It's clear by now that reading and writing play a substantial role in how I approach the world. Because of this, I feel a strong responsibility to stay alert to the risks they carry.
There are many reasons I read, but one stands out: reading gives access to other people's experiences. It can broaden your perspective, suggest better ways of doing things, help you avoid costly mistakes, and guide you toward smarter decisions, saving time and effort that would otherwise go into blind trial and error.
To use the well-known phrase, reading lets you "stand on the shoulders of giants": in other words, it allows you to build on what others have already accomplished. This metaphor, attributed to Isaac Newton, represents the essence of scientific progress. And rightly so: science would be impossible without the tools of reading and writing. Without them, we couldn’t accumulate human knowledge; every few generations, we’d have to reinvent the wheel.
That's the ideal. But in practice, I've developed a growing discomfort, an uneasy feeling I get whenever I read an essay. It's like a thorn in the back of my mind: has the author actually experienced what they’re writing about? Or have they only encountered it through other books? Worse still, are they simply projecting their assumptions as if they were facts?
Of course, no one should accept what they read without thinking critically. That much is obvious. But in recent years, my position has shifted toward something more radical. I used to believe a text should be judged on its own, that the author should vanish behind their ideas, and that good writing could stand independently. Now, I believe our first act of criticism should focus on the author: not on their credentials, but on their experience with the subject at hand.
What changed my mind was realizing how little an author’s success has to do with truth. It’s more often tied to style, timing, and marketing. A writer can captivate an audience while knowing almost nothing about their subject. Genuine experience isn't a requirement for publication.
And to be clear, I’m not just talking about obvious frauds. This also applies to respected scholars who lack real-world engagement with the topics they study and write about. It's entirely possible to live a full intellectual life without ever putting ideas into practice.
Practitioners don’t have that luxury. What they build must survive in the real world, which is the harshest judge of all; and no amount of eloquence can rescue a bad solution from failure.
The difference isn’t just practical: it’s epistemological. That is, it concerns how knowledge is created and validated. Studying from books operates within the realm of logic and abstraction. Acting in the world is shaped by feedback, pressure, and consequences. The gap between logical soundness and practical survivability is the cause of many costly, and sometimes tragic failures. It’s a gap that readers like me must remain especially wary of.
At the heart of this problem lies a fundamental misconception: the assumption that logical coherence guarantees practical success. But the relationship between logic and consequence is not linear: a small flaw in reasoning (like a fragile assumption or overlooked variable) can result in outsized consequences when translated into action. What seems like a minor theoretical misstep may be invisible to a reader immersed in abstraction, but obvious to a practitioner who has seen such missteps play out in the real world. This is the danger of mistaking logical soundness for real-world viability: clean reasoning can mask destructive errors that only practice can expose.
Words are powerful, but they are also abstractions: reflections of reality, not reality itself. When we rely solely on words, without the grounding force of lived experience or feedback from the world, we risk mistaking the reflection for the thing. We become entranced by the coherence of ideas and blind to their consequences.
This, I believe, is the core danger we must pay closer attention to. When we treat language as a substitute for experience (when we allow ideas to circulate untested, evaluated only by their internal consistency) we undermine the very foundation of knowledge transmission. Words without feedback become self-referential; they describe not the world, but a fantasy shaped by assumptions and unchecked logic. In this loop, learning becomes illusion.
Instead of building on reality, we build on reflections of reflections. The written word loses its function as a bridge between minds and becomes a hall of mirrors. In such conditions, reading and writing cease to be tools for progress: they become rituals of self-deception, exercises in chasing ghosts. We mistake language for knowledge, coherence for truth, and in doing so, we drift further from the real. Without the anchoring force of feedback, our words reflect only each other: circling endlessly, illuminating nothing.
Vale,
Davide