191–200 of 221 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Western culture seems to suffer from collective ADHD. People expect small morsels of information/experience to give them much and people eschew deeper, longer, more meaningful experiences. I could go on.
What is particularly Western about this? And compared to what? Do you just mean modern culture?
The very premise of this article shows how demented Western culture has become. The attitude of, “I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I’m not a subject matter expert on the book’s topic” is absolutely insane. It takes a decade of serious work to really get a strong handle on a topic. Books aren’t supposed to teach you something to know, they’re meant to teach you how much you don’t know. Hopefully f…
People also expect too much after reading a book just once . Reading a book once isn't enough to make a lasting impression, if you're able to remember anything at all — especially for a complex book like Thinking, Fast and Slow . The books I truly love, I've read at least three times, with pages full of highlights and notes. Re-reading a great book is worth more than reading the latest trends. Seneca wrote a bit abou…
> Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences? Maybe those books are specifically bad? I haven't read them, but I had long monologues about some historical books I read giving people basically lectures on top…
The very premise of this article shows how demented Western culture has become. The attitude of, “I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I’m not a subject matter expert on the book’s topic” is absolutely insane. It takes a decade of serious work to really get a strong handle on a topic. Books aren’t supposed to teach you something to know, they’re meant to teach you how much you don’t know. Hopefully f…
"Get explainers of insights from 3,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles. Free 7-day trial. It takes just 15 mins to read or listen to the key insights from bestselling nonfiction. Audio and Text. Insights in 15 minutes."
Personally I recoil in horror at their marketing as an "app for intellectuals". Genuinely, deep diving is frequently required. Summaries by their nature lack nuance.
I want to read the nuance. I want to give the author the chance to get their point across. I want to read all the footnotes, maybe lookup things in the bibliography.
I don't think anyone I know to be what I'd call an intellectual simply listens to summaries of books. It's sort of anti-intillectual to do that indeed.
And at least for non-fiction books, one implied
assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by
reading sentences. This last idea so invisibly defines
the medium that it’s hard not to take for granted, which
is a shame because, as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken.
The very premise of this article shows how demented Western culture has become. The attitude of, “I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I’m not a subject matter expert on the book’s topic” is absolutely insane. It takes a decade of serious work to really get a strong handle on a topic. Books aren’t supposed to teach you something to know, they’re meant to teach you how much you don’t know. Hopefully f…
I had a very different reading of the article. The author acknowledges that books do work after the reader actively engages with the topic, does the exercises, rereads, etc. The issue is that this process of transmitting knowledge could be more efficient in a different medium. The post is not against books, but pro interactive teaching methods, as the author gives a link to his proposal https://quantum.country/qcvc
Specifically, the "premise of the article" being "I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I’m not a subject matter expert on the book’s topic" is nowhere to be found in the article, at least by my reading. Or maybe it is actually there and I missed it?
I first skim the entire book. This gives me a rough idea of its structure. I then read the first chapter. Then I reproduce what I can remember from memory. Usually it's very little. Then I re-read the chapter and reproduce it from memory again. This time, I remember quite a lot. The third time, I have a very good understanding of it. Rinse and repeat for each chapter.
Something strange happens when you do this. I urge everyone to try it. There's some sort of subconscious restructuring going on; an implicit compression of the material. Somehow, it has become organized without your explicit involvement.
This is my theory of what's going on: you are incrementally improving a cognitive model of whatever it is that you are reading. You start off with a rough set of expectations. When you re-read the material for the first time, you have a basis for comparison. Expectations get violated. Beliefs get updated. The learning rate is high. With each re-read, you get diminishing returns.
This method is time-consuming, so I only use it when I have to. But it works. And it's much more efficient than flash cards.
The very premise of this article shows how demented Western culture has become. The attitude of, “I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I’m not a subject matter expert on the book’s topic” is absolutely insane. It takes a decade of serious work to really get a strong handle on a topic. Books aren’t supposed to teach you something to know, they’re meant to teach you how much you don’t know. Hopefully f…
Yes, I cannot personally fathom the appeal of things like Blinkist. "Get explainers of insights from 3,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles. Free 7-day trial. It takes just 15 mins to read or listen to the key insights from bestselling nonfiction. Audio and Text. Insights in 15 minutes." Personally I recoil in horror at their marketing as an "app for intellectuals". Genuinely, deep diving is frequently required. Summar…