The Best Authors Respect the Reader's Time

0:00Unlike Schopenhauer, you're an industrial philosopher, like an industrial designer. Your philosophy is designed for the masses. Like everybody else on Twitter, we're philosophizing for wide adoption. People suggest you read the great books, read Aristotle and Littgenstein and all the supposedly great philosophers. I mean, I've read almost all that stuff and I've gotten very little value from it. Where I have gotten value is the philosophizing of people on Twitter like you. Anybody who wants to read philosophy, I would just tell them to skip it and go read David Deutsch. You are not wrong. I can't stand any of the philosophers you talked about.

0:41I don't like Plato either. Every other piece of philosophy I picked up and put down relatively quickly because they're just making very obscure arguments over minuté and trying to come up with all-encompassing theories of the world. Even Schopenhauer falls into that trap. When he tries to talk to other philosophers, he's at his worst. When I like him is in his shorter essays. That's where he almost writes like he's on Twitter. He would have dominated Twitter. He has high density of ideas, very well thought through, good minimal examples and analogies. You can pick it up and read one paragraph and you're thinking for the next hour.

1:14I think of a better writer, a better thinker, and a better judge of people and character thanks to what I read from him. Now, he's writing from the early part of the 19th century. Whenever he wanders into topics that are scientific or medical or political, he's obviously off base. That stuff doesn't apply anymore. But when he's writing about human nature, that is timeless. When it comes to anything about human nature, I say go read the Lindy books, the older books, the ones that have survived the test of time. But if you want to develop specific knowledge, get paid for it, do something useful, then you want to stay on the bleeding edge.

1:47That knowledge is going to be more timely and obsolete more quickly. Those two make sense. What doesn't make sense to me is just reading stuff that's not Lindy or that's not about human nature, but is old. I also shy away from stuff that's low density in the learnings. like history books. I like The Lessons of History by Will Durant because it's a summarization of the story of civilization, which was his large 12-volume series. But I'm not going to go read the 12-volume series. I've read plenty of history. I know he's referring to these kinds of things. So I'm not just taking his word for it on high-level concept.

2:17But at the same time, at this point in my life, I want to read high-density works. You can call it the TikTok disease or the Twitter generation, but it's also just being respectful of our time. We already have a lot of data. We have some knowledge. Now we want wisdom. Now we want the generalized principles that we can attach to all of the other information we already have in our minds. We do want to read high-density work, but I would argue that Schopenhauer is very high-density work. All my favorite authors are very high-density. Deutsch is extremely high-density. Borges is very high-density.

2:47Ted Chiang is very high-density. The old Neil Stevenson was very high-density. Then he just cut high-volume, high-density, high everything. But the best authors respect the reader's time. And Schopenhauer is very much in that vein.