Information is always scarce for kids
Over the past few years I’ve gotten my kids a lot of the “Who Was?” series of books. These books, each about 100 pages split into 10 chapters, are short biographies of famous people throughout history. They cover everyone from Genghis Khan to Steve Irwin.
I first bought a Who Was? book for my kids when Costco had a sale on a technologists and inventors box set. I want my kids to grow up valuing similar things to me, and to feel like they can invent and discover amazing things. I also want them to love reading. I bought the box set and brought it home, and they mostly ignored it.
This wasn’t too surprising. I see much of my job as a father as creating options and showing my kids what they could do. It’s up to them to decide if they want to. But I was kind of interested in these books, so after a while I read them a few of them. Over the course of a few weeks, we made our way through biographies of Newton, Curie, Darwin, and Steve Jobs. My kids liked these enough that when there was a box set of biographies on the American founders I bought that for them too.
What surprised me most about these books was how much I learned from them. I knew who all of these people were. I also had studied a lot of what they’d discovered or made (notably Newton and Jobs). Even so, I found myself being surprised by what they’d done, or how they’d done it.
The books are all organized the same way. A short intro chapter explaining something exciting about the person, a biography that covers the persons whole life, and a few explainer boxes covering adjacent historical issues. They’re written to be accessible to 8 year-olds who don’t know much about the world yet. That means that they’re full of context.
At this point, I read the Who Was? books more than my kids. I’ll read them to the kids, but when I take the kiddos to the library I’ll often just pick up a random Who Was? and take it home for myself. They’re short, interesting, and I learn more about the world.
I think the reason I reach for Who Was? books but not Wikipedia entries is that Wikipedia entries are often entirely lacking in context.
“Why is this important?”
I am interested in what people did and how they did it. I’m much more interested in why it mattered. That’s what Who Was? really excels at. They don’t assume any context, which makes it easy to jump in. Wiki articles, biographies for adults, the news: all of this assumes you already know enough to put the facts in context.
Who Was? is better than Wikipedia in another way too: they are opinionated books. They’ll explicitly say: it was bad that Genghis Khan killed so many people, the Wild West was bad for the Native Americans, saving the environment is good, exploring space is so cool. I think opinions like this are critical for grasping onto facts, even if you don’t necessarily agree with the opinions.
The Who Was? books are each written by a different author, so they all have a slightly different slant. Even when I don’t agree with the opinions in a book, reading such a book to my kids gives me a chance to talk through all of the issues with them. I can also notice myself disagreeing, and use that as a trigger to investigate my own ideas and priorities.
Wikipedia tries to be unopinionated. This is good. We need a resource like that. But it doesn’t mean it’s the best resource to learn from or to gain context from.
A friend of mine was recently trying to learn about the Border Gateway Protocol. This is a complex and arcane protocol, and after reading several explainers, asking ChatGPT, and watching several youtubes he went to ask an old hacker friend of ours. Our hacker friend proceeded to give a long rant about all of its problems, not really emphasizing how it works at all. The rant was exactly what my friend needed though. The opinions gave my friend something for his list of facts to latch on to, and suddenly the entire concept was understandable to him.
I’m not sure how to think about or prioritize finding opinions, given the current adversarial nature of social information transfer. All of my feeds are full of people propagating falsehoods for fun or profit. I want people who have strong opinions about factual topics to explain those topics to me, but I don’t want to be taken advantage of by grifters and trolls.
For me, the happiest mix seems to be around 70-90 percent fact, with well-supported opinion wrapped around it.
Adults can have very different amounts of context
Recently a friend of mine subscribed to the Bismarck Brief. He was given a gift subscription to hand out, so I ended up getting a month’s worth of access myself. I was very excited about this going into it, as people say it has really deep analysis.
The first post I read, on the robotics industry, was super disappointing. It was all just obvious stuff, along with a few cases where specific companies were looked up and listed (x makes motors, y makes gears, z has 63% market share). I could have looked up any of those things if I cared about those numbers. I didn’t get it. Where was the insight and analysis?
