The Idea of a Book — George Lockett

So, books. I think I noted down this shard idea in response to seeing someone sharing that Sam Bankman-Fried quote:

“I would never read a book ... I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Which... well, maybe the guy should have read a book or two.

But it got me thinking about the idea of a book. What is a book? There's the obvious, physical artefact -- a set of leaved pages, bound within a cover. (Phrasing something in that way tickles my brain back to a slightly different time on Twitter, where 'a horse is a chair'.) But obviously with ebooks, audiobooks and the like, that doesn't actually describe the concept usefully (though it hasn't stopped people from yammering endlessly about whether 'you are really reading if you listen to an audiobook').

Then there are the more technical definitions to define, say, a novel vs a novella vs a novelette vs a short story vs flash fiction. Which has utility mostly in a publishing and marketing context, although limited beyond that.

For me, a book is ultimately an arbitrary boundary, but it's about lingering with something. A story or an idea. Giving it the space it (hopefully) deserves.

This is particularly stark for me when comparing, say, a non-fiction monograph to a six-paragraph blog post. Yes, on various occasions I have read books where I have understood the fundamental thrust very quickly, inside of a chapter or two. But almost always, there's been a specific benefit to the space -- examples, reiteration, coming at the thing from different angles, complicating the thesis. If nothing else it sure as hell aids comprehension and retention.

A six-paragraph blog post might, might be able to contain the same essential information. But that does not have the same valence as a book on the subject. (If nothing else, if you're reading a book on a subject, you know that the author has had to spend all that time and attention on the idea. That doesn't mean it will be good or worthwhile, but at least someone else has had to do this to a passable standard.)

I think this goes back to something I talked about the other day, in Birdfall:

Musk a) believes he is smarter than everyone else and b) holds a very simplistic (and additionally wrong) view of the world. Having all that money and power has kept him in so much of a bubble that this has never really been challenged.

So that means, when he looks at a problem in a sphere about which he knows nothing and comes up with a simplistic solution, he believes that the only reason that no one else has done that already is down to a failure of their intelligence. NOT, as is the truth, down to a failure of his intelligence and the fact that the domain he's gazing at is more complicated, and actually other people _do_ understand it a lot better than him.

The Elons Musks of the world and their warped, simplistic worldviews. If you think the world is, ultimately, rather simple, and that you are among the smartest people in it, of course you think you can understand something in depth from a six-paragraph blog post. And of course that makes you a complete and utter blockhead.