Julia Galef: [...] You know, the thing that I think books do really well is provide a nice container for a thesis or ideas, such that it’s easy to spread and talk about. And they do this better than blog posts, for the most part. I’ve heard people sometimes say, “Most books should be blog posts,” or “Most books should be articles,” or something like that, and I sympathize with that view.
Another way of phrasing this: when two people have read the same book, even if they don’t remember the details, they can reference the book as a “pointer” and make deeper arguments (held up by their intuitions about the book, ingrained because they spent so much time engaging with its entirety) than they would have been able to make if they had only read summaries.
Yes this is an excellent point; books increase the fidelity of idea transmission because they place something like a bound on how much an idea can be misinterpreted, since one can always appeal to the author’s own words (much more than a blog post or Tweet).
I really like your way of thinking about why books are useful!
This reminds me of another argument for why books are useful which came up in this 80,000 Hours podcast episode with Julia Galef.
Another way of phrasing this: when two people have read the same book, even if they don’t remember the details, they can reference the book as a “pointer” and make deeper arguments (held up by their intuitions about the book, ingrained because they spent so much time engaging with its entirety) than they would have been able to make if they had only read summaries.
Yes this is an excellent point; books increase the fidelity of idea transmission because they place something like a bound on how much an idea can be misinterpreted, since one can always appeal to the author’s own words (much more than a blog post or Tweet).