If one learns to write by reading, one would learn to 'upload' by 'downloading'.
The method of knowing is not dependent on the medium. I can present the steps in knowing to demonstrate it, but I have already made my point.
The Need to Read
51–60 of 195 posts
Re: The Need to Read
#52I might be wrong but, from his most recent posts, I get the feeling that PG is growing increasingly laconic. Makes sense?
Re: The Need to Read
#53I wonder if the core idea here is limited to reading books, or if it extends seamlessly to articles, blogs and other quality content.
Re: The Need to Read
#54It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing . And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to wr…
[deleted]
Re: The Need to Read
#55Many of us are programmers. Some of us are also trying to be writers. Trust me: writing is like programming. Reading code is very useful to become a better programmer, but you learn programming mostly by writing code. Similarly you mostly learn how to write prose by writing prose, tons of it. Reading is especially useful if you identify certain books that are very high in style (for me one of such books was "Vite di uomini non illustri" by Giuseppe Pontiggia), for your taste at least, for what you beleive the best writing is. You read these books many times, to understand what's going on, what are the patterns, how to do the same magic. As a casual reader you can read 200 books every year and yet remain a terrible writer.
EDIT: more about that on my blog if you care -> http://antirez.com/news/136
Re: The Need to Read
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful. He used to take retreats in the caves near Mecca to meditate and reflect . It was during one of these sessions that he later claimed that he was overwhelmed with the inescapable presence of archangel Gabriel who commanded him to "Read!" . This directive of Gabriel to Mohammad is held to be the first verse of t…
> the reflect phase. For some this occurs prior to writing. Others, take time when writing to pause and reflect. First you load the dataset then you train the model.
That's Zen.
Re: The Need to Read
#57To facilitate writing, 'pages' have to be ubiquitous. There is always something to write about, and ubiquity of pages facilitates the ink on paper, the pixels on screen.
Writing is a medium, and an excellent one at that. I'd agree that writing is a unique medium in generating a special kind of thoughts that are deeply introspective and concept-revealing. But I find that you can view writing not as one medium, but as a host of various submedia.
Typing on a keyboard is very different from writing on a whiteboard. The kinds of thoughts you can host to different 'pages' vary. Even electronic writing can vary depending on the psychological and technological context. Writing on Twitter on mobile varies from writing encrypted notes on your personal machine.
Is one thing better than the other? I don't think we can easily claim such. Use whiteboards when whiteboards are good, use paper when paper is good, use iPads when iPads are good. But access to various hosts for just the right occasion surely nurtures ideas faster in the right medium of growth.
Re: The Need to Read
#58This is OT and has probably been covered elsewhere, but why does PG not use https on his site? Also, why does it not trigger showing the 'Toggle Reader View (F9)' button in the Firefox addressbar, if anyone knows?
You can connect via https, but your browser will ask you to trust a Yahoo Store certificate since it has no clue how Yahoo Store might relate to paulgraham.com
Re: The Need to Read
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shakespeare wrote about Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Henry IV, and so on. How did he learn about these people if there was nothing to read?
u make one hell of a point that i thought about. this is recursion but in different languages, which is not really applicable with exception of Richard and Henry. Read in latin, then translate it to THE ORIGINAL OTHER LANGUAGE ENGLISH. You are diluting my genuine point that I am making. The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now. In all fairness, the opinion brought forward by your messiah…
> The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now
But enough to fill a single person's lifetime regardless? So whether you take Shakespeare or Murakami, their individual perspectives are not that different since either of them could have filled their lifetimes with reading.
> The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now
The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.
> your messiah PG
This is low-level, disrespectful, intellectually dishonest and a phallacy. GP said nothing about Graham and you are pulling this out of nowhere.
Re: The Need to Read
#60have you seen nassim taleb's recent comments about this guy? Taleb while harsh, always is truthful to the truth. I'm too young to know the story behind Hacker News and ycombinator, but reading some of the recent stuff makes me question prevailing sentiments about PG.
[deleted]