One of the annoying things about my current research on temporality is that there are several big fat books everybody (correctly) regards as essential references that I don’t have the patience to read fully.
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During my PhD my advisor or somebody offered a wise heuristic: for every 100 references you collect (and 100 is the minimum to claim mastery of a subject) and grok the basic point of, you actually shallow read maybe 10, and deep read maybe 3-5.
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The strategic trick is realizing that the 3-5 you go deep on are almost certainly NOT going to be the consensus seminal references in the field. That’s a recipe for boring incrementalism. You get interesting results by putting weird, unexpected obscure picks in your top 5.
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Still, this is hard when a subject is dominated by gravity field of big fat books. It’s like operating in Jupiter orbit. Engineering research is like the asteroid belt. Mostly papers. If it’s a big fat book, it’s already a textbook in civilized core, not part of the frontier.
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Research on temporality is shaped by the gravity field of a few big fat books: J. T. Fraser’s Time: the Familiar Stranger Proust’s In Search of Lost Time The Einstein-Bergson debate (an event with a fat literature attached) David Landes’ Revolution in Time
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My own starting points/key references are much more obscure, but can’t avoid contectualozing with these big mountains
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what books are they
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Generally speaking when I feel that way it means that there's not really anything drawing me to the book to make me get any additional depth out of it. Then down the road I might read some other book that talks about it in a different light and then I'll feel actually compelled
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But I'm really convinced that there is only so much you can get out of a book if there's no active intuitive lure
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