Comment by shamohit711
15 hours ago
Polite disagreement. To write (or feel the urge to write), you should have a point of view (unique povs are more interesting). To have a point of view, you need to engage with the thing in front of you. It can be a video that you disagree with, or agentic output you're belting into shape.
The advice of "read more to write better" is incomplete IMO. I'd change it to "read/engage critically to write better". Else reading results in memetic ideas and tonality
In fact, you'd want to read less if it means reading deeply
Indeed. As a young voracious reader I used to think that more reading is an unmitigated good until I came across Schopenhauer and his aphorisms. I try now to be more selective, life is short, and to engage more deeply with what I read.
"The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short."
“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.”
I can see his point that it is worth learning to think for yourself, but if you then try to publish your thoughts without understanding what else is out there (e.g. by reading about it), the results could be very embarrassing. This would seem to apply in both philosophy (which I'm assuming Schopenhauer was discussing) and (say) genre fiction.
Incidentally, having quickly scanned some of Schopenhauer's actual writing [0], I found statements such as "women are suited to being nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted" and women "are inferior to men in respect of justice, honesty and conscientiousness". If I'd come across these first I'd be very reluctant, rightly or wrongly, to uncritically accept his views on other subjects.
[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/509571816/Schopenhauer-Arthu...
> If I'd come across these first I'd be very reluctant, rightly or wrongly, to uncritically accept his views on other subjects.
You don't want people to use this sort of criteria to judge arguments. Not just because it's ad hominem, but also for selfish reasons - your opinion that after a "quick scan" one should dismiss Schopenhauer's philosophical thought (his specialty) because he shared a common contemporary opinion on the nature of women (not his specialty) reflects badly on you. If somebody could reasonably dismiss an unrelated argument that you made based on that, your arguments would be ignored regardless of their merit.
Also, people would wonder if you have dismissed all of the writings and discoveries of sexists and racists; if you have then you are obviously uneducated, and if you haven't then your exceptions imply the shape of your own specific racism and sexism. It's a no-win situation for you.
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Nowadays the analogy to “not reading bad books” is “not consuming social media”. Reading a bad book seems so much more beneficial to your concentration, focus and attention span than doomscrolling that it’s a valid recommendation. The bar is low.
When you think about it, humans have never been reading as much as we do right now thanks to Internet and digitalisation.
Yet the quality has gone down when you compare it to, say, 1600's greatest works.
This is attributable to survivorship bias and the democratisation of information. We aren't exposed to the 99% worst books, plays, pamphlets, and sermons of the 17th century, but we experience the dull ramblings of our fellow 21st-century citizens daily and through many delivery channels.
That is correct, but if we compare the top 10 literally work of the last 20 years to the same period 500 years ago... Do you think the quality has improved?
Do you think many people will read Stephen King in 500 years?