on a mostly unrelated note, skimming of the comic strip Pearlsbefore swine should leave you holding your sides in laughter.

But here’s a good counter-example: Bill James, the inventor of modern baseball statistics, a self-educated night watchman, self-published, whose writing was eccentric, to say the least- his career is chronicled as a sidelight in Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball.

Of course, continuing to read a book in the wrong mood is its own disaster—no small thing to remember when you’re not setting a book aside lightly, but throwing it with great force.

The problem with this question is that it encourages people to conflate:

(a) making a quick judgment about what it’s worth expending time reading

(b) complaining about bad style

(c) making a serious critical assessment of an article or a book

After five minutes with the aforementioned Feyerabend I could tell that it was unmitigated sophistry. Later I DID end up spending many hours on that hundred pages (a tragic waste of the human spirit, in retrospect) and discovered that it was even worse than I’d initially thought. Intellectually irresponsible rubbish.

Anyway, if the question is “can we EVER tell within five minutes that a book/paper is garbage?”, the answer is clearly ‘yes’—even when there are no blatant grammatical errors or suchlike.

Of course it’s also obvious that we can’t always do so. So I guess the real question is “how often can we do so?” Dunno the answer to that one, unsurprisingly.

“Quality” determined in what context? As with my previous comment, I’m wary of selection bias.

If the argument is that triage is necessary (and it is), then I’d argue that “skimming” is only effective as part of a larger toolset. On its own it’s unreliable.

If the argument is as a counter-argument against the assertion that one must read all of a writer’s words to criticize them, well…surely the abolutist nature of that assertion is its own refutation? At least commonsensically?

While “if you haven’t read it, you can’t criticize it” is usually a rhetorical tactic and not an earnest argument, it also seems to me that the “I don’t need to” response is suspciously self-serving.

But I don’t ever review books based on a 5 minute skimming – the closest I’ve come is reviewing a Tom Clancy novel after reading only its last two thirds.

Just kidding.

You couldn’t be more right. Confirmation Bias is a horrible thing when it comes to finding the truth and everybody falls for it.

So, John, are you defending ideal or practical skimming? I would argue that in practice skimming is so often and so badly misused that its theoretical utility is completely nullified. Maybe you’re the exception. Maybe I am. If so, we could defend our skimming. But skimming in general? I don’t think so.

Oh, and of course it’s the case that this skimming can reveal if someone’s arguments and conclusions are probably unreliable. It’s far less likely to reveal that their arguments are invalid and their conclusions wrong. But a person is more likely to skim, and stop, reading a hostile viewpoint and then using that skim as a claim against the hostile argument.