Listening to podcasts or watching videos, I hear people knowing things and it makes me want to get in on the action, but I have no idea where to start. What book do I need to read to start being knowledgeable?
thou shalt enter the Library and open up books in the nonfiction section. thou wilt poke and prod the maps and globes. look up unfamiliar words & concepts on the internet when encountered. ask questions to librarians!
The closest we've ever got is Justified True Belief and even that is wrong due to Gettier. Epistemology is a spook, no one knows how people come to know things, knowing anything is a spook.
Other joke answer: What they teach at Harvard Business School & What they don't teach at Harvard Business School (my partner got me both as a joke gift once, the first one is kinda interesting and the guy that wrote it attended Harvard Business School the year before 2008 - interesting to see the mindset of those people leading up to the Great Financial Crash. The other one is just some boomer style BS).
A more serious answer for learning about communism, ABC of Communism by Bukharin which was literally meant for pre-Soviet Russian serfs and working people to understand or Value, Price, Profit by Marx which is also a good intro to Marxism. Even the manifesto isn't too hard. There's also the Bread Book (conquest of bread) by Kropotkin which is pretty decent.
If you wanna just be more knoweldgeable in general, I guess watch youtube science videos or video essays on art or use your local library dunno. The only other way is to pay some college like 10K and force yourself to learn a wide survey of topics over a couple years.
Khan Academy is a legitimately great resource for learning things. As with any school there's some good professors and some bad ones and most of them are libs, but that's also true of the authors of books.
you think people actually know things??? :capitalist-laugh:
but in all seriousness :parenti-hands:
I'm gonna get a bachelors in psychology and I'm fairly certain I've learned nothing since AP psych in junior year of high school
YouTube -> Wikipedia -> academic books on libgen and scihub -> primary sources
I do multiple passes because it's more interesting and you get your bearings faster, so you don't have to rely on poorly sourced beginner materials. For any given topic, I'd probably watch a couple of videos on youtube, open a bunch of wikipedia tabs, pull up a map, browse libgen or b-ok.cc and look at the tables of contents of some books from oxford or whatever, and read some snippets from memoirs and other primary sources. Doing that will build a pretty good foundation to learn more. IMO it's a more natural way to study than the chapter-by-chapter way you learn in school.
Don't stop learning shit. Literally ever. If you aren't learning, you need to be digesting fresh knowledge and thinking about how it all interacts. It's not linear, it's exponential. The more you know, the more you get out of new information.
For instance, if you know how synthesizers work, you know 90% of how a radio works. You know those two things, and are shown how those principals apply also to physical vibrations and light, you now know 90% of how most instruments work, add knowledge of diffraction and now you know how rainbows work, most of how how a camera works, etc etc.
yeah so what you want to do is find things you're interested in and watch videos, read books listen to podcasts, talk to people etc about those things
I'm reading a book called How to Read a Book by Charles Van Doren, Mortimer J. Adler and I think it's pretty useful. It describes the different levels of reading comprehension and the steps for each of them. Also gives advice on reading philosophy, history, social science, etc.
