The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that people do this less to actually feel superior to others and more as a desperate act of establishing an identity, ANY identity, to simply feel seen and validated in spite of just being yet another person on the planet. This uniquely-human trait seems to run counter to the natural order, where spotted leopards, panthers, elephants, myriad birds all just exist and go about their lives, despite their objective, innate individualities.

We are curious creatures lol

In your use case, the LLM can be a great tool to get a start, but it's much easier to accept that output uncritically, which is especially problematic because it bears the biases of the training corpus. Sure, you can mitigate that issue if you're driven by the intellectual curiosity to dig deeper, which it seems you are, but at that point aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway? You're just using the initial steps to discover the "foundational texts", as the original post puts it, of the field. The LLM step becomes less material to the follow-up reading you've done after the fact.

Many, perhaps even most people will not make it to the second step. I see the lack of intellectual curiosity as a problem of focus more than anything else, and in my experience the overly rich media landscape of the internet does not concentrate that focus in most people.

Books are dense on info (assuming its not a churned out book which are also a problem now with self publishing) the internet tends to be full of fluff and greatly increases the time that I spend sifting rather than just learning and researching. My best purchase in the last couple years is a 10.3" ebook reader. Technical subject books don't work well on smaller readers and it makes a huge difference in quality of my personal development/research/learning.

I do agree that right now LLM's can help you a lot when you are starting on especially on a subject you know little about. However this will absolutely be poisoned over time because marketing will always creep in until it dominates the HTTP source. There is simply too much money to be made jamming a product in someones face no matter how subtle over providing impartial information when it comes to HTTP. The subtle ads are the most insidious because they can often waste lots of your time without you realizing it. Sometimes for years if you don't realize you were evangelized rather than educated.

I would fall into the category of someone who does research as leisure. I have been slowly unraveling the genetics behind gender dysphoria. Yes I have borrowed a few biology books from libraries, but it has mostly been reading 70 years of research papers, piecing together all the evidence to make a hypothesis, comparing it to all the research data and iterating. In the last year I have also started getting a fair number of WGS (Whole Genome Sequenced) files, and I have a whole separate pile of anecdotal that just because it isn't published doesn't mean I can ignore it either. These are about as far from books as you can get. It is something I do for leisure, so my investigation has been somewhat random, following whatever I found interating at that time including dead ends. Been doing this very open ended research for years now and at this point we have a really solid understanding of it, so the edge cases are actually now the fun stuff. I never would have made anywhere near the progress I did if I had been forced to start with reading a bunch of random unrelated biology books.

Aren't you saying the same thing, putting them down? You could both be curious about each other.

I'll do it the way I always have - read, cogitate, experiment.

That's not to say I don't think others should use LLMs by the way, knock yourself out.

Leisurely and "must include" sounds very contradicting.

>> I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else.

We all have our bias. We settle with and swear by a way we end up finding to work for us for right reasons.

I notice this a lot while doing math. I would normally start with books because they already have predefined structure and have all the topics a person would normally need. I buy 3 or 4 books for which solutions are available. I start with book and then I would listen to lectures. If I do not understand, I would read some other book on same topic. I would have one book which I can understand better than other. Then try to solve many problems from all the books and look up solutions.

Though this is so time consuming and demanding with a full time job, when I engage with learning, I try to engage in this manner. If somebody asks me, I would recommend this because for fairly technical topics because other ways have left me with vague understanding but not good enough mental model to make me relate to problems in terms of the abstractions from those topics. That does not mean this is the only way and each might have to find thier own path.

LLM has been godsend for me too here, particularly when I am trying to fill my gaps in understanding while reading technical books. And it is much more easier to listen or see, than to read. So, given our current landscape and how much time is spent with work, it is true that it is getting harder and harder to read and almost not feasible for many of us.

Did he say anything else was important? I'd have to read the source material.

Why did he say you should read the source material?

Did he consider counter-arguments?

Was his overall argument more nuanced?

How did he come to the conclusion that you should read source material?

Was this his main point, or a secondary point in a list of several different arguments?

Honestly, a lot of academia seems like social media. People take a one-line summary and argue over the merits, often without any real idea of the source material.

