Against Disruption: On the Bulletpointization of Books

I’m not saying that all self-help is bad. There’s always been an audience for short and snappy self-improvement books (there’s a reason why there are only 7 Habits, not 70), and that’s just fine. But I do worry about a larger phenomenon that I’ll call the bulletpointification of books and media.

[…]The popularity of book summary services like Blinkist and Shortform is a perfect encapsulation of what gets lost (nuance) in the bulletpointification of books, in which every bit of information is served in digestible bite-sized portions that you can upload right to your brain. A recent Blinkist post titled “7 Blinks To Understand the Conflict Between Israel and Hamas,” may give you some idea of the scale of such bullet point derangement, as if a blink was a proper unit of measurement to use to understand a genocide happening before the world’s eyes.

I have seen many VC-funded book startups come and go, usually led by well-intentioned people who think they have a good idea about how to “save” books. Remember all of the startups saying that they would be the Netflix of books? The latest bunch of startups that are for sure going to “fix” what’s wrong with books are focused on AI.

conciselyverbose,

I’m not saying that all self-help is bad.

I'm pretty damn close. None of it is actually based in any kind of evidence.

alyaza,
@alyaza@beehaw.org avatar

i wonder if the best way to think about self-help as a genre is as a sort of placebo genre, where the act of engaging with the genre is a more useful act toward whatever you want to do than actually reading any particular book.

conciselyverbose,

I get what you're saying. Merely being the impetus to make the effort has value.

It's kind of how I feel about pop science stuff like Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers is a little better than nothing, but there's a lot wrong with his core characterization of the research compared to reality. But if less people are going to read stuff like Peak or Range that use some academic rigor, is the partial presentation being popularized better? Or is the misrepresentation more harm than good?

I'm not entirely sure. But I do know to take his work with a heavy dose of skepticism.

(In this example, Ericsson (Peak) was on the initial research Gladwell jumps "10k hours" off of, which only explored the very structured training, with frequent feedback, of classical violin. Epstein (Range) sort of presents his as critiquing the original work, but mostly is really pointing to the flaws of Gladwell's presentation, before providing a different perspective mixing anecdotes with research supporting a broader base and showcasing how bringing ideas from other disciplines can have a lot of value to problem solving.)

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