Re:The Lindy Effect
by RamblingCTO on Thursday September 14, 2023 @05:08AM
(#37506592)
Absolutely! Book discovery IS hard and it's sad that goodreads is still the best way for me. Recommendations suck on all platforms and visiting book shops has a recency bias and I'm going out with a whole in my pocket
"The kind of storytelling people got away with 50 years ago really doesn't work anymore today."
Yeah, I've struggled with this a lot -- e.g. still having trouble reading the works of Dostoevsky because of those endless walking-in-the-park-and-philosopising dialogues. These seem alien in my time and culture.
I suppose you have to sense the characteristics of that 50-year-old language -- and see the universal, timeless ideas behind that language. Language is a tool, a form. It does change quite a bit in 50 (or 100) years, whereas the general ideas change much less IMO. To a large degree, this is a "seeing forest for the trees" thing.
Re:The Lindy Effect
by RamblingCTO on Thursday September 14, 2023 @07:47AM
(#37507653)
Ohhh how I can relate. I'm reading Walden as a non-native speaker and 170 years ago things were quite different. Kindle has the nice functionality that tries to explain terms. What it does in practice tho is that it explains things I know and doesn't explain wildly exotic terms ...
Re:The Lindy Effect
by DontchaKnowit on Thursday September 14, 2023 @09:18AM
(#37508626)
Yeah I tried reading Solaris and was laughing at how bad it was. Felt the same way about nueromancer. Had a good run of trying out sci fi classics and being dissapointed. Philip k dicks stuff was solid tho. Ubiq is the shit
Re:The Lindy Effect
by RamblingCTO on Friday September 15, 2023 @02:40AM
(#37519334)
I'm also having a hard time with neuromancer, but I'm afraid that Gibson did this on purpose
So on the one hand recency bias results in us giving undue attention to new books. On the other hand we are too forgiving to classics. There is no lesson here. Finding the right books to read is hard and you can't trust reviews.