The question of who (or what) to trust is of utmost importance. Since we do not have unlimited time and resources, we must make choices about what we rely on for new information or reference materials.

Walking into a book store and choosing to read one of the top selling books—this is not just "reading" or "learning" plain and simple. You are approaching some material with a purpose. Maybe you're looking for,

• advice on how to get past a particular business problem
• distraction
• affirmation to continue to doing what you're doing
• how the mind of a different worldview thinks

Reading popular books, you must sift through jargon, empty speculations, opinions, political agendas, and more. That being said, you can't believe in everything you read. "Reading" broadly is often presented as an activity that is generally good to do.

While obviously reading (or re-reading) certain things can be useful, it is silly to say that just reading a lot is good in the same way you wouldn't want to spend all your time talking to the same people again and again if you did not have good reason to trust those people. You could call up a robot telephone thing and talk all day, but this probably would be terrible...

So, who do we trust? What kind of reading is good to do?

Heuristics for finding useful information

First, you want to find people to read who have demonstrated their success. Books by smaller authors in specific domains are often good for this. Learning how to do some basic computer programing, you hear about such-and-such professor who is really good in such-and-such area, or such-and-such business person who made such-and-such project.

Technical reading is often evidently useful in that it shows how to get material results using a particular methodology.

Under "technical reading" here, I'll include cookbooks, workout guides, and even self-help type books that give instructions on how to do things—e.g. the Getting Things Done methodology by David Allen, which I've referenced at least a few times here.

When we start talking about "business success", billionaires, investing, and that sort of thing, I think stuff gets a little bit shakier. You can ask,

• What background does the author of my book come from? (e.g. rich family? poor family?)
• How does this person really make money? (e.g. is it really just making a better product, or is it more about tax loopholes, government contracts, insider connections etc.)
• What belief system does this person have? (e.g. are they "non-spiritual"? an occult practioner?)

Questions like the ones above are important to look at because they can be more revealing of what sort of thing you are going to be actually told in some reading. Whereas "dry" technical literature is pretty self-explanatory, uncritically accepting the advice of people that live really differently from you or I in many respects (e.g. Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Donald Trump, Elon Musk...) can be an actually counter-productive thing to do.

General points versus what is of the times

Many programing books I've gone through attempt to illustrate general principles using some specific language. So, while the specifics of the languages used and their implementations may change over time, these books contain more general information that can be useful in designing software regardless of what software is currently available—hence "software engineering" versus "C++/python/etc".

The point made above can also be applied to advice on investing, property management, etc. This is because these things depend on a particular environment, such as California law in 2021 and federal reserve notes. Just like how Microsoft might update your computer or introduce some new software standards without your permission, so too policy/law-makers may change the "playing field" on which you operate.

So when reading stuff, it is not enough to say "oh, Peter Thiel is a really rich guy, so he must know how to invest so I will read his book and learn". While I'm sure you can learn a lot from reading stuff by any rich person, you should take into consideration what is general (and thus true in your situation with regard to what you're doing) and what is specifics, speculations, filler/fluff or just deception/propaganda.

Repetition and Re-reading

In the modern era, there is an emphasis on novelty and consumerism. For a while I was using goodreads and reviewing books. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing to do, but I think it is biased towards a particular sort of reading which I don't think is often the best sort to do.

What is better—(a) to read 20 books in a year, or (b) to re-read one good book 20 times and know it very well in a year?

I think that overall, (b) is probably better. Repeated over some decades, you might find yourself knowing twenty or thirty books really well. That seems like a better lifetime investment than kinda, sorta remembering 500 books to me.

Just like it takes time to have a conversation with someone else, to think over what they've said, to ask them to clarify certain stuff—in the same way, good books aren't just "consumables". You wouldn't want to meet people just to increase your Facebook friends count (hopefully)—similarly, what profit is there for you to pride yourself on the number of books you've read?

If you've read 100 books but learned nothing, that's just silly!

Clear thinking, discipline, and application of effort

Reading itself is a means to an end. Just as you wouldn't want to spend your whole life on an exercise bike, it would do no good to spend your whole life just consuming books. You work on developing physical fitness (in the absence of nearby mountains, lakes, etc) so you can enjoy other things later as well as to instill discipline which in turn gives you more freedom.

Reading similarly is a useful thing to do in order to develop effective ways of thinking, approaching problems, and so on.

There have been very physically fit people who never used gyms/exercise equipment (e.g. people with a physically demanding job they do skillfully) and likewise there have been very smart, effective people who were illiterate.¹

Conclusions

Let us come full circle and return to the question of trust.

There are lots of people telling you to read lots of things—should you just read all the things? Obviously, if you have things to do, you don't have time to do this. Instead, you might prioritize the things that already interest you, something a friend read (in order to strengthen a relationship with that friend), something that will very likely be useful to you...

One thing a little above average IQ people (search up the "Redditor" character for more info) might get flattered by is being regarded as a "bookish" or "learned" person. This often makes them the biggest suckers to indoctrination appealing to their "nerdy" sensibilities. Smugly sitting in a book store reading the latest popular "science" book, they may look down on people that flip through People magazine at the grocery store checkout. They may scoff at the New Age store (though they may be simultaneously dating a significant other they met at some Yoga studio)—though they themselves simply trust everything that is being told to them by the Scientist Wizard Prophets. ²

Just as we decide which people in our lives we trust, we should also examine the extent to which we trust various institutions and the official messages they put forth—this includes book publishers—particularly if they are tied to very rich people. What sort of content is being offered to us and why? What isn't being promoted?