171–180 of 184 posts
Straight from How to Read a Book. I highly recommend it; it felt like my IQ went up a couple of points after reading it
That's the problem with productivity porn. You feel smarter and more productive, that you're becoming a better human being. In reality, you've accomplished nothing and all the hard work is still ahead of you.
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No, sports are not pretty close to battles. People killing and getting killed makes a difference. My emotional state would be very different if I would meet a rival at dawn for a fight on life and death than if I'm fencing for points in a club. And most importantly, by reading I get the thoughts, feelings and motivations from other people, which teaches me different ways to see the world and empathy. And if we for a…
I have nothing against reading and enjoy it thoroughly, the discussion here isn't that, it's about learning and being considered competent, and I'm simply pointing out a specific qualia of learning first-hand vs read and how it manifests in your reliability to others. UFC and boxing are certainly life and death and I'm sure you'd have quite a similar feeling to going to battle. Though again this really misses the poi…
And most people, not only 4 of the 5 last US presidents, who decides important things about wars, have in the best case read about wars, rarely fought in any themselves.
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Please try to avoid gatekeeping in public, particularly with regards to what people read. Please?
I'm not sure it's fair to say that I'm gatekeeping what people read. It's more about the spirit behind the reading. Anyway, if it's gatekeeping to suggest that people should pursue personal growth through their own authentic interests rather than reading as a chore to be "more efficient", then call me president of the gatekeeping club for all I care.
If someone reads short, easy to read books for any reason, that's dandy. I'm sure they'll get something useful out of it.
On the other hand, are you reading The Art of Computer Programming? (Oddly enough, I can currently answer yes, since I've been playing around with the section in Seminumerical Algorithms on testing random number sources. :-) )
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The worst is some arbitrary goal of reading X books per year. That clearly optimises for short, easy to read books (eg New York Times Best Sellers) and avoids more technical and difficult books (eg Art of Computer Programming)
I agree. I used to try to read X books a year, participate in Goodreads year in books, etc. This year I decided to stop consuming 90% of news and 99% of social media (mostly instagram) and try to read at least one 800+ page book per month (usually historical biographies). After reading two of these larger books in 2021, I feel like (and this is nothing new or profound) that concentration really is a lost art and it j…
In 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris brags that he is a judo champion because he found a loophole in the judging criteria. By forcing people out of bounds 3 times in a match, he could disqualify them and win by default. Ok, sure. Those are the rules, and he won. But in any way that really matters, he was not a judo champion. Further, this guy’s association with Tim Ferris (see his Youtube) is an automatic disqualification…
The fact that Ferris is completely transparent about how he won tells me that he probably doesn’t actually think of himself as a war machine. You are also underestimating Judo here, too. It’s all about grappling and throws, positioning. Maybe keep that in mind a little bit when you say he won by forcing his opponent out of bounds. It’s not a street fight.
In 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris brags that he is a judo champion because he found a loophole in the judging criteria. By forcing people out of bounds 3 times in a match, he could disqualify them and win by default. Ok, sure. Those are the rules, and he won. But in any way that really matters, he was not a judo champion. Further, this guy’s association with Tim Ferris (see his Youtube) is an automatic disqualification…
So your argument to dismiss this blogpost is guilt by association, am I understanding you correctly?
In 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris brags that he is a judo champion because he found a loophole in the judging criteria. By forcing people out of bounds 3 times in a match, he could disqualify them and win by default. Ok, sure. Those are the rules, and he won. But in any way that really matters, he was not a judo champion. Further, this guy’s association with Tim Ferris (see his Youtube) is an automatic disqualification…
Of all qualms you could have against Ferriss, this is the pettiest.
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We need to _do_ something with it. Reading is not enough, we must apply it somehow. That's why there are exercises in school or uni. That's why some people write summaries of books on their blogs. Another idea might be to make youtube videos about the books we read. Just to summarize them in our own words. To do more with the material that just reading. (P.S. It's also the reason why I like and recommend Zed Shaw's "…
Yeah, that's why I started taking notes. For topics that are important to my work / hobbies I write my own wiki-style summary to synthesize information from all the sources I've read. When I inevitably forget later, I basically have written myself a textbook that explains things in a way that I know I'll understand later. I will also happily try to summarize the info to my partner or whoever will listen. But outside…
If you'd be willing to try to generate small discussion groups about books, I'm definitely interested. Might be worth putting out a call here on HN, though who knows how many will stick with it. It helps for me that my interests are all over the place. But sadly, most people just aren't academically bent in that sense.
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There are two kinds of reading. Reading that is hard and reading that is easy . Nobody who reads 100 books a year (or even 50 as the author cops to) is reading anything particularly difficult. It's either fluff self-help, or fiction that vacuums your attention in, or a medium article by some MBA blown up to 250 pages by a publisher, or something you should be listening to as an audiobook on your commute. Look at what…
I wish people bragged about reading ONE book. "Heard that you read a lot, what are you reading lately?", "Well, I've been at it with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the last five years, highly recommended".