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Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
31–40 of 167 posts
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#32I built a tool for myself for the purpose of grokking ideas from books called Emdash [1]. Over the years I've collected reams of highlights from books and articles but until recently, rarely reviewed or absorbed them. The core of this app uses on-device ML to show related passages with similar ideas from other books you've read, and I find that going broad and exploring concepts from different angles really helps in…
This is really neat!! Love how you have a sample library for one to experience how using emdash is like.
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#33It may be more important to the author at this point in their life, but that will likely change with time.
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#34Well it really depends what your goals are, right? What kind of books are you reading, to what end? I personally struggle to think of any book I have engaged with which I got value out of, that could be meaningfully summarized in a couple of hours. The author was an expert on the subject and they only managed to summarize it down to a few hundred pages - if there was only a couple of pages worth of ideas in there pre…
It's up to you. For me, I may write the parts I presently find most useful in detail. And some high-level summaries for reference. Then I can search my notes to know what book I need.
I'm still not sure why someone would need to do this? What kind of information are you obtaining from books that you later find yourself wanting to search for?
These kind of productivity tips always confuse me when they lack context of what the person writing is trying to do.
Like: Anki flashcards and spaced repetition. I see a lot of people advocating for them. I have never understood why because, in my personal experience, retaining lots of disconnected facts has never really been something I've needed to solve for. I do sort of see how it could work for rapid language learning (though I still think immersion, reading and writing are better than randomized vocabulary memorization, if you can take the time to do it that way), and I think I understand it in the context of fields like medicine where there's just a lot of facts you need to acquire, but people will advocate it for everything, and I just don't get it.
When I read a book, the process of reading it adds to the sum of my knowledge; I absorb the ideas, combine them with my own, and come to a new understanding of a topic. At that point, the book has accomplished its goal, for me.
But I acknowledge that's just how I read. I'm not an academic who might be later on finding myself needing to recall where I read something so I can cite it (although I find in general I can remember where I read certain things)... is that the use case here? What's the goal with building up an externalized knowledgeable?
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#35ChatGPT will do this. But also, try quizzing yourself about what you’ve read the day before. I bet the retention is slim.
Sure, ChatGPT can do this. Just like you could drive a car over a marathon route. That’s not the point though, the point of summarizing is to force yourself to understand. It’s the journey not the destination that’s important.
Well said. And, in other words, while ChatGPT can summarize it for you, it cannot understand it for you.
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#36I built a tool for myself for the purpose of grokking ideas from books called Emdash [1]. Over the years I've collected reams of highlights from books and articles but until recently, rarely reviewed or absorbed them. The core of this app uses on-device ML to show related passages with similar ideas from other books you've read, and I find that going broad and exploring concepts from different angles really helps in…
I would really love for something like this to be integrated into Logseq
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's up to you. For me, I may write the parts I presently find most useful in detail. And some high-level summaries for reference. Then I can search my notes to know what book I need.
I'm still not sure why someone would need to do this? What kind of information are you obtaining from books that you later find yourself wanting to search for? These kind of productivity tips always confuse me when they lack context of what the person writing is trying to do . Like: Anki flashcards and spaced repetition. I see a lot of people advocating for them. I have never understood why because, in my personal ex…
If your genuinely curious there is an attempt at an answer in this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34507927-how-to-take-sma...
Gist of it being, like you say, to not only summarise but to process into ones own knowledge base. And yes, this book is targeted at academics with the purpose of setting them up for producing papers, books, or other artefacts from that knowledge base.
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#38Tiago Forte popularized the idea of "Progressive Summarization", which starts with extensive highlighting, then rounds of progressive refinement, ie bold key phrases and concepts in a given passage, then later review those and summarize in your own words. Strong approach for retention and comprehension...
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#39I've been using Obsidian recently and I can say it's had a big impact on my life. When I was younger I used to read a lot, but i hardly remember anything. Now, when I read something important, I'm sure to summarize it in Obsidian. I can remember it easier and even if I can't, I know where to go to find that information.
You can use llamaindex to load your vault and parse it to a local LLM (you can use openai if you’re comfortable with it). You end up getting your own personal search engine and it’s amazing. I really should finish my write up about it (also written in Obsidian)
Do you know how this compares to [PrivateGPT](https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT). I am honestly at the point of choice paralysis with all these new tools
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's up to you. For me, I may write the parts I presently find most useful in detail. And some high-level summaries for reference. Then I can search my notes to know what book I need.
I'm still not sure why someone would need to do this? What kind of information are you obtaining from books that you later find yourself wanting to search for? These kind of productivity tips always confuse me when they lack context of what the person writing is trying to do . Like: Anki flashcards and spaced repetition. I see a lot of people advocating for them. I have never understood why because, in my personal ex…
> retaining lots of disconnected facts has never really been something I've needed to solve for.
At in regards to Anki usage, the “disconnected facts” seem to be something that only students (high school/college) or people new to Anki do. These people are very much using Anki for a short term goal like passing a test or class. For that use case, “disconnected facts” works just fine.
The people who use Anki (long term) outside of school and outside of 2nd language learning usually have much more connected webs of cards. While the individual cards are usually atomic, they might have a dozen or more cards all attacking a concept from different angles. Also in this usecase it seems just the act of formulating the questions is the biggest part of the learning. The reviewing part is almost secondary.