Hah, this is exploiting the old, 'back in my day music was good, unlike whatever you are listening to now'.

In other words, you let everyone else filter for you.

Or: Lindy Effect, survivorship bias, some kind of incentive that selects for quality over time, etc.

Music is almost purely for entertainment and not for information so tastes can afford to be variable. And books are published on all sorts of topics so even despite this, among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.

> And books are published on all sorts of topics so even despite this, among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.

This is recursive and implies a decrease in diversity over time, starting from enormously high and reaching abysmally small. But I am fairly certain that it doesn't hold.

> among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.

I fail to see what makes old books capable of disagreeing with each other and recent releases incapable. At some point new releases become old and therefore they suddenly attain the ability to disagree with each other?

I fail to see the difference between music and books tbh. Whatever remains popular has, as you said, some property or quality that helps preserve it in memory.

> This is recursive and implies a decrease in diversity over time, starting from enormously high and reaching abysmally small. But I am fairly certain that it doesn't hold.

What books are considered part of a canon will always trail behind the total number of books being published, so the total set will either remain stable or increase in size.

However, I think your assumption that it will somehow converge only holds if the criterion of quality are both universal and consistent. Neither has to be true – different cultures have different measures and weights for quality, and within cultures there are disagreement as to what quality is (even in a contemporary setting). Hence my next claim.

> I fail to see what makes old books capable of disagreeing with each other and recent releases incapable. At some point new releases become old and therefore they suddenly attain the ability to disagree with each other?

That's the point – it equivocates the two which allows you to be indifferent between them upto other factors, since you should expect both new and old books to be diverse, rather than the monoculture of thought you are attempting to resist by going completely your own way. Those other factors can include possible selection effects like I have claimed above which act as signals for a book's quality.

I guess the only thing left to add is that you can't read everything, but there's a lot you could read. Given this problem, does one be an early adopter for a book or not?

Thank you for explaining your POV. In retrospect, my first comment insinuates a lazy approach to filtering. However, I didn't intend so, and it caused a misunderstanding, because we are in agreement. I did not intend to suggest that 'allowing other people to select for you' creates a monoculture, though the lack of information in the sentence and my subsequent replies points to that.

> I guess the only thing left to add is that you can't read everything, but there's a lot you could read. Given this problem, does one be an early adopter for a book or not?

The answer to the explore-exploit dilemma is dependent on the remaining time and your reward function, i.e. goals. I am still in my infancy as an avid reader, therefore I can not give a good enough comment.

Riffing off of this:

A better heuristic that can accommodate both the observation and necessity of change in how books are appraised could be: "What is the oldest possible correct book for the given topic, that continues to be read today?" If new books come for new topics that's fine, read them if the topic matters. Else older books might be better to use given the previous argument.

> I'm a big fan of the adage to not read anything younger than 10/20/30 years old

The only issue I really have with this is textbooks. Especially true for humanities/history where some new things have come to light or new theories/fields have developed.

> by definition most books are mediocre

What? Oh, well, in that regard most elements in any category is mediocre. Doesn’t really mean much...

Sturgeon's law: "ninety percent of everything is crap." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law