The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

Plenty of animals go out of their way to be seen. If it’s a pretty bird it’s most likely a male bird.

Animals at play do appear to show off to each other. Orcas wear salmons as hats as if it was a fast fashion trend.

I don’t think humans are unique in this regard at all.

Most things people do, and the stories they weave around their lives are about finding ways that allow them to think of themselves as being a certain kind of person. More than money, more than others' opinions even.

I think it’s latent status signaling. Humans are hierarchical primates and we search for status in our social groups. To that end, it’s not much different than other social creatures that seek social status in their tribe/pride/pack/pod.

Being "seen and validated" translates to "feeling superior" when people want to be seen and validated on a scale that very few other people are, and I think many people naively want this.

I am getting old and I agree.

>The older I get, the more I'm convinced that people do this less to actually feel superior to others and more as a desperate act of establishing an identity, ANY identity, to simply feel seen and validated in spite of just being yet another person on the planet.

I think this is broadly correct. I have had a sense for a while now that there are quite a few people express extreme versions of their opinions substituting amplitude for fidelity. A strongly held opinion isn't heard as much as a weakly held opinion forcefully expressed.

Part of this is down to mass communication and it occurs for all things. There are good apps for mobile phones that never get seen because the focus goes to the top few percent. The same is probably true for games on Steam. Most peoples' blogs will be read by fewer people than the number of blogs they read themselves for the simple reason that some blogs get millions of readers.

I can see the obvious frustration that must be felt when someone has an idea to share that they feel isn't being expressed. When it comes to emotional expression, small communities are required if you want to have a group that reciprocates attention. Most people don't want to be heard by everyone, they just want to be heard. What we have is an environment where a few people are heard by everyone and lots of people are unheard.

I think sites like HN, and the smaller subreddit communities along with discords (I miss IRC, It's still there, but the people aren't) work against that flow.

There's an element of social 'groupthink' pressure if communities of similar opinions cluster, more often against ideas than for, but I think that on these platforms it also meets a degree of resistance that helps balance things.

HN has Rust/AI/Bitcoin where there are always a few people who will express distain for the subject. Each of these seem weird if you actually consider the criticisms as being in good faith.

Why should people be annoyed about liking another programming language, or want to write things in it, or talk about it?

Why are there people who are certain AI is doomed to failure that are so concerned about the money of investors? Especially when many of the people who express such distain for AI generally do not look terribly kindly towards investors anyway. It's like they don't like rich people while simultaneously concerned that the rich might lose all their money.

Why are those who decry Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme so angry about the fact that other people, who they disagree with and denigrate, are doomed to lose their money? Why are they so concerned for the finances for people they don't like?

I think the motivation behind all of them is they want their dissenting position to be heard. When these things are talked about people can see some degree of popularity for an opinion that they don't hold. It seems it isn't enough to think "I don't think that will work, but good luck to them."

> I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong

The good news is that not only does the "private researcher" (curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate some work.

The danger is that some wannabes create even more noise on the proper science channels that are already polluted by fraudsters generating fake papers via ChatGPT and friends... making it harder for the untrained eye to distinguish between respectable science and pseudo-science.

Yea, it's the classic conflation of the format of the media with other factors- it's not the fact that you're reading from a screen instead of a paper page that's making you intellectually incurious.

But the disingenuous thing is that I don't think these arguments are really meant to examine why people might be less curious- it's just to sound cooler than people who read the OP and imagine the writer in some cafe pouring over a big stack of hardcover books.

>> aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway?

I would say the distinction is that I don't need to be precious about why I would look at foundational texts. Maybe foundational texts are a bit over-hyped- anything written 100 years ago was made for the context of that time, and even if the ideas are universal to a certain extent, it's better digested through a modern lens in light of how those ideas have affected everything since then. How much more do you get out of an idea reading it from the original? It feels like there's a bit of a diminishing return in a lot of cases.

Everytime I hear ebook my brain pictures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewok#/media/File%3AWicket_W_Wa...

