 Now, I recently stumbled upon this concept which runs under the name of Sturgeon's Law. And this outlines essentially that 90% of everything is crap. So all things, cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people and pins are to the expert and discerning guy crude, except for the acceptable type which we each happen to like. Now of course that you should take this with a grain of salt. But I found it as an interesting framework to keep in mind before say, randomly selecting that new book that you wanna read. And if you're looking to start a personal kit of frameworks you can use to read both more books and articles, I will start with filtering out the fluff first. And sure you can use semi-random consumption and use speed and skimming to consume it faster while also increasing your chances of finding a new gem. In comparison with the good old days when the book had to be written by hand first then involved the printing press, the shipping, the reading and rereading by millions of people so that one can end up saying something like, yes, this book is good and stood the test of time. So what I would do nowadays instead of say randomly selecting the next book I want to read is to ask myself a series of questions first that I have sort of run into a mental checklist. So the first question I would ask myself before deciding whether or not to buy a new book is what would be, say, the oldest error-free book for the topic that you are interested in? And to shape up an answer for this particular question of mine I would first start with the basics. I would go online and start digging. So again I would start with the basics like visiting the Amazon review page for that particular book I'm interested in. Then go to Goodreads Reviews and slowly migrate to subreddit's Quora Deep Dives Underground Book Review Blogs and why not ask some of my literary friends. So I would gather all of these notes and usually this takes me from 20 to 30 minutes and then I would decide whether to buy the book or not. And I do keep an open mind that I am not going to get stuck in a quest to find the perfect book having the aforementioned stats. So I'm reading something like, say, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, a solid book which stood the test of time and is one of the greatest works of philosophy. I would then consider skipping books that came to life as a result of, say, a series of blog posts on a specific topic where I could absorb and understand the main idea without having to read 300 plus more pages on examples, portraying that idea. And I remember that a few years ago there was this book called The One Thing. And the main idea of the book was around the value of simplifying one's workload by focusing on the most important task, any given project or something along those lines. But this to me is pretty basic. I mean, I do understand that there are different kinds of readers and we are all on different stages of our journey. But again, you could get the main idea in title and just like reading a few reviews. And again, I've never read the book, but I think I don't have to. Now, of course, that true contemplation one should eventually be able to squeeze and generate more ideas by following a simple concept and extrapolate and reach higher grounds like a little Buddha. But most of us are not like that. And I'm not saying that these books are inherently bad, but that the information inside the books can be sort of compressed inside one paragraph or something like that without actually losing the information you can use various words to describe a concept and sort of build this abstract and just like should the abstract and the Twitter thread and, you know, that's it. But there's a caveat to my system as there are different kinds of books because, you know, reading a sci-fi book is very different from reading a scientific book. So I would also think about differentiating the scientific errors versus the sci-fi errors, which technically are not errors in the context of reading such a book. But this is on your side to decide how far do you want to go in terms of reading sci-fi and, you know, how flexible your thinking is. And I do feel energetic whenever I want to start reading a new book. And this gets me excited, which it should. Because if I view it as just another book I have to read just to make sure that I keep my one thousand books per year record, I won't read it. And having that initial spark of curiosity and excitement keeps you going. Now, the next question I would ask myself is, what is the newest error-free book written on that particular topic and kind of repeat my first investigation framework? Going online once again, reading notes, maybe summaries, Goodreads reviews, Amazon reviews and also checking with friends and gathering resources. One can also check something like Blinkist for this, which is an app that summarizes books into digestible 15 minute chunks. But I think that you should focus on defining what error-free means. And one other question I would ask, sort of like a support type of question is, is the author of the book actually respected in the scientific community? Or maybe is this author a New York time bestseller type of author with a good publisher? Is this pop psychology? Is this pop science? Is the author again? Well respected as a scientist. And a quick way to assert someone's credibility in the academia is to check their age index score. And this represents how many other scientists are citing their paper. It takes into account both the number of an individual's publications and their impact on peers as indicated by citation counts. Its creator states that a successful scientist will have an age index of 20 after 20 years. And outstanding scientists will have an index over 40 after 20 years. And the truly unique individual will have an index of 60 after 20 years or 90 after 30 years. And there are, of course, many ways to think about science and sort of assess the precision of its findings and how much we should trust the findings. But I oftentimes think of it as a spectrum. You first have physics, which is the real or the hardcore science. And we confirm our fate and its findings on a daily basis. You then have the social scientists, which are on the other side of the spectrum. And then you have books that are not on the spectrum at all. And that is fiction. And this is very much personal, but oftentimes can be a great catalyst for innovation, as a lot of people have been stimulated by works of fiction in their youth. Now, the final question I would ask myself before finally deciding whether or not to start being a new book or a piece of research is, can I find that book online for free? Because most of the books that actually stood the test of time can be found online for free. So you have free sites such as Open Library, which is a front and maintained by instrument archives specifically dedicated to borrowing e-books. You also have library walks, which features countless public domain works, including most of the Western canon as audiobooks and also in the public domain. And then you have the free e-book foundation and the Project Gutenberg. So I would go there, I would search for the book, I would download the book locally and I would upload the book to Kindle. And if you are into reading physical books and like the feel of paper and your fingers, you should still be able to print the book out. But finding the book online for free can actually save you time and money as well. And you can actually skim the book pretty fast and not feel sorry about spending money if you end up not liking the book. But I admit, I do not do this for every single look. I'm not that mad yet, but creating a framework where you are able to go straight to the most emblematic error-free books, as you can, is a nice tool to have in your back pocket, filtering out the fluff while also reinforcing what is clean and scientifically correct. And for the general population in a world ruled by chaos theory, it is quite easy to say that a constellation has a strong effect on your life. So keeping an open mind while also trying to clean up that 90 percent of everything which Sturgeon outlined as crap can be an overall decent, useful framework you can use while deciding what book you should consume next.