This is my experience:
Books ----- Now I read books, but not even books fulfill this requirement of sound argumentation: some have lazy thinking (ie self-help, business advice) using barely anything beyond anecdotes as evidence for a point they present as generalizable.
The concept of 'useful books' by Robfitz is going in the right direction: a book that solves a problem.
Philosophy books often contain good examples of argumentation. One could read just philosophy books! The problem is that they are:
- Not well-written (or written for an audience who is not me!) - Solving problems that are not immediately relevant to me (whether God exists, whether humans are rational, etc) - Not using empirical evidence at all (the methods of philosophy are like this! Only recently there are some experimental philosophers)
Books that don't do what I want: - Geopolitics - Evolutionary psychology - Self-help - Non-fiction books designed to be a best-seller - Books designed to upsell you on a product or service - Technical books
Opinion pieces, blogs, substack ------------------------------- In 2024, their writing style sounds very 'twitter' (provocative, hasty generalizations, predictions, very little in terms of argumentation). Example "PayPal was expected to “shock” the world. Instead, they shot themselves in the foot." These opinions have almost zero usefulness for me. More so if they are trying to make predictions. Influencers on twitter make predicitions every other day and they rarely bother checking their track record for accuracy. And if they did, it would be very low.
News ---- I realize I can only aspire to understand a handful of topics well-enough that I can follow the news and know when they are bullshit or not!
- Fact-checked (almost zero sources have this! And it's too costly to do the fact-checking yourself) - Clearly-stated bias - Showing you their data sources when they use data/graphs