Doing personal fancy research was not available before as it is now. Even though one still has to be rather privileged to have time to dig through obscure details that don’t make him money.

Long live LLMs

My personal take is LLMs and podcasts are not great for research. Wikipedia is generally outstanding for science and related topics, although it's clearly astroturfed on topics about companies and some political topics. Podcasts typically cover things very shallowly but can sometimes be useful if there's a topic well served by the interview-a-day format. YouTube has a lot of treasure but you need to be able to search and not get distracted by clickbait.

LLMs function exceptionally as next generation search engines. But their knowledge for research bottoms out very quickly unless you know a lot about the subject and are able to prompt it effectively.

For example, I asked ChatGPT o1 your question about suburbs and its answer was basically total nonsense. The third theory it mentions was white flight and the post WWII era, which can't possibly explain why suburbs exist internationally and have since ancient times. There's probably a better prompt where you define what a suburb is and why you're interested in it and otherwise give it some good parameters and it gives you some more relevant information.

BTW I more or less agree that foundational texts can be very important to read. Not always, of course, but often enough that if you read a lot you should consider it. Often I find they bring considerable clarity to a subject.

>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts

It completely depends on the depth at which you are researching for leisure. If you like to do it to learn some stuff, just using LLMS, wiki and books is perfectly fine!

If you're trying to make a breakthrough in human understanding, it is useful to understand very very well the foundations. It is not required, sometime, another background is enough to see clearly some research issue.

But as you're doing research for fun, if you want to push the boundaries, having very strong foundational knowledge is awesome and very empowering.

Take for example the LLMs, you have many levels of comprehension that you may aim for (just an example):

- simply using occasionally (existance awareness)

- experimenting with prompts engineering (exploratory research)

- studying the neural architectures (understanding better what's going on)

- understanding how the architectures are validated (if they are...)

- finding limiting cases (deeper exploratory research)

- thinking about in under the perspective of bayesian/classical statistics (research at the normal mathematical/engineering level)

- going deep into characterizing the architectures in terms of manifolds, or any other suitable structure that you believe is true (deep fundamental research)

- opening up new questions about what can be learned and why (leading to another research field)

The first 3 are available inside a LLM, on Wikipedia and in books. The rest you need to fetch some papers. The more you go down the path, the more obscure the papers gets.

Up to the end, the last point, where you land in survey papers for the other field, and then you can start again with new questions. The good thing is that most of the fundamental research can be readily applied to understand the new field! It's like a jump start.

But at the end of the day, depending on which depth you want to do your leisure research, the deeper you go, the more foundation papers become important, not just from their content, but also the powerful ideas that can be transferred in other research projects.

Maybe.. One thing that is missing from what I say is that it's not about the quantity, or even the quality of the material you read. But it depends on engaging in deep thinking about it! Someone can spend his life reading and not become smarter, maybe only more knowledgeable.

I my opinion, deep thinking is maybe the most fun and useful skill in leisure research, as in paid research.

In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding. I heard, that is why Feynman lectures are bad for some people. It is very easy to understand, but doing physics require active problem solving.

Consuming audio is the most human way and if it works for you, it works for you.

Postulating that a particular kind of activity might be better suited to a particular kind of goal isn't elitism. Is it "elitist" to claim that one sorting algorithm is faster than another?

People are so individualistic and sensitive these days that they take any proposed alternatives that don't align with their own habits and modes of consumption as a direct affront against them. I don't think this article is claiming any sort of superiority—it's lamenting a previous modality of information exchange and reflection that seems to be on the decline. Sure, you might argue that claiming civilization is in crisis is a form of elitism, but I interpret it more like an elaboration of a perceived problem and not a value judgement about the superiority of some alternatives.

I don't like riding in cars. I prefer to walk. Plenty of people would be right to tell me taking a car is often more efficient, I don't think of them as "car elitists".

When I say you should read, I'm not really saying that's the only valid way to take in information.

I'm saying that to a first approximation, if you do read, you are probably practicing healthy habits around taking in information. And if you don't, it's likely you're not.

It's a slightly blunt statement, but the more nuanced 'try to engage with information deeply, think through multi-step reasoning cascades on your own, integrate different sources of information and transfer them to new domains' really doesn't land in the same way.