The majority of online content can decrease in quality while LLMs can increase in quality.

If the decrease in quality is noticeable to you, then it can be accounted for by future model makers. We already know that quantity isn't everything.

The average coming down only creates a stronger contrast for the high-quality work. As a writer, I'm excited about having LLMs available to help me. They're already indispensable.

> However this will absolutely be poisoned over time because marketing will always creep in until it dominates the HTTP source.

I often remind myself that we are in the golden age of LLMs, like the pre-enshitification days when Google would nearly always return relevant and useful results, and I felt like with access to the Internet I could learn anything.

Sounds interesting, do you have somewhere I can read some of what you've learned across your research?

If that's what you like to do, of course that's fine. If we are going to talk with each other about what we like to do, we need to agree on meaning.

In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth. As ultimate solutions to that goal, Wikipedia and LLM output lack sufficient accuracy and lack verifiability. Many find them useful as bibliographic tools that point us to accurate, verifiable sources.

Also, research requires looking at the actual evidence - the primary sources; that's where the truth is, that's the foundation of the scientific method. Secondary sources filter the truth through someone else's interpretation, but for amateur researchers that may be all that's realistic - traveling to archives, building or using complex equipment is not realistic. Still, Wikipedia and (almost all) LLMs are tertiary or higher order sources: they are a combination of secondary or higher order sources - Wikipedia doesn't allow citing primary sources as far as I know (which would be necessary for Wikipedia to be a secondary source); LLM input is mostly secondary or higher order sources.

I don't object if you call reading Wikipedia, 'research'. I don't at all object to you doing what you value. But we are talking about two different things.

I commented on the article so I suppose I'm engaging with the ideas.

To be clear, I also think it's a shame that people don't read as many books these days, I don't read a huge amount but I feel like I'm at the higher-end of my social circle in terms of reading volume.

Mostly, I don't like the trope that there's some kind of moral imperative to Read More Books and that Things Used to Be Better. Overall I'm philosophically disinclined to draw the conclusion that phones/attention/social media are bad and reading more will improve society. I also have TikTok but I don't think it makes me a worse person.

> In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding.

That just means exploiting the medium to full potential hasn't been normalized yet. Much like with the books, you can pause video and audio. And, much like with books, you can go through the material once to get the high-level overview, and then play it again to learn more, now that you have better feel for how things fit.

I've noticed that both pausing to think and playing the same work couple times in a short succession, are something people are reluctant to do. Writing this, I've noticed that myself I am reluctant to do it too, for no apparent reason. Might be because people my age and older, we weren't forced to learn from videos or audio during school and university years, so we didn't internalize the same consumption patterns as we did with books.

Similar to other commenters I disagree. You can definitely read without parsing and just “move on”.

Or accept a superficial understanding and fail to see the deeper point. Philosophy might be a good domain to see this happen with - read the words but don’t parse the meaning.

>One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step

Yes, you can. You can even skim—or entirely skip—whole sections.

I think your personal take is more so that you require "interaction" in the learning process; which is extremely common and universally accepted as best way to learn stuff.

>If I don't understand I cannot move on to next step

Everytime you encounter new hard concept, you really have to actively think/interact with that information to make it yours. This is often lacking in the "lecture" style teaching. One key benefit of reading is that you can do it at your pace.

I think for audio/verbal medium, you would probably have a completely different experience if you were talking to Feynman. He have a lecture for you, and everytime you get stuck, you can interrupt him and ask follow up question or ask further. This is probably why Private tuition is so valuable (and very very often used in East Asian nation); whichever fence of preference you fall to, a someone dedicated to teaching you is an extreme advantage.