Then I read about Greece’s financial situation and was blown away with how much I learned and how much more I understood things I’d been hearing about for 15 years. In a lot of ways, the Greek Financials post had a similar structure to the robotics post: lots of basic facts about how a system works. Some stats and details about specific aspects of the issue. A few strong opinions about what was good or bad about it.
This, then, is the insight – learning enough about a topic to know what context someone needs. I didn’t get anything from the robotics post because I already have most of the context for the industry. Because I had the context it seemed like minutiae. For politics and finance, I have very little context. Bismarck Brief is fantastic specifically for context. It has an agenda, an opinion. That opinion is almost but not quite the average bay area libertarian opinion, which I like well enough to read a lot of words in it.
A lot of basic information in each brief is something anyone could look up, presented in a moderately opinionated way and with a huge amount of context. If I had wanted to, I could have spent a week or so sifting through wiki articles, news, history books, and finance books to get a sense for what was going on with Greece. Even after that, I would have had trouble knowing what was important without having someone to chat with who had some experience with it all.
Geopolitics and history articles engage me because I know like 30% of them, so the rest fills in gaps and it feels like I’m gaining an amazing understanding of the world. But am I?
How do I know what I’m missing, given that I only read the brief about Greece’s financials and didn’t read anything else? The appeal of the brief is that it is brief, and I get what I need without having to read hundreds of pages. If I want to be sure that I’m not being misled, I’d need to read an equivalent article by someone with an alternative viewpoint (an adversarial collaboration, maybe?).
What about LLMs? Could I paste a brief, or wiki article, or a Who Was? into the context and get it to give me an opposing viewpoint? I’m optimistic about this. I often think of LLMs as answer engines: they can give you the exact right amount of context (assuming you prompt them right).
Why is this important?
Why do I care about the Kremlin? About Genghis Khan? About Greece’s financial crisis? Will I do anything different now that I know a bit more about those topics?
There are a lot of reasons that I’m interested in history and politics, but honestly one big one is just that I want to engage with my culture. I want to understand how we got to where we are, why people are doing or thinking certain things. I’m just curious. Sure I could read deep scholarly history books about these things. I’m reading Ada Palmer’s 500 page tome on the Italian Renaissance right now. I have a limited amount of time and unlimited curiosity, so brief primers on topics are perfect for me.
I don’t think most books should be blog posts, but I do appreciate a short book. Not everyone reads as fast as Tyler. I want to be able to get enough context quickly to engage with active cultural conversations.
I was originally excited about Bismarck Brief for “strategy”. I wanted to use it to answer questions like:
- what to invest in?
- is there going to be a war?
- should I vote for policies like X if I value Y?
It’s not yet clear to me yet how to use it for that. It does give me a great starting place to learn about something, but it doesn’t make any decisions for me (and if it did I probably wouldn’t trust them).
I do think that reading these posts is useful for those goals though. Learning about the Greek financial crisis is helpful to understand some of what’s going on in my own country. I can actually see some patterns like “if a country does x, then y will happen”. Then I can reason about that based on my own values.
The more context you have, the more the new information you come across will be meaningful and useful to you. This is something asking the LLM can’t give you. It can’t help you think, any more than having a really smart teacher helps you think. It can guide you and show you the way, but you have to put in the effort.
I tell my mentees at work: it’s ok to use an LLM to write code, but make sure that the code flows through your brain. You need to understand it well enough to maintain and improve it. Vibe coding isn’t enough when a mistake could kill someone.
Obviously people in different industries have different tradeoffs. Not everyone builds safety critical robots, but everyone is ultimately responsible for their own lives. Having context can help you know when someone is trying to help you or take advantage of you. It can help you make critical decisions when they need to be made quickly. This is what I’m trying to instill in my kids when I read them Who Was?