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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29505 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Or they have a quota for article length and needed to pad it out.

This is a very common thing you encounter where the first 3-5 chapters of some nonfiction book are compelling and directly relevant to the author’s main thesis. Then the rest of the book is vaguely related to the thesis, mostly it’s other things the author has studied and can write competently about.

Publishers are reticent to put an 80 page book on the shelves even if that’s the best version of the book the author can produce.

I've noticed this so much in nonfiction books I've read lately, and a few fiction ones too!

100-120 pages of really amazing insights that are explained and applied in intuitive ways. Then another 100 or so pages of banal platitudes that vaguely follow from the rest. A big one is applying whatever insights they've made to social issue du jour. "Here's how my groundbreaking research into quantum hyperlinking across nonlocal space can help address... climate change." (I made that up, to be clear)

Big ideas don't necessarily need a novel-length treatment to explain in full, even addressing all the possible implications. But selling books is one of the few proven ways to make a buck from specialized academic research (until you have a saleable product, I guess) so that's the mold they'll trying to fill.

I basically never get past 1/3 of non-fiction books, but I often feel slightly guilty about it. It seems arrogant to say the last 2/3 is filler or stuff I can work out myself but…

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