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by dinfinity
379 days ago
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Is it? Or are 'legitimate' books just too often not concise and structured enough? I do a lot of personal knowledge management and I use a shit ton of sections and lists in that. Books evolved from the art of telling stories, not from efficiently conveying knowledge. Perhaps we're just way too used for books etc. to an approach that is suboptimal. I know I personally despise news articles and blogs that start with "setting the scene" and are incredibly and needlessly verbose, using thousands of words to say what could be made clear in a single paragraph. Viewed from another angle: Reading text is inherently serial in nature even though a lot of things are related to each other in a graph. A document with sections with bulleted lists is actually a way to represent a tree, which is closer to a fully unconstrained graph. I would argue that trees like that are much easier to parse than classically written texts. There is irony here in that I only used some whitespace to add structure, but never used any bulleted lists in this comment. [...] I did generate an alternative with Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, but the formatting doesn't work here on HN. It was decent, though! |
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That's because these are notes, not a book. A list-heavy outline format makes sense for notes, as these are summaries that supplement your own memory and knowledge you've already taken in. They're not a sole/primary source of conveying knowledge to others on their own.
> Perhaps we're just way too used for books etc. to an approach that is suboptimal.
If you truly believe books are "suboptimal", I can only suggest that you consider looking inward and do some reflection:
Is the "problem" really with books and long-form writing, which is the dominant form of knowledge transfer across several thousand years of human civilization?
Or is the problem with people's attention spans in the past decade, due to dopamine-fueling social media doom scrolling and AI usage?