• Who says there’s no more alpha?
• Patrick Collison? (unsubstantiated)
• Holden Karnofsky
• SBF: “Should have been a blog post”
• Richard Hanania
• Who says there still is alpha?
• Emerson Spartz?
• For reading books
• Writing is an encapsulation of someone else’s thoughts, fed to you at much faster speeds
• Books are specifically written by a single author, so present a coherent worldview missing from jumping from Substack to Substack
• Even if you don’t remember the specific content, you remember the narrative, the pointer to whether something was good or bad, and can go back to refer to it later
• It takes a while to actually have something sink in; tweet vs article vs book
• Reading is practice at skimming & reading faster, which is useful for loading more shortform stuff into your memory
• Tyler Cowen’s “What do you practice the way a pianist practices scales?” — reading
• Against reading books
• Talking with people forms bonds, you can’t bond with a book
• Except with vague hero-worship towards the author
• What are the alternatives? What does reading funge against?
• Reading book titles and tweets and articles
• Listening to books or podcasts
• Watching videos
• Guess: People’s short-term memories are degrading as a result of screens and persistent internet connection; it’s not that books are getting worse, but humans are getting more distracted
• Also, the people saying this are extremely well read. Perhaps “no alpha left in books” is correct for them on the margin, but not for you, person who reads three books a year.
• Correlation between success and lifetime # books read?
• More specifically, success on the high end