Feynman's introductory physics course also entailed a lot of problem-solving and labs, in addition to the lectures that are the basis for The Feynman Lectures on Physics. If you go to The Feynman Lectures Website (www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu) and you take a look at the "Original Course Handouts" you can see the homework sets, quizzes and tests his students took (which are not for the feint of heart - many of the problems are quite difficult), and also the labs they did. For those reading the book now, there is also a supplemental volume (sold separately), "Exercises for The Feynman Lectures on Physics" which includes most of the problems given to Feynman's students, and many from later years given to students whose textbook was The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

There’s also the meta element of understanding how each medium affects the way you engage with the topic, which I think can be helpful in understanding when you might want to switch and why.

That is, assuming you probably want to have more than one media type in order to round out your understanding.

"When in doubt, read on." — Alfred Korzybski, the father of modern semantics, in his foundational 1933 book, "Science and Sanity."

https://archive.org/stream/alfred-korzybksi-science-and-sani...

Feynman lectures pretend that physics doesn’t require a ton of hard, painful, and not all that rewarding math to get to any of the good stuff.

This discussion on the immanent collapse of civilization never gets old. Socrates complained that this new invention of writing was ruining philosophy and memory. In his view philosophy was verbal jousting and conversation while walking.

The primary source is from Socrates lips (unavaiable), but you can read Plato’s Phaedrus, ask Wikipedia, or chat with Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

Well said. I should stop using social media, the level of discourse is low and anti-intellectualism is rampant. I do think the world would benefit from more amateur researchers.

Ok I'm going to invert that thought, and say: if books are so intelectually more efficient, why do we even have universities? Why do we have lectures, and why doesn't everyone just read?

Spoken word is one of the most primitive and human ways of communicating information. Written word appeared as a replacement to spoken word, because there was no other capable medium of information. Now we have mediums capable of doing so, why not use them instead.

Also you're somehow implying that because I'm doing the dishes I'm paying less attention? I think that's a really big assumption, and will probably vary a lot from person to person.

> you just can't read while doing the dishes or morning cardio or running unit tests

this is literally what audiobooks are for. And I concentrate significantly better on audio if I'm multitasking with a mindless activity

Actually, I'm somewhere in between about Audio books.

First of all, for some books, that's great. Esp, if read by a good voice actor. It can convert a book to radio theater, that's magic.

However, if you're listening while you're driving, or being distracted, you lose the some parts of the picture.

Lastly, not all books are good audio books. Some of them need stopping, reflecting, and some re-reading sometimes.

So, horses for courses I may say.

I tend to rewind audio books and re listen to the last minute or two or three.

Ten years ago I read James Joyce’s Ulysses as a book. I enjoyed it, but when I listened to it as an audio book a year later, the excellent actors/voice artists really brought it to life for me.

I often self describe myself as a ‘gentleman scientist’ because for many years I have done my own research, sometimes in areas where I had no interest in practical application. I also believe that the act of writing is crucial to thinking (I have written 20+ books, 2500+ blog articles). I think too many people put too much emphasis on “work” vs. just living: averaging only ‘working’ about 60% of my adult life has made room for other activitites.

I cannot say what works for other people. For me, unless I’m reading with my eyeballs, taking notes, and working examples, I’m not really convinced I’m learning anything difficult.

The snob's take is bad, but there is a point of agreement I have with one aspect of audiobooks: it's impossible to remember details about things that fall outside your native language, if you haven't already studied them. For example, I listened to a nonfiction audiobook about Xi Jinping. I could tell you the broad strokes of the people in his orbit from the late 1970s on, but I have no idea how to spell or even Google them effectively, because I never read them--I only heard them.

The same goes for foreign concepts/places/etc., for me at least there is no substitute for reading when it comes to retention and recall of material.

I saw elsewhere that someone said it was ablist to say that an audiobook doesn't count as a book, which I could only think that we put too much importance on books.

Don't take this as an anti-intellectual screed. Far from it--I read a lot. But I think you can also learn from magazines, newspapers, plays, orations, etc. It leads to this weird situation where people are optimizing not for what they're learning but for the count. How many books have you read this year? Does an audiobook count? Like... it doesn't really matter.

