This is the "best" post I have read so far this year. Assuming we still love to read and long to understand great thinkers, the question arises should we read the books of the greater thinkers or should we read a "distilled" version of works of great thinkers by some other author. Distilled version are very precise, laconic, parochial and prone to unconscious biases of the author. The books by great thinkers are usually verbose (an understatement given those reams and reams of paper), sometimes prone to confusing pleonasm but these are the books which gives us those spectacular "goose bums", the joy of understanding directly from those beautiful words and the short cognitive journey trip we take while reading these original works has an immense effect on NGF, which can last a life time if assimilated into metacognition.Tyler Cowen points out:
"1. Secondary sources are unreliable and they do not capture or understand many of the original insights. To remove it from the distant past, what I get from John Rawls or Robert Nozick is quite distinct from what I get from their distillers.
"1. Secondary sources are unreliable and they do not capture or understand many of the original insights. To remove it from the distant past, what I get from John Rawls or Robert Nozick is quite distinct from what I get from their distillers.
2. Truly great thinkers require numerous distillers. Can you read just one book on Keynes? No. So you have to read a few. Shouldn't one of these then be Keynes himself? Yes.
3. The errors of top thinkers are often more interesting and instructive than their successes. Distillers have a hard time capturing these errors and their fruitfulness.
4. We often read great thinkers not to learn what they understood but also to set our minds racing and to find interesting new questions. Great thinkers are usually better at supplying this service than are their distillers.
5. Sometimes the value is in having read common sources and benefiting from the commonality per se. Great thinkers are usually more focal than any of their distillers and thus reading them is a good input for discussions with others.
6. Original sources often help you challenge or reexamine your world view or intellectual ethos. Distillers very often pander to that world view, while pretending to challenge you.
7. Consider a simple comparison. You can read either Adam Smith's two major books or any ten or even twenty books on him, toss in articles if you wish. It's a no-brainer which you should choose.
8. The best distillers often are original sources in their own right (and in part unreliable expositors), such as in Charles Taylor's excellent book on Hegel.
9. Distillation works best in very exact sciences, such as physics and mathematics. If you rely on distillation for an inexact science, you will do best at capturing its exact parts. You will be left with a systematic bias, and knowledge gap, regarding its inexact parts."
Given the perpetual process of nerualplasticity and not knowing the exact current stage in that process (and knowing it loses a little gusto with age), I usually pickup the distilled version first to epitomize the thoughts of the thinker. The distilled versions were always been my catalyst to instigate to read the original works eventually(here, here, here and here). I am looking forward to read Theory of Moral Sentiments soon and will sure get back on how that goes.(fantastic piece on the "contemporary" Amazon reviews on classics)
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