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🙅‍♂️ "Fiction vs. Nonfiction" these terms are a relic of the archaic book publishing industry, but still the main way people categorize their reading! 💁‍♂️ "reading for entertainment" vs "reading for betterment". At

we use the above instead. Why?

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1️⃣ nonfiction vs fiction is super binary and low information content. What about a sci-fi book you take away a whole worldview from? What about a biography you read for its ups and downs? What about articles, blogs, tweets? How can they be categorized as one or the other?

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2️⃣ reading for betterment vs entertainment gets at _why_ people are actually reading, which is what really matters Reading for entertainment is a substitute for Netflix, Instagram, video games etc Reading for betterment is a pursuit of knowledge/skills. Big difference!

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3️⃣ Many of the best books are fun to read, but also better you a lot. It's not binary. A big inspiration was authors like

@nealstephenson

&

. Folks would tell us they want to retain more from these authors' books... even though they're fiction!

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4️⃣ Once you have this terminology, a lot becomes clear. "Reading for entertainment" has already been disrupted by technology -- there's 100x more entertaining reading now being done in social media apps than fiction books...

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5️⃣ "Reading for betterment", on the other hand, is still basically in the stone ages. It's often done in paper books, web browsers, archaic PDF readers, email inboxes. None of these mediums are built to promote better learning, focus, prioritization, or retention.

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Have you seen the work

@andy_matuschak

has done building

- a mnemonic medium designed for long-term learning and deeper internalization of content?

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Yes :P very familiar!

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I'm curious what your thoughts are on augmenting existing mediums (books, Twitter threads, etc.) vs building better mediums.

is doing the former. Is that enough, or just the first step?

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@andy_matuschak

Replying to

Broadly speaking, they're different activities, though both are valuable in their own ways. I'd say the latter is lower-mean and higher-variance.

4:47 PM · Oct 2, 2021TweetDeck

Replying to

@andy_matuschak

They are united by a shared goal: improving the learning outcomes of content consumption.