alt Hacker NewsA Man Who Reads Books for a Living (One Every Two Days)
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I was once unemployed for a year when I was young (about 19) and I rather frighteningly read about one (probably 0.75) fairly serious novel a day (think Graham Greene sort of stuff). I have loads of time on my hands now (I'm 72) and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
I had a good friend who did this -- was a reader for a movie studio, looking for adaptations. Everyone teased him for having such a great job.
I wonder how he felt about holiday vacation book report assignments back in school.
Robert Redford's character in _Three Days of the Condor_ gets asked what he does for a living. "I read." Has always seemed to be the ideal job. :-)
> a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation
To me the interesting question about a job like this is "How can you tell if you're doing it well?" It involves such high-stakes, high-uncertainty and highly variability that it has to be nearly impossible to know. I mean you're predicting distant outcomes from creative pursuits which must first survive a gauntlet of wicked complexity and randomness.
Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right.
While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
I started to find this article interesting but every time I tapped “x” on an ad to dismiss it, no more than five seconds later, the same ad would appear at the bottom and distract me. Over and over.
"I read books [...] I've read a couple of books a week for [...] 50 [years]"[1] - Jim Keller (CPU designer) with Lex Fridman.
I read two books a day in middle school. Still my favorite time to look back on…
TIL I can get paid for doing what I do for fun: reading ~100 books a year.
What surprises me is that he only reads about 50 more books a year than I do, and he does it full time.
This seems like the kind of profession that AI would’ve already destroyed. Aren’t LLMs pretty good at what he’s doing?
I would imagine this sucks the fun out of some books and also forces you to read a lot of dreadful books. I knew a bibliophile who worked for a publisher and was sad to hear from him that he rarely got time to read for pleasure.
How does he stay awake??
Boring isn't it? Reading half a book every single day.
Not for him though, he loves it.
This is LLM territory and they are extremely good at it.
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With exceptions, after sometime everything can bring you down or nothing can bring you down.
On a similar note, I have friends who watches TV Series and Movies before they come out to create/review the subtitles. Sounds like fun job but gets boring really fast.