The 10% rule
Seeing Like a State gets abandoned at 12%, and the abandonment is the lesson: he used to force boring books to 100% over four months of skimming, and now reads to ten percent and chooses. A book that doesn't grab you costs four books that would have.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 10:25 (leer hasta el 10% y decidir)
- ↳ video diary @ 10:03 (la aritmética de los cuatro meses)
- ↳ video diary @ 31:19 (postscript: A Pattern Language cae bajo la regla)
The book is a serious one, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, recommended by ChatGPT, his current librarian, after he described what he wanted to learn ▸ 8:04. He quits at 12% ▸ 7:43, and the diagnosis is specific: heavy technical vocabulary, structural redundancy, the same problem re-proven in France, then England, then a third country after the reader already got it ▸ 8:24, plus untranslated quotes in medieval English ▸ 10:40. Interesting, even, but “no consigue agarrarme,” and he names the pattern with Julia’s favorite frame: staying is the toxic relationship you keep not leaving ▸ 8:59.
The old regime was completionism: a boring book, started, must be finished, so he’d grind one to 100% over four months of surface-skimming and call the checkbox a victory ▸ 9:41. The arithmetic that killed the regime: those same four months hold four or five books that actually engage you, teach you more, and get read with attention instead of around it ▸ 10:03. Hence the rule now being installed: read to ten percent, then decide, am I enjoying this, am I learning, and drop it without ceremony if not ▸ 10:25.
el libro aburrido no se lee: se orbita cuatro meses; suéltalo →
The honest footnote is that the 12% wasn’t wasted: he keeps Scott’s story of France standardizing weights and measures, every village with its own bottle-sized bottle, trade nearly impossible until the units converged ▸ 11:05. And the replacement is already open, a short philosophy of social ecology that starts by asking what nature even is, when does a forest touched by humans stop being natural, and whether beings made of nature can produce anything unnatural at all ▸ 13:02. Two percent in and it already grabs him, which under the new rule is the entire test…
Postscript, two weeks later: the rule claims a prestigious casualty. Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, sequel to a favorite, gets dropped for being architecture pura y dura where the first book was general ▸ 31:19. Its replacement is Gödel, Escher, Bach, currently deep in what he calls “versión chismecito de Bach” but promising enough on information and analogy to survive the ten percent ▸ 32:12. The rule cuts pedigree and boredom with the same knife.
// continued in
no entry has continued this idea yet: the arc is still open