Reading Trash

It is said that books are food for the intellect. And then there are books that I prefer to term intellectual junk food. I've read a few trivia books over the years. I think they might be familiar to many people: the bestsellers that tell readers about all sorts of amazing stories that boggle the average person's mind. In fact, the books are great big collections of Did-You-Know's. My first encounter with such a book had me hooked, at least initially. Wow. It has that stuff? I did not know that. This book is teaching me stuff! After reading it, I pored over the stuff I (thought I) learned. Much as I tried, I could only recall the specific cases. Oooh so this is what a Black Swan is. That is what Flipnosis is about. So that's what it's like to be Fooled By Randomness. However, what I failed to glean from the readings are the first principles of the phenomena. That is, how I might go about replicating them or perhaps avoiding them. In short, the books left me scarcely better off than when I started. Perhaps I traded the cost of the books for the ability to impress my friends with my knowledge of trivia. Ultimately, the books aren't bad per se in that they're outright lies, but that they do not truly better a person. What's worse is that they give readers the illusion that they've been bettered, when the reader is not taught the underlying principles of the phenomenon. I am now no better at spotting a potential Black Swan or actually changing someone's thought patterns through Flipnosis or anything else along those lines. There just is no substitute for a proper (self) education in the matters by reading proper books designed to teach precisely those things.