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How I read books: a guide on how to learn

denzhadanov.com

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Re: How I read books: a guide on how to learn

#53
post #29
post #9

Sometimes I wonder how I would turn out if I did organized people stuff like this. What bothers me is these life advices always feel like bullshit. Like, check this guy out. He has his own website with a title "Den Zhadanov\nTechnology. Productivity. Inspiration.". This is life coaching 101. He writes about how burning man didn't change his life and has pictures of books on beaches. How does one take this person seri…

Your comment reminds me of something Andy Matuschak wrote: > But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields, whatever those may be. In fact, most such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity. These writers offer advice on note-taking to help scientists and executives with the…

Did someone manage to convince him to OSS or sell licenses to his system? Seems similar to http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors but more dynamic and with some extra link discovery. I am trying logseq right now but the bullet-point format is a bit limiting (equally so when I compare my own freeform paper notetaking with bullet journalling).

Re: How I read books: a guide on how to learn

#54
post #9

Sometimes I wonder how I would turn out if I did organized people stuff like this. What bothers me is these life advices always feel like bullshit. Like, check this guy out. He has his own website with a title "Den Zhadanov\nTechnology. Productivity. Inspiration.". This is life coaching 101. He writes about how burning man didn't change his life and has pictures of books on beaches. How does one take this person seri…

I think this is a common reaction. We're built with fraud detection as social animals.

People who talk as experts about areas their experience and accomplishments haven't aligned with always raise this. In this case, don't tell me how to learn when I question how much learning you've done.

The opposite of this is Adrian Colyer's the morning paper [1], where I'd love to learn Adrian's process of ingesting so much technical information.

As an aside, there are folks with expertise in certain areas that dip into a wide ranging set of topic. I try to remind myself of their expertise and discount heavily their opinion on other things:

Elon Musk talking about anything not related to launching a car or space company. Elon's opinions about Covid-19 testing the latest example.

Sam Atman talking about anything not related to VC investing.

[1] - https://blog.acolyer.org/

Re: How I read books: a guide on how to learn

#55
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One exception may be Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist, who was a prolific writer. His note taking method was part of his philosophical process, I assume.

He is an exception in that he wrote about note-taking from the perspective of someone who used his system to make serious contributions to systems theory and various other fields. But he's a great demonstration of Matuschak's point. Luhmnam wrote dozens of books about a wide range of topics, enabled by Zettelkasten, and then wrote a couple of essays towards the end of his career about how he did it.

> he wrote about note-taking

Did he? I though we have his archive and we know how he used it (from some interview, I think). Didn't thought he wrote about it directly in his system. Do you have source on that?

Re: How I read books: a guide on how to learn

#56
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminds me of something Andy Matuschak wrote: > But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields, whatever those may be. In fact, most such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity. These writers offer advice on note-taking to help scientists and executives with the…

Did someone manage to convince him to OSS or sell licenses to his system? Seems similar to http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors but more dynamic and with some extra link discovery. I am trying logseq right now but the bullet-point format is a bit limiting (equally so when I compare my own freeform paper notetaking with bullet journalling).

It's only for presentation. He writes in Bear on MacOS and use his script to make backlinks https://github.com/andymatuschak/Bear-Markdown-Export . He made a video presenting how he works, should be somewhere on YT. But if you're asking specifically about that website source code then yes, he was asked about it. He didn't publish it. There are some alternatives: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners

Re: How I read books: a guide on how to learn

#57
post #29
post #9

Sometimes I wonder how I would turn out if I did organized people stuff like this. What bothers me is these life advices always feel like bullshit. Like, check this guy out. He has his own website with a title "Den Zhadanov\nTechnology. Productivity. Inspiration.". This is life coaching 101. He writes about how burning man didn't change his life and has pictures of books on beaches. How does one take this person seri…

Your comment reminds me of something Andy Matuschak wrote: > But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields, whatever those may be. In fact, most such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity. These writers offer advice on note-taking to help scientists and executives with the…

Feynman with his (super simple...) method for getting deep understanding is a great example.

Re: How I read books: a guide on how to learn

#58
post #9

Sometimes I wonder how I would turn out if I did organized people stuff like this. What bothers me is these life advices always feel like bullshit. Like, check this guy out. He has his own website with a title "Den Zhadanov\nTechnology. Productivity. Inspiration.". This is life coaching 101. He writes about how burning man didn't change his life and has pictures of books on beaches. How does one take this person seri…

He has really not completed a single book on that list. I can see a bunch which are "Currently reading" but none are complete. and we are getting advice based on that.Maybe I'll be look to read his blog after some reading has been done.

Re: How I read books: a guide on how to learn

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my friends made a habit of giving unsolicited advice for things that they don't have the results to show for what they are preaching, we wouldn't be friends for long. So, yeah, I wish people applied some self-restraint when posting these things. As much as we can develop a bullshit detector, there is only so much time we can spend calling out BS vendors in our lives.

Well yeah the good thing about the internet is that you pull the info you choose to pull. Sometimes HN curation does not align with your interests; it will pass.

HN curation brings me tons of things that are not exactly of my interest but still does not bother me. What bothers me (and I guess the OP) is the BS vendoring.

It's the people that got some kind of success in one field (whether by luck, talent, hard work or a combination of it) and start thinking that they have authority to talk about anything else. The bad part is when the masses start actually giving credit to them without any further scrutiny.

Actors/celebrities and their fan bases are the best example of this effect.

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