90% published research is garbage put out by sad cronyist scholarly communities. Stuff at best worth indexing for broader trends in a PDF dump.
You’d be choosing to live in an aestheticized landfill
Old books would be slightly less sad: less garbagey, but even more dead.
I barely like the sight of my own paper copies of the few papers I’ve published. Tossed most of my physical paper collection (2-3 shelves of 3-ring binders) a few years ago — andvthats filtered and selected stuff. I still have a few hundred digital pdfs in Dropbox.
Twitter is genuinely superior as a discovery environment to any library I’ve ever used. You get to be in the middle of a million messy, ornery, grumpy, but living, thinking minds. You are in the gravity field of the actual creative destruction of ideas.
At any moment a bunnytail might open up for you that leads to a new Alice-like wonderland. Could be esoteric theoretical physics or some silly ascii art subculture. Or just the one weirdo in the world who knows all about some random shit
Your profile says machine learning. You’re sitting in the best living data set in history and you’re fantasizing about retreating to some sad little dead collection of pseudorandom narrow data 😂