A Very Short Essay: Why Reading Is Essential
"If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you." — General James Mattis
There's a massive difference between reading words on a page, and reading. At a surface level, reading may seem like a passive act—words on a page, sentences strung together, information being consumed. But when you strip away the surface, when you engage with reading as more than just a passive act, you begin to see its deeper beauty. Reading is not just about gathering facts; it's an intimate dialogue with the greatest minds across history, a portal into perspectives that would otherwise be inaccessible. It allows you to see the world through the lens of a philosopher from ancient Greece, a scientist pushing the boundaries of knowledge, or a writer capturing the raw essence of human nature. The more you engage, the more you realise that books are not just records of information but intricate maps of thought, each one sharpening your understanding, refining your perception, and deepening your ability to think critically. Over time, reading transforms from an act of consumption into an act of exploration, where ideas connect, challenge, and evolve in ways that shape not just what you know, but how you think.
It's a common fallacy to believe that you "don't need" to read. Perhaps, you think experience alone is enough, or that memorising "irrelevant facts" is pointless. But this is a false premise. No single person, no matter how intelligent, has experienced enough of the world to make well-rounded, deeply informed decisions without external knowledge.
Perhaps a way to further emphasise the necessity of reading is by explaining its importance in terms of reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning (subset of machine learning), an agent (decision maker) learns through trial and error, updating its strategies based on rewards and penalties. However, an agent with limited training data is fundamentally restricted in its ability to make optimal decisions. Similarly, a human who only learns through personal experience is like an RL agent with sparse data; no matter how sharp they are, they are constrained by their own limited reality.
Reading expands this training data exponentially, providing access to thousands of years of accumulated knowledge. Learning purely through direct experience is like endlessly reinventing the wheel—an infinite cycle of trial and error constrained by personal limitations. Reading, however, allows you to inherit and abstract rigorously tested solutions, compressing centuries of knowledge into cognitive shortcuts that refine understanding and accelerate problem-solving. A reinforcement learning agent trained on richer, more diverse experiences will perform significantly better than one trained on a limited dataset. Likewise, a person who reads extensively—especially across a range of disciplines—becomes more adaptable, more aware of cognitive biases, and better equipped to navigate an uncertain world.
However, reading should not be a passive act. It should be a Socratic dialogue, a critical discussion with the author, engaging with new ideas, assessing them, recognising the authors' (and your own) biases and in turn updating beliefs, rather than blindly following what's on the surface. A reader must question, critique, and refine their beliefs in light of new evidence. Just as an AI trained on biased or low-quality data will produce flawed outputs, a person who reads uncritically or consumes only biased material may not actually improve their intelligence. The value of reading comes not just from accumulation but from analysis and application.
To conclude, saying "reading doesn't make you smarter" is as absurd as saying "training an AI on more data doesn't improve its performance." To read is to extend beyond oneself—to inherit the collective wisdom of those who came before. The more one reads, the less one is confined by the limits of their own mind.