Books Tend To Be Better than YouTube Videos
A defence of reading non-fiction in the 21st century
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one” - George R.R. Martin
"Reading a book" by Ed Yourdon is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
I have only banned one person from commenting on my posts on Substack. The conversation began well enough, before descending into axe-grinding territory. At the start of the conversation, I politely explained why reading credible non-fiction is such an important part of the Sharpen your Axe project. The other person - a conspiracy theorist - said that she never read books and that YouTube is just as good a source of information nowadays.
I disagreed strongly, but never got the chance to explain why as the conversation soon took a turn for the worse. After mulling it over for much too long in my head, I will use today’s post to explain why I think books tend to be much better than YouTube videos, at least at the moment. There are several reasons why and they overlap.
We will borrow a term - barriers to entry - from the business world for the first reason. This concept explains why it is much easier to set up a neighbourhood dry-cleaning business than it is to set up a car factory. For a dry cleaner, the first step is to choose a neighbourhood without much competition. You need a space and some machines, plus maybe a little capital for marketing, and you’re off.
On the other hand, to set up a car factory, you need huge amounts of capital, a giant space, armies of workers and support staff, huge spending on research and development (R&D) and marketing and so on, not to mention extraordinary expertise in supply chains. It is pretty much impossible for an ordinary member of the public to overcome these barriers. Even if someone did find a way of doing it, the existing brands will destroy you on price because their enormous scale allows them to keep prices under control.
In this analogy, recording a YouTube video is like opening a dry cleaner. YouTube is full of people sitting in their cars and ranting away about subjects that they barely understand. Writing a book is much closer to setting up a business with some barriers to entry. You will need to read a lot of books before you write one. Nobody ever publishes their first book - all authors have an unpublished manuscript or three under the bed. Finding a publisher is challenging; and if you publish a book yourself you will also have to market it yourself.
The second reason builds on the first. Without barriers to entry, literally anyone can upload any video about any subject to YouTube. This means that the probability of finding credible information is low. You are much more likely to find an uninformed amateur than you are a credible expert.
This is not to say that every non-fiction book you read will be good or that every video will be bad. Of course not! Conspiracy theorists and crackpots do manage to publish books all the time; and there are credible videos if you look for them. However, the third reason why books tend to be better than videos is due to what happens when you finish consuming the material.
The Flat Earth conspiracy theory spread like wildfire on YouTube a few years ago due to the platform’s recommendation algorithms, which were designed to minimize cognitive dissonance while locking viewers into the platform as long as possible. Research shows that Russian propagandists joined forces with science denialists to provide hours of deeply questionable content. For a long time, the algorithms failed to present a reality-based alternative to people who went down this rabbit hole. By the time YouTube changed its algorithms in 2019, the damage was already done for people who had bought into this ridiculous material.
By contrast, imagine that someone falls in love with a non-fiction book full of nonsense, like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Fine! If the reader decides to dig deeper into the material, he or she will have to go to the local bookshop or library or run some searches on Amazon. Sooner or later, he or she will come across a reality-based history of the Templars; or a book that talks about how historians think about their methodology; or a numerate take that says that if Jesus Christ had European descendants 2,000 years ago and those descendants also passed on their genes, then after 80 generations or so every European will carry this allegedly sacred blood.
In fact, this process of moving from nonsense to credible material happens to readers all the time. Many readers fall in love with an emotionally charged amateur take, but then as they slowly read more books on the subject begin to appreciate more thoughtful approaches. I have seen little evidence of this happening with fans of YouTube videos, although I suppose it is possible and will become more probable as the algorithms improve.
The fourth reason why books tend to be better than videos is a little fuzzier. I haven’t quite worked out worked out the best way to express it yet, but I’ll give it a try. In my experience, many of my social media acquaintances who get into YouTube pseudo-research tend to consume videos while they are very high. They let the words wash over them while enjoying being in a hypnotic flow state; and this seems to ramp up their gullibility to questionable material. It isn’t surprising that grifters sometimes try and sell the line that “reading books is for losers.” They’d much rather hypnotise stoners with the spoken word!
I haven’t seen much research on the link between consuming nonsense on YouTube while high and gullibility. However, if any aspiring psychologists are reading this column, it would be a great topic for a doctoral thesis.
By contrast, reading books requires concentration. Reading is a self-limiting activity. The moment you stop concentrating, you stop reading properly. All big readers have had the experience of realizing that we have only been skimming the words. We have to go back a few pages and try to re-read the passage while concentrating fully.
The fifth reason for the difference is that people who read a lot have the option of educating themselves by videos or by books. Reading is much faster, so most will choose this option most of the time. People who rarely read have much less choice about how to consume material.
The final reason that books tend to be better than videos is because of all the accumulated knowledge that they embed. Books descend from clay tablets, which date back nearly 4,000 years. Over more than 150 generations, a select group of people in each generation have sought to tame our thoughts by writing them down and sharing them with others, while referring back to others who have done the same.
The great science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin helps provide us with a glimpse of the difference between the worlds of writers/readers and spoken-word cultures in her Earthsea series. In this world, both men and women can have magical powers. In the early novels, men appear to have developed wizarding institutions to preserve, develop and teach their skills, while witches appear not to have not done so. Later novels show that the backstory is a little more complicated than it first appears.
