this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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A bit more than fifteen years ago I was burned out in my very successful creative career, and decided to try and learn about how the world worked.
I noticed opposing headlines generated from the same studies (published in whichever academic journal) and realised I could only go to the source: the actual studies themselves. This is in the fields of climate change, global energy production, and biospheric degradation. The scientific method is much degraded but there is still some substance to it. Wikipedia no chance at all. Academic papers take a bit of getting used to but coping with them is a skill that most people can learn in fairly short order. Start with the abstract, then conclusion if the abstract is interesting. Don't worry about the maths, plenty of people will look at that, and go from there.
I also read all of the major works on Western beliefs on economics, from the Physiocrats (Quesnay) to modern monetary theory. Read books, not websites/a website edited by who knows which government agencies and one guy who edited a third of it. It is simple: the cost of production still usually means more effort, so higher quality, provided you are somewhat discerning of the books you buy.
This should not even be up for debate. The fact it is does go some way to explain why the US is so fucked.
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Books are not immune to being written by LLMs spewing nonsense, lies, and hallucinations, which will only make more traditional issue of author/publisher biases worse. The asymmetry between how long it takes to create misinformation and how long it takes to verify it has never been this bad.
Media literacy will be very important going forward for new informational material and there will be increasing demand for pre-LLM materials.
Yes I know books are not immune to llm's. The classics are all already written - I would suggest peple start with them.