Wittgenstein's Poker, by John Eidinow and David Edmonds

That one time Wittgenstein maybe (or did he?) threatened Popper with a fire poker.

I badly wanted to like this book; my very smart friend said it's the only book about Wittgenstein that's ever been both popular and accurate.

However, I just couldn't bring myself to care about Wittgenstein, Popper or the poker, and gave up pretty quickly.

And this got me thinking about books and specificity. Most books of any specificity are a decision to go overly-deep into one topic, relative to its global "importance." E.g. a friend was recently reading a biography of a not-that-famous painter, and I realised that in terms of "fairly" distributing your time in life relative to the total knowledge of humanity, there's only a handful of people whose biographies really "merit" reading.

And the friend said the biography was still worth it in part to understand the time and place the painter lived in. And that makes sense to me: specifics are often more memorable than abstracts, and maybe the best way to understand history is to learn about a few specific incidents from different times and places, and therefore understand the worlds around each of those incidents in a way that sticks in your memory. (That's certainly the goal of Wittgenstein's Poker: it's meant to be about that moment in philosophy more generally, not just an insanely detailed exploration of whether or not the poker incident ever happened, and why it became legendary if not).

Where does that leave us? I don't know if I quit this book because I don't care enough about the time/place around it, or if the incident itself seemed too unimportant, or if I just randomly wasn't grabbed by this particular book at this particular time.

I've always wanted a schema that would just unambiguously tell you how best to learn things: this level of specificity, followed by this level of abstraction. And of course that probably can't work; it mostly feels like you have to somewhat-randomly bounce around between topics and keep gnawing at whatever interests you. [It's possible this relates to Wittgenstein's philosophy, but since I didn't finish the book I don't know....]