry about fundamental books, worry about opening up black boxes at a steady rate.

Reminds me of the saying, “I can tell it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”

My undergrad humanities courses were 100+ students packed into a giant lecture hall listening to a professor talk. There was essentially no interaction.