Snob: "Listening to an audio book doesn't count as reading the book!"

Everyone else in the world: "k"

I see problems arising from this in academia quite commonly. The discussions based only on reading and writing (and discussions) tend to get detached from reality, often to the point of inability to point out any real world examples where the discussion actually applies to.

Also many who lament lack of reading can be quite proudly "not technical persons", "not mathematical thinkers" or "not good with my hands", with kind of implication that these are not of much significance for intellectual development.

But the people who put reading on a pedestal also need to remember that reading is still subservient to doing, because that is where theory meets reality and reality is not usually kind to theory.

The reality is when you get deep enough in a topic, virtually all the content is available solely in text form. So I tell people that while it's fine to consume content in other formats, you have to make sure you are quite capable when it comes to reading.

Balance them all out depending on your preferences.

btw, the common idea that people have “learning styles” seems to have been debunked, but I do feel that there are so many ways to approach a topic that it’s helpful to understand them through different media

Indeed, history is largely lost on kids. You need to see some real world events play out before you can care about history.

I also think, if you're going to teach history to children, it should be taught in reverse chronology. Basically here's what's happening now, and that's due to what happened last year, which is due to what happened last decade, etc. Work your way back to the Greeks and Babylonians. Like James Burke's Connections.

Have you read Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore? I admit I didn't finish it, but what I did read was very interesting. Although I admittedly didn't fact check it.

Well, our minds aren’t but we have legs and arms which is cool. But maybe that will change too.

It's not that they are too stupid, but they don't even __try__ to think.

They have no idea I only have a degree in American History and Secondary Education. When they do ask some actually get upset thinking that I was tricking them! I used to get upset, but I know now how much some people hold their degree close to their ego.

Science needs more "art", that is the fun part.

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/things-could-be-bette...

https://thorehusfeldt.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/soda201...

Worth noting that Adler was also the editor of Encyclopdia Britannica's Great Books Series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...

Where do you find community interested in serious amatuer research?

I know what most people actually mean by that, but my gears start turning because not only do I know that I read more than any of my ancestors. Reading is like breathing to me.

I guess I do it out of leisure in a sense, but it's a way of life in many respects. Perhaps I don't read much fiction, but not a day goes by that I'm not cracking open an encyclopedia (aka Wikipedia), reading blog posts, investigating research papers, and reading some eBook I've stripped the DRM from on my Kobo.

And I'm an oddball – so if I'm reading that much, then surely there are plenty of people out there reading stuff.

I do sometimes wonder whether Gen Z and Alpha are even reading anything outside of school anymore, but that's probably more of that doomsday crap I'm prone to slipping into as I gradually become an old man.

Absolutely - it's a miracle, almost. But relatively few people really do it because they are rarely pursuing truth. They are reading and watching misinformation and disinformation.

> Global book market is healthy and as big as it ever was. Most of us a reading more in a day that even scholars did in a month two centuries ago.

Enjoy yourself; still, most of that is social media and that's equating things based on their medium. It's like saying, 'I look at lots of paintings' when you're talking about your walls, because Jackson Pollack's art and your walls both use paint and some of it even splattered.

Also among books, there are instant romances and On the Origin of Species and Analects. There's nothing wrong with the former, but the fact that they all share a medium is almost meaningless.

> democratization

I'm familiar with the expression, but I think it's an attempt by propagandists and nihilists to ennoble their work. It's 'democratization' that they can spread misinformation and disinformation. Social media is not comparable to books; it's professional media, only 100x worse.

However, I don't necessarily think the problem is books. I think the problem is 'time', and how reading has evolved in my life to be less about "the enjoyment of the action of reading" into "the necessity of acquiring the information" (even if that 'necessity' is intended for 'leisure' / 'pleasure').

It's as if the modern world has conditioned us all to skim-read, prioritise, and optimise information-to-words ratio. I wouldn't "mind" sitting down with an unknown book and giving it a good-old college try, in principle, but in practice, any book I read now competes with some other book in my backlog, which I'm also not ever going to read because that too competes with another book in my backlog, and I simply don't have the time, because I should be reading more stuff for work etc instead.

