Today's entry is about knowledge. Specifically, I want to discuss the nature of reading information in places like books and websites and how the activity of reading relates to acting in the world.

Collectively as a society in the USA (I mostly know California), there is great value placed on book learning. And so people with a strong aptitude for this (e.g. can score high on the SAT, LSAT, GRE) can often find high-paying employment in a white-collar work environment.

Phrases like "reading comprehension" and "critical thinking" can be found all over educational materials. How these things are often tested is by presenting some big block of text (e.g. some reprinted magazine article) and then asking some questions about that passage.

While learning how to pick apart the meanings of sentences, read through dense prose with reasonable speed, and and answer specific questions from written reports is not a bad skill to have, it is only one technique for understanding the world and it is one that can be dangerously misapplied.

Writing and Knowledge

If you found a piece of paper on the ground in a parking lot that said something like,

Supermarket - Eggs - Milk (Whole) - Ground beef - Sesame oil (for Chinese cooking)

Hardware Store - Wood glue - AA Batteries

...you would likely infer that you had stumbled across some kind of shopping list. Maybe the person using it dropped it while loading groceries into their car.

The document you found isn't like most books or websites, but you can make a good guess at what it is because you have likely made use (or seen someone else make use) of a similar type of thing.

You know how to read this document, assuming it is a grocery list, and because it is not your grocery list, the contents of it don't really matter. You can help toss it in a trashcan or just leave it (maybe the person that made it will drive back noticing they lost their list).

The knowledge/skill you have is how to create and interpret shopping lists.

Books, Articles, and More

Let us now return to books, (Internet, magazine) articles, and other publications you will likely see at newsstands in airports, public libraries, and other places where mass-publications are often found.

We can ask—who produced these materials and for what reasons? Most people will take published materials at face value, especially if they haven't tried their hand at publications of any sorts. Magazines filled with ads can be presumed to provide some interesting "content" to people interested in fitness, cooking, guns, etc. A news magazine can be expected to tell you about what is going on the world, maybe with some opinions/commentary by someone working in say... Iran.

Here is where a grocery list becomes very different from much of the reading people busy themselves with. A grocery list serves a pretty specific, self-explanatory purpose. Magazines and popular books often serve subtler, less-obvious purchases. Consider,

• A book by a (current) celebrity: probably aims to make you interested in and/or like this person more
• An account of some political/military event; "current events": likely wants to frame some situation in a way so that you have a sympathetic viewpoint towards some action
• Popular science: get you familiarized and comfortable with some ideas that may be rolled out at scale (e.g. Personal computers), sell gadgets/tech
• Fashion/beauty stuff: establish trends, sell beauty products

The "reading comprehension" skills described at the beginning of this post prepare you to read and internalize the messages these publications push. You can repeat what such-and-such and such has said. But does doing this guarantee you learned anything?

Talking Points

Just like you can name endless details about Pokémon or some other fictional entities, one can be pretty skilled at quickly browsing and internalizing the talking points of various reading materials.

The purpose of many publications is to fill your head with talking points that in turn lead you to be more sympathetic to other positions using similar language. For instance, most people don't want to be called a racist. So there is a lot of literature out there that pushes talking points explaining why such-and-such is(n't) racist.

Case Study

Through the Sam Harris podcast ¹, I've been exposed to numerous ideas. Here, I'll recall some off the top of my head (probably won't be hard to find if you try to look them up):

• The dangers of AI take over (Max Tegmark talk)
• Lab grown meat as a way that we can be well-nourished and not have ethical problems that might otherwise motivate someone to become vegan
• Having regulatory/governing bodies in place to protect public discourse from fake news
• Specific doctrines in Islam (mostly Wahabi/Sunni) are incompatible with liberal western democracy; reform of some kind needed

One can listen to hours upon hours of podcasts (or read many, many books), but learn very little beyond being able to repeat points like the ones above.

If we look beyond talking points and see what exactly someone is trying to say/advocate, we can skip a lot of reading homework.