I could argue that it doesn't because you use different neural path ways to absorb the book :)

I used to agree with you, but then I found out how most people get through audiobooks and TV shows. They just miss stuff! They zone out for a few seconds or a few minutes. They take phone calls and move the laundry into the dryer without pausing and rewinding. It's crazy! Watching a fast-moving TV show with someone like that is bizarre because they'll happily sit through a complex conversation between characters even though they missed all the context that makes the conversation make sense.

Granted you can miss a lot when you're reading, too, since a lot of the context for any work is external to the work itself, but with a book, you have to actively choose to keep going when you're confused, rather than passively letting it flow past you. Nothing privileges the choice to turn to the next page rather than returning to the previous page.

I think the experience of reading books at least is good training for how to read an audiobook or listen to a lecture. You should be quick to pause and rewind if you suspect you missed something.

To be pedantic, it’s definitionally not reading. You listened to the book, you didn’t read it.

There’s just an odd legitimacy associated specifically with reading - that people want to access, and so makes other people weirdly snobbish/defensive of it.

>it should be taught in reverse chronology. Basically here's what's happening now, and that's due to what happened last year, which is due to what happened last decade, etc

Boy, oh boy, you will hate Karl Popper if you ever decide to read him lol

With respect to the New Testament, Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews" is the most contemporary historical account of the region, written in the late 1st century, and attests to the execution of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas, the rule of Pontius Pilate in Judea, and some other events attested to in the New Testament. Some of these events are themselves corroborated by Roman authors and archaeological evidence, such as coins and the Pilate stone.

I’d recommend to just start reading it to get a feel for it. It’s not all history, there is poetry, proverbs, lawgiving, etc.

The relationship of the Bible to history is complicated. I recommend the “Pete Ruins ____” episodes of The Bible for Normal People podcast, which is fun but also grounded in the academic field of biblical studies. Here’s the first one for Genesis, where the historical aspects are especially complex and interesting: https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/episode-277-pete-enns-pe...

The Bible is a mixture of history, poetry, wisdom literature, and much more. There's a really fascinating study Bible (ESV Archaeology Study Bible) that does a fantastic job of putting everything into its historical, sociopolitical, and geographical context.

A prince of Egypt that believed in the religion of the sun was forced to leave and took some slaves with him. For example.

The book that really got me hooked was The rise and fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer. He was a journalist in Berlin before WWII, and you can see the journalistic background shine through in his narrative. A lot of what I've read since then has been in trying to trace back the references he gives to how the events of WWII recapitulated older conflicts, which I then went and found references in which to learn about.

Barbara Tuchman is a delightful mostly medieval historian, and Mary Beard is a wonderful Roman historian. Both have a decidedly personal voice, which happened to click well with me; your milage may vary.

Someone else in the thread mentioned Simon Sebag Montefiore, and I've enjoyed most of what he's written. It feels a little less scholarly than some other popular historical sources, but that's just an informal impression from a tyro.

Lots of people enjoy Yuval Harari, but I do not enjoy him at all.

IMO it's too broad. You need to have something you want to learn more about and then try to find a couple of different books on the subject to get a clearer picture.

My interest grew when I had the realization that you can easily spot "gaps" in history, if you just start asking "Why?"

Example: This country invaded that country. Why?

History is full of cause and effect. The fastest way to figure out where you're not getting the whole story is if there's not a "Why?" or the reason simply doesn't make sense.

I enjoy US history, but I've learned to gravitate towards topics that simply don't get discussed much in the "highlights", with the highlights being the American Revolution and WWII. Just for example, the War of 1812, French and Indian War aren't talked about much but are pretty interesting. Learning about the Cold War by reading Skunkworks was really cool. There's a book called The Code Book that is a great read and covers a lot of "history of encryption" during wartime that I really enjoyed.

On the Biblical side of things, I went down a rabbit hole trying to track the migration of the Jewish Tribe of Dan from Cyprus and their influence on Greek/Roman mythology. Just really interesting stuff to me so I even blogged about it.

https://www.readnotmisled.org/p/was-herculesjewish-biblical-...