In Tehanu, the fourth of six books in the series, Le Guin puts these words in the mind of a character who has spent time with both wizards and witches and observed significant differences between them: “A good deal of her [a witch’s] obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.”
We can see something similar in the difference between books and videos. If you want to write books, you should read; and read a lot. You should read fiction and non-fiction. You should read good books and bad books. Struggle through William Shakespeare’s history plays and Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov. Also, try The Origins of Totalitarianism and Pride and Prejudice. Feel disappointed with yourself for not getting enough out of them and read them again; and then again a few years later when your concentration has improved; and then return to them a decade or two later.
You should also think hard about what you read. Maybe keep a reading diary to track what you learnt and what you want to learn next? Why not start a blog and publish essays on the books you enjoy on a regular basis?
On the other hand, if you want record videos, you just need to buy a webcam and start. There is an art to doing it well, of course, but you might find that getting good engagement metrics and doing credible, reality-based work might not necessarily go hand in hand. Podcast host Joe Rogan is a case in point.
It is worth mentioning that this essay is a snapshot of how I see matters in March/April 2023. The world is changing fast. I’m not sure this essay will survive the test of time. Maybe in the not-too-distant future, we will see increasing crossover between both worlds. More authors and experts will be drawn to making videos; and the producers of the videos with the highest engagement levels will be invited to write books. Maybe future generations will look back on YouTube’s mishandling of the Flat Earth issue as a false start, while video algorithms will increasingly reward reality-based information while downgrading amateur speculation. We’ll see.
In the meantime, though, my advice remains the same: Read books! As someone who fell in love with reading around the age of seven or eight and who has always read more than 100 books per year, not to mention publishing a book on how to think critically about the news, I realize that I am somewhat of a dinosaur in the video age. Not many young people develop the reading habit nowadays. Also, there are so many other sources of entertainment, which mean that many people who enjoyed books as children and young adults often slowly stop reading books as they get older.
If you want to develop (or recover) the reading habit, my advice is to buy or download a handful of books on subjects you find exciting. Pile the books next to your bed or load them up in an “unread books” folder on your Kindle or e-reader. The next step is to set a process goal. A good example is to read one chapter after lunch every day. Another example is to read a book on your commute instead of looking at your phone or glancing at a free newspaper.
As you develop good reading habits, you can add more process goals into the mix. Maybe decide to buy a book or two every month as soon as you get paid. Why not read a chapter every night before bed instead of watching another Netflix episode? What about reading for an hour a day when you’re on holiday? Why not start building a wishlist of books that are referenced in the material that you enjoy? If you do this steadily for a long time, all the reading will compound. As you spend time with the words of credible researchers and great novelists, it will gradually become much easier to recognize grifters and con artists, who use conspiracy theories as the bodyguards of bad ideas instead of reconsidering their starting positions.
Finally, one of the big advantages of engaging with formal education is that it puts you in a position where you have to read material that you might not have discovered for yourself. Why not enroll in a course or two in your spare time? Any qualifications will be secondary to getting a good reading list from the teacher at the start of the course and slowly plowing through it in your own time. Hopefully the recommended authors will be experts in their fields and you will learn plenty of new ideas from them. The comments are open. See you next week!
Further Reading
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition by Ursula Le Guin
Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!
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One more reason, I think, that reading nonfiction is better for developing critical thinking skills in particular than watching videos about nonfiction is that the physical experience of reading a book keeps the reader in their own bearings or mindset, whereas a video experience takes most people into a more passive, consuming style of processing information. Seeing the author’s thoughts in black and white, when something confusing or unconvincing is said, it is so simple to pause and reread, perhaps go back, perhaps pull out another book. When something stunning is said, the same - it’s so simple and natural to highlight it or write it in your own notebook so you remember the line. In watching a video, in contrast, the specific words and sentences are much less noticed while watching a video, and the mind is apt to skim past something nonsensical or wrong more easily. This is actually somewhat the case as well for reading digital text v paper, https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf. But profoundly more so for watching videos.
I agree in part. In regards to learning, books have a structured approach whereas many videos tend to be abstract, that is, part of the information you seek is there, but frequently the information tendered is not at the beginning of what you need to learn first. You wouldn't start reading a book on page 50, and then skip to page 10, that is what I refer to as abstract.Non fiction learning books tend to have considerable fact checks before they are published, Videos tend to be less reliable.
That said, Video is processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text says Psychology Today. This statement is consistent with my own experience.I take the juxtaposition to your assertions of books being a quicker way to learn. I believe your position, that you cannot or will be less likely to be objective to the information you are being told in a video and that you are gullible if you accept what the video is telling you without applying critical thinking is merely an attempt to muddy the waters, and poisoning the well ( so to speak), anyone who happens to disagree, well the implication is that they are gullable, however, there is absolutely no evidence to support the contention that you can learn quicker from a book than a video ( anyone who believes that must be gullible.lol).
An avid book reader will agree that books are better to learn. However, that is merely confirmation bias, they believe what they want to believe unless they can adduce supporting evidence that is more compelling than counter-evidence.). The level of concentration required to fully digest the information from a book is higher than the concentration levels necessary to digest what a video requires. A video is not only telling you but also showing you.