Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

Summary

My first year of college, I had a work-study job which ended up being one of the most sneakily important intellectual experiences of my life. I was a lowly library shelver, assigned to the shelves labelled A through F section in the Library of Congress filing system: mostly works on religion, philosophy, sociology, and history. I say sneakily important because at first glance, shelving books in a library is super boring. What it amounts to, physically, is reading the label on a book, then placing it on the shelf where it belongs, repeated around a thousand times per shift. To avoid the tedium, I decided that I would also flip to a random page of every book I shelved and read a random sentence from it. Usually, I would stop there — running aground on some passage by a Hungarian classical music critic or a long-dead statistician of Bolivia’s agricultural development or any number of other things that failed to catch my interest. But other times — like when I came across a book about Hellenistic mystery cults, or The Education of Henry Adams, or Are Clothes Modern?— I would become so absorbed that I’d make my way through several pages before reluctantly depositing the book back where it belonged. And then, very often, I’d do the same with the books on either side of the one I’d liked.GR 830, v through w: the vampire/werewolf section of Columbia’s Butler Library. In retrospect, I learned more at this job than in any formal class I’ve ever taken, because it was a filtered form of auto-didacticism. The Library of Congress classification system — and the expert staff of an academic research library — had already sorted and filtered these texts. Not to mention the selection mechanism of the fact that that they had been checked out: had, in other words, found a lasting readership. Thus I was not seeing a truly haphazard sampling of books, but a targeted, organized, yet still interestingly randomized sampling of good books. Today, undergraduate students will invariably search...