When I'm looking for a book, I usually look for older but still popular books. New but highly rated books are hit or miss, but those old ones that people still recommend have consistently been great reads.
I have missed so much media over the past 20 years that I operate like this. I'm not concerned with whether music or games are new or not. Media that came out 5 or 15 years ago is just as new to me as something that came out this year, and there's a much larger selection.
Cost is the most obvious motivator, but for me it's more about filtering for quality in order to best allocate my limited adult gaming hours— why sink the time and money into a just-released title that might turn out to be the next Anthem or Fallout 76, when you can wait a few years about pick it up for $10-15 once it's a known winner?
That said, even within r/patientgamers, there's a spectrum in terms of just how patient some people are. For example, some people are just getting into stuff from the Xbox 360 era, whereas others are already talking about whether RDR2 has stood the test of time or not, ha.
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers. So that if a man wishes to improve himself in any subject he must guard against immediately seizing the newest books written upon it, in the assumption that science is always advancing and that the older books have been made use of in the compiling of the new. They have, it is true, been used; but how? The writer often does not thoroughly understand the old books; he will, at the same time, not use their exact words, so that the result is he spoils and bungles what has been said in a much better and clearer way by the old writers; since they wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject. He often leaves out the best things they have written, their most striking elucidations of the matter, their happiest remarks, because he does not recognise their value or feel how pregnant they are. It is only what is stupid and shallow that appeals to him. An old and excellent book is frequently shelved for new and bad ones; which, written for the sake of money, wear a pretentious air and are much eulogised by the authors’ friends. In science, a man who wishes to distinguish himself brings something new to market; this frequently consists in his denouncing some principle that has been previously held as correct, so that he may establish a wrong one of his own. Sometimes his attempt is successful for a short time, when a return is made to the old and correct doctrine. These innovators are serious about nothing else in the world than their own priceless person, and it is this that they wish to make its mark. They bring this quickly about by beginning a paradox; the sterility of their own heads suggests their taking the path of negation; and truths that have long been recognised are now denied — for instance, the vital power, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat’s distinction between the working of the passions and the working of intelligence, or they return to crass atomism, etc., etc. Hence the course of science is often retrogressive.
>No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously
I feel this way about math books a lot actually, especially calculus. When we really formalized the foundations of calculus using limits and epsilon delta arguments in proofs (instead of alternatives like Non-standard analysis see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_analysis) I feel like a great deal of the intuition that actually built calculus was lost. I call it "differential reasoning", and I wish there was a class in just such a thing, formalized with operator theory and non-standard analysis techniques. It's still used a lot in physics but no one talks about the concept of a "ratio of differentials" in modern calculus.
Yeah, a book recommendation would be great! I’ve picked up this way of thinking over the last decade, but don’t know of a resource to recommend people.
I find this is especially true of fiction or infotainment books. Older fiction and popularized non-fiction usually deals with many of the same social issues faced today, but because it has stood up to the test of time, often more effectively.
Whether it’s gender identity issues, technological warfare, jingoist politicians, class struggles, leadership advice, etc., somebody already wrote about it more effectively than the huge majority of modern writers churning out books.