Quote of the Day

Christopher Nolan’s persistent thematic idea [is] 'What we see is not true, it's just a facade.' You see this in all his movies. But he never says ["why"] . . . in any depth . . ." Basically, there's nothing to 'get' in the first place.

This is not completely true. The Batman films serve steak, not tripe. But it's worth repeating over and over: If you didn't understand something it's usually because the author/director/painter/composer isn't clear or because there is nothing to "get."

What and Where to Read

I'll bookend another David Brooks quote with two Keynes quotes:

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones

But Brooks believes we should try to entrap ourselves with the old ideas:

. . . different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on . . .

But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.

The thing is, you can read books with terrible, unimportant ideas just like you can read terrible writing on the Internet (like this). Brooks isn't arguing for books so much as arguing for the cannon. But I don't read fiction because there are hardly any good ideas in fiction--you tend to get out only what you put in. That eliminates most of the cannon. The rest, which is mostly philosophy and religion, you can learn more efficiently through secondary sources. Reading Kant in translation or Berkeley directly is a horrible way to learn about the categorical imperative or subjective idealism. If you want to be smart don't read a lot of "great books," just siphon a ton of great ideas out of good textbooks and literature reviews. Then think hard about why most of those ideas are bad (e.g. this).

That said, Brooks might have a point when you consider libertarians. They tend to learn everything they know from a few Internet sources and don't know much economic theory. Indeed,

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Reading

Some reads are just fun, human interest pieces that leave you feeling pensive and satisfied even though you can't identify what you learned. I think there is value in this kind of reading--from time to time--and a favorite example from recent years is There and Back Again: Soul of a Commuter.

Other reads are complete tripe. One type is bad because the author don't make an argument. They are often dealing with a trade-off that necessities thinking about the costs on one hand and the benefits on the other, but they fail to see the big picture and obsess over benefits (if they are pro) or costs (if they are con). This "assessment" of Teach for America is a good example.

Another type of tripe masquerade as being about some important issue--global governance, ethics, religion--but makes trite, unverifiable, and often poorly formed claims. This deeply unsatisfying, but popular, piece from Ross Douthat fits that bill. Conservatives love it for pouring oil on the fire of their unexamined prejudices, but if you're a deep thinker that should be anathema.

The best reads are concise and make an explicit argument. They benefit from giving a sense of the big picture, but their value comes from teaching you something you didn't know before or only had a vague sense of. They can be particularly helpful if you've asked the question they ask but never found an answer. They are hard to find because good ideas don't grow on tree, but if you look in the right places you'll probably find a few each week. This paper, by Angrist and Pischke, is the best I've read the past few days, but I'd only recommend it for people who write empirical economics papers.