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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Case for Reading Books, published by xander balwit on June 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR––––N/A I recently engaged in a lively discussion with several high-profile EAs wherein they voiced their indifference, or even distaste, towards reading books. Having assumed that those who prioritize rigorous epistemics would be avid book-readers, this took me by surprise. They argued that unlike a podcast, which one can listen to at double speed while doing other things, reading doesn’t optimize for information absorption. While some conceded the value of reading nonfiction or condensed summaries of academic articles, few “wasted” their time on literature. While optimization has its utility, I would echo Owen Cotton-Barratt’s claim that there are cases where it misses the mark. When it comes to reading books (or not reading them as the case may be), over-optimization discounts several key human values. Aristotle’s Ethics offers us a great starting point to better understand these values. He begins: “Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good. Hence the good has been rightly defined as ‘that at which all things aim.’ For our purposes here, arguing for the “good” derived from reading fiction is rather bootless unless one agrees with the premise; humans strive toward the good, and the good is attained through a plurality of pursuits. Aristotle goes on to claim “that the supreme good is obviously something final.Now we call an object pursued for its own sake more final than one pursued because of something else.Well, happiness more than anything else is thought to be just such an end.” I argue that reading books engenders this happiness, propelling us towards a multitude of intrinsic goods. Given this, reading books for the sake of reading books, more than for the sake of acquiring knowledge or synthesizing facts is precisely what must be defended. THE CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL MILIEU My first argument in favor of reading fiction is to better understand its capacity to influence worldviews and shift values. Books such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther defined whole movements, inspiring objectivists and romantics to find their exemplars and cultivate their own unique aesthetics. George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm mobilized readers against totalitarianism and coined lasting prescient phrases, such as “Big Brother is watching you.” Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has attracted numerous people to the EA and the rationality community. Yudkowsky teaches readers how to think more rationally through entertainment and memorable characterization, effects that employ far more emotional power and resonance than reading them in a nonfiction context would. While not every movement looks to the literary canon, there are myriad examples that show how fiction communicates ideas powerfully and persuasively. Reading books allows us to uncover and explore the ideas, assumptions, and hypotheses that inform humanity's past and present and, quite possibly, its future. WORLD BUILDING Another argument in favor of reading fiction would be its world-building. A good novel creates a believable alternate reality. While many people may have heard the adage about how fiction forces readers to suspend their disbelief, I am far more partial to the idea that good fiction generates belief in proportion to its skill at world-building. This may be a trip back in time to a well-documented historical period, a visit to a foreign country or a different city, or a journey to a utopia or imagined future. We inhabit these worlds utterly alongside their residents in a far different way than when we are shooting the shit over the dinner table about what life was like in...