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Thought experiment. Take the top 7 books that have shaped your thinking as a “stack” in the software sense running on the hardware of your brain. Would someone else who shared your top 7 be able to follow along most of your thinking, say 80%?
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Don’t take the particular numbers seriously. Think of it as: do the first n books explain m% of your thinking where m(n) is a positive definite function? (ie the more books you share in your stack with me, in the same order, the closer your thinking to mine)... true or false?
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Many people seem to loosely operate on this assumption, which is sort of like a blank slate model where books get loaded in and interconnected, and a sort of “principal component analysis” yields books in order of explained fraction.
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The other assumption that seems built in is that books are only valuable as a chunk of information. But the value of that information depends on the experience you bring when you’re absorbing it, and, more importantly, the work you out it to afterwards.
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To me, the combo of experience + practice + chance influences the impact of any book more than the content of the books itself. And I’m saying this as a fanatical reader, so I’m not trying to minimise the importance of books.
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My guess is that people reading the same books already thought the same way beforehand, and are probably slightly more aligned afterwards.
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