One of the great things about being alive now is that most famous people you respect have written something that you can read. Adam Smith is famous for The Wealth of Nations, and you can buy your own copy for cheap or download it for free. Why read about it when you could read it? Similarly, Feynman is an awesome physicist and great teacher, why learn physics from someone else when you could learn it from him?
Well, it turns out that there’s actually some pretty good reasons, sometimes. The Wealth of Nations is actually a great read that I do recommend to anyone interested in economics, but my copy is a thousand pages, with another hundred of appendices and indices, and that is a lot of time to spend on a book. Similarly, although Smith lays down the concepts well, there has been progress in basic microeconomics in the last two hundred years, and so it seems like it should be read along with an introductory textbook. A lot of other ‘classics’ are really not well written- Das Kapital, for example, is not a work I would recommend without heavy disclaimers about Marx’s explanatory style. (Basically, until the third time he describes something his description will be missing critical details, without mention that those details are missing.)
EY recommended at one point reading textbooks about settled science, and that seems like a strong plan- especially with some original classics mixed in for flavor and extra depth. I have Quantum Mechanics books written by Griffiths and Dirac, among others- and I like the Griffiths one a lot more, even thought Dirac was one of the guys that invented this stuff, because Griffiths is much more skilled at education. But it’s still worth cracking open the Dirac book a few times.
Strongly suspect more of us should be taking this advice.
I do take that advice, and it works pretty well.
One of the great things about being alive now is that most famous people you respect have written something that you can read. Adam Smith is famous for The Wealth of Nations, and you can buy your own copy for cheap or download it for free. Why read about it when you could read it? Similarly, Feynman is an awesome physicist and great teacher, why learn physics from someone else when you could learn it from him?
Well, it turns out that there’s actually some pretty good reasons, sometimes. The Wealth of Nations is actually a great read that I do recommend to anyone interested in economics, but my copy is a thousand pages, with another hundred of appendices and indices, and that is a lot of time to spend on a book. Similarly, although Smith lays down the concepts well, there has been progress in basic microeconomics in the last two hundred years, and so it seems like it should be read along with an introductory textbook. A lot of other ‘classics’ are really not well written- Das Kapital, for example, is not a work I would recommend without heavy disclaimers about Marx’s explanatory style. (Basically, until the third time he describes something his description will be missing critical details, without mention that those details are missing.)
EY recommended at one point reading textbooks about settled science, and that seems like a strong plan- especially with some original classics mixed in for flavor and extra depth. I have Quantum Mechanics books written by Griffiths and Dirac, among others- and I like the Griffiths one a lot more, even thought Dirac was one of the guys that invented this stuff, because Griffiths is much more skilled at education. But it’s still worth cracking open the Dirac book a few times.