The Art of Learning: Information Density and the Power of Books

The average American spends 1,300 hours on social media (Forbes, 2023)

At the same time, people report "tweet overload" (21 million person sample) and a range of other problems related to having "too much content" and "too little time".

The average tweet is ~30 characters long, lasts for an average of 18 minutes, and takes about a minute to write.

The average article in a major publication takes a few months of research, interviewing and editing to create a few pages' worth of content.

The average book takes about a year and change to assemble — oftentimes years or more to inform ~250 pages of writing.

A book seems like it's the more cumbersome undertaking — people say everything from "they don't have time" to "I just don't have the attention span". And yet these same people all sit in the same dataset for Instagram, Twitter and the rest — people who spend an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media every day.

Everyone wants a quick dopamine hit; a 10-minute Instagram scroll, a 5-minute online chess game. But rarely do we reflect on whether this is actually the most efficient use of our time.

If you do the math, a 10-word tweet that took 60 seconds to write comes out to about 6 seconds of thought / word. For an average book of ~75,000 words that takes around a year to put together, that comes out to [60 sec x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days] / 75,000 words. Incredibly, that's 31,536,000 seconds / 75,000 words = 420.48 seconds of thought / word. That's 70x the information density.

That's not even counting the background research and years of life experience that led an author to write something (and the fact that tweets have zero filter). For researcher, interviewer and biographer bar-none Robert Caro, it took him 7 years of pure dedication to assemble The Power Broker. The book's final printing contained ~1100 pages (700,000 words), leaving us at 315.36 seconds / word from one of the most productive writers of the 21st century. And the narrative brilliance and thoroughness behind every detail shows that even a number like this isn't even close to doing his writing justice.

If playing a blitz game is a tweet — a classical chess game is a book.

In working with my coach — an International Master (and likely soon-to-be-Grandmaster) from Spain, I've seen such extraordinary benefits to shifting where I spend my time to more information-dense spaces. Where I used to spend 3-4 hours playing several 10-minute, 5-minute, even 1-minute games, I now spend 4 hours playing a single classical game, an hour analyzing on my own, and another half-hour talking through my thought process with my coach. I'm diving 3-4-5 moves deep per side across multiple variations at several points each game, then comparing those final scenarios in a positional way.

You go from just asking yourself, "Am I winning material" and "Is this a checkmating pattern?" to "Do these pieces belong on these specific squares?" and "Is this endgame structure favorable to me?" You start to realize you can see so much more than you'd ever imagined in a series of 10-minute blitz games.

In the same way, a book integrates concepts from dozens of domains, challenges you with totally new knowledge, and often pushes you into new areas of interest that link up across multiple aspects of your life.

So one of the most important things I've tried to communicate when actually learning anything — and part of why TownSquare Chess is gaining traction — is that deep thinking, deep analysis and long-term planning is secretly the fastest way to get better. Be deliberate not just about how much time you spend, but how you spend it.

Speed up by slowing down.