Some Suggestions for Myself about How to Read
A person who wants to have a well-informed view of the world faces the trouble that there are a LOT of sources of information and ideas out there. Some of those sources are good (i.e., will help your opinion get closer to something truth or useful), and some are bad. In this post I want to offer some suggestions about how to decide what to read to get exposed to new information and ideas.
This problem of a deluge of content is not new. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill observed in the 1800s: “When there were few books... A book of sterling merit, when it came out, was sure to be heard of, and might hope to be read, by the whole reading class...But when almost every person who can spell, can and will write, what is to be done? It is difficult to know what to read, except by reading everything” (1).We may take issue with Mill’s ideas of what qualifies a book to be “of sterling merit” (2), but his general point is truer today than it was then: People don’t have time to read all the best books, articles, blog posts, etc. that exist.
So how should we decide what to read, or to consume more generally? I’m going to make a couple of assumptions about the reader in answering this question:
We are talking about a topic on which you want to have a well-formed opinion. As I talked about in a previous blog post, there are probably lots of topics on which you don’t have time to become well-informed. On those topics you should not have a strong opinion (3)
The purpose of your reading is to become more knowledgeable or to have better ideas. You might also read for entertainment, aesthetic pleasure, or social purposes, but in those cases your approach to reading will probably be different (4). Also I’m going to use the verb “to read” but my points also apply to other ways of learning (e.g., podcasts, videos)
For this kind of reader I have two suggestions (5):
#1: Find trustworthy experts and rely on them as a starting point. By “experts” I mean people who are knowledgeable and ideally thoughtful about the thing you want to learn about. It might seem obvious to rely on these people, but there is a tendency in the US now to be suspicious of those called “ experts” for one of two reasons:
They’re an elite group who live in ivory towers and don’t actually understand the real problems of the world.
They are too condescending/self-interested to use their expertise to actually help people.
I think that the people who are referred to in and deferred to by society as “experts” often are fair targets of both of these critiques. But:
The person is not really an expert if they don’t understand what they’re talking about, academic titles or societal position notwithstanding.
An intelligent reader can read past condescension and self-interest if the claims being made are backed up with actual knowledge. Every person you read is biased, and you’re not going to agree with everything they say. But if someone has knowledge and experiences relevant to what you want to learn about, you can benefit from their expertise as long as you understand the biases they are likely to have.
Depending on what it is you want to learn about, the people society calls experts may or may not be reliable. For example, when it comes to questions “is this food from the store safe to eat?” I don’t even think to fact-check the FDA — I trust that those experts are doing what’s right. But when it’s a question of “what is the most effective way to fight global poverty” I might think that academic experts don’t have the full story, so I need to also seek out perspectives from the poorest individuals in the world who are experts about their own lives.
On the importance of seeking out multiple perspectives...
#2: Read and engage with a diversity of views. Diversity of views means really meaningfully engaging with ideas from people unlike you, ideas you don’t even know that you don’t know, or ideas you find instinctively repulsive (6). Here are some ideas about how to do that practically do that:
Rely less on recommendations from your friends. Your friends are probably like you. And even if they aren’t, you get to hear their views when you talk to them. If you want to obtain a new insight, you need to read perspectives that you aren’t already exposed to via your friends.
Rely less on algorithms. If you want to be surprised by a new insight, you probably need to read something that an algorithm would find surprising based on your past reading history.
Read more old things. People in olden times had a lot of the same general problems that we do. But they lived in a totally different time, so they automatically have a different perspective on them than we do.
Read more things originally written in other languages. You’re automatically an outsider when reading something written in a foreign language. The author was not writing for you. This makes it more likely that they will express different ideas, or express the same ideas differently, than would the authors out there who are writing for people like you.
Read things that aren’t designed to be entertaining or fun. By restricting yourself only to ideas that are expressed in light and easy-to-swallow writing, you’re erecting a barrier between yourself and all those who have great ideas but aren’t great communicators. Plus your idea of what’s entertaining may exclude ideas that challenge you. And finally, reading something difficult forces you to recreate the author’s argument and think harder about what you actually believe, rather than just quickly reading, nodding your head, and moving along.
You probably don’t want to go to the extreme on all these dimensions at once. I don’t mean to say that you should go read a dry analysis of French waterways from the 1700s. But if your goal is to be more informed on some topic, particularly a contentious social or political topic, it might be helpful to try to push yourself in some of these ways to read things that you wouldn’t naturally come across.
I’ll end with another quote from Mill, who I find incredibly inspiring on the topic of arriving at the truth by comparing conflicting ideas. People tend to, he says,
place the same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions as are shared by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer: for in proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of "the world" in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society
We have a higher ability than anyone who lived before us to expand our “world” beyond those who live near, live like, or believe the same things as us. We have also greater access to the knowledge of experts, both those recognized as such by society and those not. Let’s avail ourselves of as much of humanity’s experience as we can rather than remaining inert in our current beliefs and perspectives.
1. The Mill experts that roam my blog will know that Mill was here curmudgeonedly making the point that people just read too darn quickly in his day, and that the quality of books wasn’t what it used to be. To which I say that there are probably more bad books now than there were in his day, but also more good books because there are just more books. And also get off my lawn.
2. E.g., J.S. Mill had a very positive view of his father’s A History of British India in which he wrote things like “under the glosing exterior of the Hindu, lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy” and dismissed out of hand claims that ancient Indian scholars made the advances in astronomy and that they did in fact make.
3. Here’s a rough equation showing how strongly I should be allowed to have an opinion (I’m saying “I” but I really mean “you”):
For example, without great factual knowledge and only a vague understanding of why someone would oppose my view, I would be comfortable having the strong but rather vague opinion that “the government should do more to fight climate change.” My general beliefs about the role of government and the importance of the environment (i.e., my ideology) are enough to bring me to this opinion.
But if I want to be more specific about my opinion (say I believe strongly that “the federal government should fight climate change by mandating that all new cars must meet XX emission thresholds”), I should have a strong understanding of what exactly the economic and political effects of such a policy are likely to be, what the alternative policy options are, and what the arguments for those alternative policy options are. Ideology itself isn’t enough when you get down to brass tacks.
4. Though my points probably do apply if your goal is to experience and appreciate a variety artistic expressions (e.g., expand your taste in music or novels or movies).
5. I say “this kind of reader” but I really mean “me.” This post is largely a way for me to answer these questions for myself.
6. A lot of times when people say “I want to read more diverse books” they mean “I want to read more woke books”. That’s not what I’m suggesting here (though I’m also not discouraging it). I’m talking about diversity of ideas. Diversity along the dimensions of race, gender, and sexual orientation is valuable, but by focusing on these dimensions it’s easy to limit your consumption of ideas about racial and gender dynamics to a particular worldview that’s very popular on coastal college campuses. Diversity of ideology, temperament, historical period, etc. are also important as far as arriving at good ideas is concerned.