Sam Harris seems pretty transparent about many of his goals; he is a self-proclaimed atheist who I think is interested in having an overall peaceful, prosperous society which steers away from a 'greatest possible suffering' scenario. He seems to espouse a kind of incrementalist approach, wherein we make society gradually better (as opposed to doing some quick, violent, revolution), and he seems to be optimistic in the sense that he find the accumulation of "expert knowledge" to be sufficient for guiding humanity as a whole to have better and better lives, generally, by his definitions.

Thus, someone that is already on board with the general attitude of Sam Harris will likely find his southing voice and amiable guests to make for pleasant listening. Talk of new technologies and stuff opens the door for fun speculation about how the world could be.

Basically, you can read reality as a kind of progressive march towards a "utopian" type of Science governed society optimized for human well-being on a kind of minimize-pain ultilitarian metric.

If you are on board with this worldview and in the position to make policy-decisions (whether locally in your own household, in a small business or elsewhere), listening to more Sam Harris might be useful in exposing you to many new "hacks" to progress towards these shared goals. Likewise, trusting Sam as a calm and knowledgable fount of knowledge, you may vote along the political positions he espouses too, trusting that he has your same goals in mind.

Ramblings about filtering what you read/watch

Now, if you fundamentally disagree with the worldview of Sam Harris and think that he is wrong in his most basic assumptions (e.g. as a religious person, you reject the atheistic scientist "clergy" of experts) to hear all the details that follow from Sam's worldview will probably not be interesting or useful to you.

Likewise, if you believe that someone like... Thomas Jefferson was a fool, a racist, and all the other bad things, you would probably not benefit much from reading his writings at length unless you were being paid to do just that for whatever reason.

Getting back to books and articles, I think that looking at the type of stuff we're reading, we can save a lot of time by actively choosing to NOT read certain stuff.

On one hand, this is obvious. But for many it is not because growing up many of us are just told that reading (generally) is good. If you're reading a non-fiction book rather than watching a TV, you're being a smart-smart rather than a dumb-dumb, right?

What I'm saying here is that this is not so, and that using basic "philosophy" techniques of looking at what people's presuppositions are, we can "cut the chase" with a lot of content and save our time and energy to do other things.

Probably the fastest way to do this is to talk to knowledgable people about subjects you are interested in reading about. For example, you may be looking for a book on how to draw. A friend that is skilled in drawing might point out a book to you and say "everything in here is useful for developing your skills except for Chapter 13 where the author just rambles about some latest educational technique that was trendy when this book was published". Here, a helpful guide helps you avoid wasting your time on trying to make sense of some talking points that might add more confusion than clarity to your main aim.

Conversely, your goal might be to understand another person's worldview, and so rather than trying to filter out presuppositions you think are wrong, you might want to read the most "brainwashed" of the brainwashed books. I've posted reviews on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and of many of the Harry Potter books. While I myself was not naturally drawn to reading these books for the content within them itself, I wanted to understand how someone that espouses particular ideology describes the world operating, who appears heroic to them, and so on and so forth. So I read these books aware of some of the biases/preferences of these authors and it was helpful for me to understand why certain ideas appeal to certain demographics.

"Fact or Fiction"

Some texts are informative in a pretty direct and obvious way, e.g. a technical manual on operating some machine or a foreign language bilingual dictionary. For many other works, however, things are not so obvious. What is a book on WW1 trying to accomplish?

In this way, reading "fiction" vs "nonfiction" can often be more or less the "same thing" in the sense that you get story telling in both genres trying to get people to hold some view or repeat some talking point in some form or another.

Through reading, we can learn stuff by looking outside of the (often speculative) words of texts themselves but analyzing first what people are trying to accomplish with particular documents. oftentimes people will just come out and say what this is—a Buddhist might tell you a book is promoting Buddhism by reading it you can reduce suffering, for instance. Other parties are trickier. Be especially wary of anyone who claims to be "unbiased" or giving you "just the facts".