I remember I told a friend of mine once, that I was practicing speed-reading, and that I was getting good at it, and reading books faster as a result. I remember the look of horror on his face, he thought it was a terrible idea. The whole point of a book is to read it slowly, he said. There was this idea that, if you speed read it, even if you do in fact read everything in it, you've still only just looked at the all content, but you haven't really experienced or savoured the book, or allowed yourself to get lost in it. And he's right, I think, and his words do still echo and haunt me a tiny bit to this day. I do remember what that feeling of getting lost in a good book was like, and I really miss it. But I don't know how to get it back. Certainly not between breaks while reading reports at work.

From the age of 20 to 38, I had a hard time reading books. I grew up reading Tolkien, Dan Simmons, Timothy Zahn, but the internet exploding in speeds and online content replaced my reading habits. So I moved to just read that.

I recently got back into reading books by trying books I used to read. I'm fine with Tolkien, but I couldn't stomach 3 chapters of Heir to the Empire. Star Wars was just boring to me now. And I found that I like mystery/spooky books more than I did before. I can still read Tolkien and Hyperion without a problem and I also like my nonfiction software/hardware stuff too.

I think there is a lot of elitism about reading and the intellectualism around it. "What books are you reading right now?" is a sort of shibboleth or even one-upmanship ("Oh yes I read that last year - you should read this other thing that I think is better/more clever" etc).

Don't play the game. If you don't like reading books and don't get much out of it, don't do it.

I get a secret glee when I have mentees and younger folks asking me about what books to read to achieve success or get hired etc, and I tell them "don't waste your time reading books - learn <thing> instead." It ruffles feathers, and I am sure I'll get roasted on here too, but there you go! :)

While various obligations can reduce your entertainment time, I've noticed that most people complaining about that tend to be able to list tens of Netflix series that they watched. And then wonder why I have no idea what they're talking about and when I have time to read.

> Even the sci-fi and fantasy books, once I loved, lost their magic.

Have they, or have you finished all the great books that were published before the present, and now need to wait for someone to write new great books?

95% of what gets published in a year in any medium is probably only worth watching/reading if you're very bored. Your saving grace when you are born is there is a century of previously published good stuff. But you're eventually going to run out.

I found that disagreeable viewpoints very seldom takes away any value of a book. Much worse is if it's written badly, repetitive, slow, etc.

Have you read the Bible? It's shockingly different from what people believe is written there. It is a post-apocalyptic survival guide, as well as a collection of human stories and ideas that might date back hundreds of thousands of years.

Have you read the Quran? Reading it is essential to understanding Muslims and their faith. It is first and foremost an anti-christian book, and the faith is foremost anti-christian. Just as christendom at one time was foremost anti-pagan.

There's an immense wealth in mythology from all over the world to read, which takes you on journeys much more profound than any fantasy book.

Have you read the communist manifesto? It is a short pamphlet, energetic and quite fun to read. Even an anti-communist can understand why it riled up so many people.

Have you read the books written by historical figures, instead of about historical figures. The former is much more interesting, while the latter is written by some dusty professor with an agenda.

Think about the most provocative book you can imagine and go and read it. It's just letters on paper, nothing more.

As for sci-fi and fantasy, you shouldn't read that. You only have one life, why would you waste it? You can and should read von Brauns book "Mars Project", which is the only science "fiction" book which should have been written.

For fiction, there are hundreds of classics, and the older the more interesting.

When I read a book and there's an interesting reference to another book, I always download that book as well. This takes you down paths that you never thought existed, and now I have a couple hundred books already on my reading list. If one is a dud, I just delete it.

The older and more cynical I have become, they're kind of just bullshit. I'd love to say their escapist but they fail even there as I my escapism increasingly requires a modicum of plausibility. I think there are still some books out there that might ring true in terms of seeing people and society for the way they are, but then there is a lot of Harry Potter.

I don't know about that, but so what if it did? Why is it even worth remarking on?

I care about the value of their ideas; they don't need to pass a culture war test first.

I was thinking about the civilization book case and wondering if they had forgotten to include sun tzu, clausewitz, etc ...