A people's history of the united states is a good one. Most history is written by the generals and leaders. This account is colored by the oft ignored people.

Handwriting in America, Thornton

You’ve been siding with Russia since 1776?

My boss regularly criticizes me for thinking too much. Sometimes I stop and think if this is the best way to implement something, and then suddenly receive a lecture about velocity, moving fast, being efficient, being ok with pushing bugs to prod, and all that shebang.

Our society has a pathological obsession with productivity.

I learned more about intellectual etiquette & inquiry from this book than from my teachers and professors. And I learned about the canon of european / western literature.

The boom of Romantasy seems to be attributed at least partially to GenZ. So depending on how you classify reading Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Romantasy GenZ is definitely still reading.

I have begun to recognize a sense of restlessness in myself that prompts me to optimize for information, as you have said, and I think I can begin to name it: anxiety due to withdrawal. It is illuminating to have once been a smoker because the feeling is quite similar. That our tastes have changed is due at least in part to the addiction of information. And a solution, at least in part, is to accept the pain of withdrawal.

It can be exceedingly difficult to distinguish good habits from bad where they involve the necessities and pleasures of life, such as food and information. Bad habits tend to comfort us in the moment but weaken us over time; good habits tend toward opposite. When I am honest with myself, I recognize the majority of my information seeking as quelling some anxious feeling rather than building true knowledge or wisdom, and the majority of the information I sought to be naught but empty distractions in the long term. And I also recognize my backlogs as a series of deaths that I have not accepted: I retain them to grasp onto the passing potentiality of my youth; I hold fast to the mirage of different lives.

That's where I'm at. Not just with books, but with movies and games, it just feels like too much time to commit to a single leisure activity. And I'm not a workaholic or super busy otherwise, so I could make the time to enjoy a book. It's just a mindset I didn't used to have, that says I shouldn't just read a book and enjoy it, but should be taking notes and learning something while I do, or listening to the audiobook so I can do some other tasks at the same time.

I'm not sure how that happened, but it feels like it happened to a lot of us.

Yeah you could be right. I'm actually in a similar boat. I used to read a lot of fictions before 25-ish but then I got hooked by the Internet so I rarely read any books since then. I used to enjoy Tolkien and D&D novels a LOT but recently I found them to be meh.

> I also think people will happily walk away from a show or movie

I’m not so sure. I feel like people may walk away from a show in between seasons, when a new one comes out and they realise they aren’t interested anymore. But in the age of binge watching, it’s harder to realise “I’m not actually enjoying this” because each episode is made to be addictive.

With movies, my feeling is that even when people realise midway they’re not enjoying it, they experience sunk cost and will watch to the end hoping it gets better.

I remember (but I’m not finding) a This American Life segment about a woman who relished in exiting the movie theatre midway through a feature. It wasn’t seen as a common thing.

> but for some reason won't walk away from a book. If you're 30% in and you hate it, just walk away.

I completely agree. I’d even say you could do it sooner than 30%.

Yeah I feel that too. It's kinda hard to go away from a book, even a borrowed one and I have no idea why. Maybe I'm trying to convince myself that I should like the book but I don't.

I used to read a lot of books including classics and others when I was younger, before 25, but then Internet took off so I barely read books. When my son was born a few years ago I tried to go back and found my interests narrowed to a niche.

Anyway, maybe I shouldn't complain as it helps to focus...

> I think there is a lot of elitism about reading and the intellectualism around it. … Don't play the game. If you don't like reading books and don't get much out of it, don't do it.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that it's good to get your knowledge wherever you enjoy getting it, as long as it's from a reliable source and you're checking them when possible for any claims you intend to rely on. With that said, I think that:

> Genuinely I cannot remember the last time I read a book. I read absolute crap-tons of interesting stuff online, but books? Those out-of-date, read-only, closed-perspectives from people with something they're trying to say? Nope.

may go too far the other direction in implying that books have nothing valuable to offer, which I think isn't true. (I'm also curious about the "from people with something they're trying to say" line, which, coming after the others, sounds like it's meant to be criticism. Surely that's true of wherever else you get your information, too? I can't imagine wanting to read the writing, in any form, or watch the videos or listen to the podcasts or whatever, of someone who isn't trying to say something.)

