Non-fiction books as black boxes: they are more than their ideas

Written: March 23, 2018 | Released: June 4, 2021

If we shouldn’t judge a (non-fiction) book by its cover, what should we judge it by?

In my experience, highly analytical people tend to reduce non-fiction books to the ideas they contain. From this point of view, most non-fiction is pretty bad.

Why bother reading 350 pages just to get 3-6 ideas? Why wade through 20 anecdotes and stories that provide almost no evidence for the author’s claims? Why listen to an idea being repeated in slightly different forms over and over for hours? I’m pretty sympathetic to these complaints.

But a different way to evaluate non-fiction (and perhaps even fiction, too) is to consider it from the perspective of what it DOES to you rather than what it EXPLAINS to you.

Forget for a moment that a book is a bunch of words. Think of it as a black box. A person P comes in contact with the black box, and a slightly different person, P’, comes out the other side. What’s the difference between P’ and P?

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P’ may have learned some new ideas, but he or she may also be different from P in numerous other ways, including having:

(1) greater motivation to take or avoid certain kinds of actions (e.g., after reading Practical Ethics by Singer)

(2) a more helpful self-perspective (e.g., after reading Self-Compassion by Neff)

(3) beliefs that certain things are possible which seemed impossible before (e.g., after reading Superintelligence by Bostrom)

(4) more intuition for what very different types of people are like (e.g., after reading The World Until Yesterday by Diamond)

(5) different ways of framing how the world works (e.g., after reading The Selfish Gene by Dawkins)

(6) less fear of certain things (e.g., after reading When Panic Attacks by Burns)

(7) a clearer picture of how to take certain actions (e.g., after reading The Power of Habit by Duhigg)

(8) tricks for dealing with difficult situations (e.g., after reading the DBT Skills Workbook by McKay)

(9) a more nuanced model of human interactions (e.g., after reading Impro by Johnstone)

(10) a different mindset about how to live your life (e.g., after reading The 2 AM Principle by Levy)

And so on. Sure, these books contain ideas (I tend to like books with ideas, so I’m biased). But the point is that they can have substantial effects on the reader that can go beyond (or are not merely reducible to) the ideas they contain (i.e., a simple list of the ideas from each book may not have nearly as strong an effect).

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According to the internet, Kafka once said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Not all axes are idea-shaped. So it’s useful to have a more nuanced view of what makes non-fiction good (that goes beyond merely being entertaining).

That being said, most non-fiction books are not good from the black box perspective either, because either P’ and P are the same person, or because P’ is not more like the person you hope to be than P is. So, then, one way to think about the value of a non-fiction book is not only to consider whether P and P’ differ from each other but to consider whether (and in what ways) P’ tends to be better than P.