> Have they, or have you finished all the great books that were published before the present, and now need to wait for someone to write new great books?

I know that for me, the kind of books I used to like lost appeal. I would read them multiple times, but I just do not find them pleasurable anymore. It is not about me finishing all the great books humanity wrote up to now. It is about me changing.

For the record, the same thing happened with some movies/series. They used to be super great, when I am trying to rewatch they are not.

I don't watch movies or TV shows very much.

For TV shows I keep going back to the same ones I loved, that is the X-Files. And I can't even think of a second one I'd go back to watch...damn there is really no other TV show I'm going to watch, unless you count kids show such as Bluey.

For movies I'm also going back to the ones I loved to watch. I think I did add maybe a few throughout the years, but it's safe to say that most of the movies in my library are older than 10 years old.

The thing about movies and shows is, reality can be weirder and more interesting. Most of the movies and TV shows are pretty naive when they try talking about politics or such.

> Have you read the Bible? It's shockingly different from what people believe is written there. It is a post-apocalyptic survival guide, as well as a collection of human stories and ideas that might date back hundreds of thousands of years.

You must mean hundreds or thousands, right? Modern homo-sapiens are not hundreds of thousands of years old.

> Have you read the Quran? Reading it is essential to understanding Muslims and their faith. It is first and foremost an anti-christian book, and the faith is foremost anti-christian. Just as christendom at one time was foremost anti-pagan.

I've only read parts of the Quran in translation, and I wouldn't say that I understand it that well. It's not organized in a narrative structure like the bible, and there are a lot of parts that are impossible to understand without outside knowledge, like a surah that condemns Abu Lahab but doesn't explain who he was [1]. The Quran is not really the sort of book that you can just read on its own without guidance and expect to understand.

So, with the preface that you should take what I have to say about the Quran with a grain of salt, I'm not sure how you could take away that it's primarily an anti-Christian text. Yes, it criticizes Christians and Jews a lot, but it also has good things to say about them. For example:

"Indeed, the believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabians—whoever truly believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good will have their reward with their Lord. And there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve." [2]

The main villains of the Quran are polytheists (like Abu Lahab). It talks about them a lot more and never has anything good to say [3]. By contrast, the New Testament barely even mentions polytheists or pagans – most of its criticism is directed against Jews.

Muslims traditionally believe that Jesus was the messiah, that he was born of a virgin, that he performed miracles, and that he's going to return and rule the world in a future era [4]. It's also said that Muhammad was identified as a prophet by a Christian monk named Bahira [5]. Early on, Orthodox Christians identified Islam as a heretical form of Christianity, not a different religion [6]. These do not seem like traits of a religion that is foremost anti-Christian.

[1] https://quran.com/111

[2] https://quran.com/2/62

[3] https://quran.com/search?query=polytheist

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_Islam

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahira

[6] https://archive.org/details/johnofdamascuson0000saha

What you describe you want is, in a sense, the definition of 'serious' literature. A value of it is that it has real insight about real people and life.

A lot of people reject it - because of school/authority associations, because they didn't understand it in high school, for culture war reasons, etc. When you put all that aside and just read the book, it is what you describe - the 'great' writing offering soaring, beautiful, tranformative insight, the work of genius.

I think it's hard to understand without experience in the world and life - real responsibility, pressure, failure, success, real injury, healing, trauma, seeing evil and good in yourself - whatever your age. I'm not sure it's accessible for most high schoolers and often people don't try it again.

Yeah I get the same feeling about books, movies and TV shows.

The moment that they try to talk about politics or something serious, I feel they fell short. Reality is way more complex than what they are trying to reveal.

But I'm going to try some hard sci-fi and see what happens.

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