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Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

andreasfragner.com

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Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#51

Post by jameshart »

pessimizer wrote: post #46
jameshart wrote: post #14

Well 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…

I find that most of the things I read can be pretty effectively summarized in a single thesis sentence and a few additional sentences to generally describe how that thesis was supported. If you're only reading things that can't even be summarized in an abstract, you must be reading a lot of unopinionated biographies?

If after reading an entire book you haven’t already internalized its main thesis, it’s probably not a very valuable thesis.

But reducing a book down to a single thesis minimizes the takeaway value of the book, surely?

Take a book like Gödel Escher Bach. Sure, that book has a thesis. But the value of having read that book is not captured in ‘strange loops are all it takes to create beauty, complexity and consciousness’ - all the different ideas that underpin that thesis are what makes it valuable. That book lives as a set of new connections and pathways between ideas in my brain. And I read it over 20 years ago.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#52

Post by wenc »

travisporter wrote: post #50
wenc wrote: post #45

It’s not worth summarizing every book. I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name, and the takeaway is that the first reading of a book should be a quick one (table of contents, skimming, dipping into pages). Only after a book is shown to have promise are we then to engage in deep reading which not only involves summarizing but also syntopical reading, which is t…

This may be cultural but I just cannot bring myself write in a book even in pencil. post-its notes for me this is a great idea if I have the discipline

I had the same problem but my instructor told me: a book devoid of scribbles is a book that hasn’t been engaged with deeply. If you have to, buy two copies of a book — one for display and another to scribble in, knowing that you’ll truly own the scribbled copy because you won’t be able to sell it.

Post-its work. For me I use a mechanical pencil.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#53

Post by taeric »

jameshart wrote: post #14

Well 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…

Summarizing is not the same as condensing. Just jotting down your view helps you. Such that you don't even have to worry about making your version for an audience.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#54

Post by njarboe »

travisporter wrote: post #50
wenc wrote: post #45

It’s not worth summarizing every book. I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name, and the takeaway is that the first reading of a book should be a quick one (table of contents, skimming, dipping into pages). Only after a book is shown to have promise are we then to engage in deep reading which not only involves summarizing but also syntopical reading, which is t…

This may be cultural but I just cannot bring myself write in a book even in pencil. post-its notes for me this is a great idea if I have the discipline

Scholars from the middle ages wrote on the edges of their scrolls and codexes. Some of these notes are very interesting and useful to scholars. In elementary and primary school most are taught not to write in books because they have to be used for decades, but there is a long tradition of taking notes in books. They are very inexpensive now compared to the past and when you write in the you leave a little extra something for posterity.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#55

Post by paulcole »

pessimizer wrote: post #49
paulcole wrote: post #16

I’m at 47 books read this year so far and mostly disagree with the author of the article. When you find a book that’s worth summarizing, do it. But I get exposed to many more ideas (and find the ones worth thinking about more) simply by reading more. Also, I just like reading. My goal isn’t to have some kind of personal knowledge base to prove how much I’ve comprehended to myself.

> My goal isn’t to have some kind of personal knowledge base to prove how much I’ve comprehended to myself. The reason many people accumulate wealth is to spend it, not to stare at it insecurely. It goes without saying that knowing more things expands the number of things you can do.

> The reason many people accumulate wealth is to spend it, not to stare at it insecurely

Yes and the reason many people accumulate wealth is to stare at it insecurely. What’s your point?

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#56

Post by charlie0 »

cout wrote: post #7
charlie0 wrote: post #2

I'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.

Why obsidian?

Mainly because it's open source and has a ton of functionality. I can bring text docs, diagrams, spreadsheets, images, audio, and even video under one single pkm. Because it's an offline app, it doesnt have any of the drawbacks of the online proprietary solutions.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#57

Post by charlie0 »

sendfoods wrote: post #39
syntaxing wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ditto. There's so many llms out there now. Is there a website where these are aggregated and ranked? Man, I've been too busy to keep on top of these developments.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#59

Post by bowsamic »

mrits wrote: post #18
paulcole wrote: post #16

I’m at 47 books read this year so far and mostly disagree with the author of the article. When you find a book that’s worth summarizing, do it. But I get exposed to many more ideas (and find the ones worth thinking about more) simply by reading more. Also, I just like reading. My goal isn’t to have some kind of personal knowledge base to prove how much I’ve comprehended to myself.

If getting exposed to a lot of ideas is the goal then spending your life on this site and reddit would be the way to go.

Not in my experience. The knowledge here and on Reddit is shallow and does not explore any topic in depth. Theres a reason why Hegel took 1000+ pages to develop his logic. You can never get exposed to the full idea

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#60

Post by syntaxing »

sendfoods wrote: post #39
syntaxing wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's more or less the same exact idea! Use langchain, import llm and embedding model, and query against it. The repo you provided does the same exact thing but using llama cpp python as the backend. I opted to write my own custom llm class with using textgen as the api backend so I can use the gpu since its way faster. But with the new cuBLAS support on llama cpp, it's a game changer so you can use either now. I do find the llama cpp + cuBLAS about 25% slower compared to pure GPU which is really good for what it is.

I get how there's so many choices nowadays and it's overwhelming but 95% of the repo you'll see just uses langchain. For the backend, llama cpp is your best bet minus the constant updates that break the quantized models. If you look for TheBloke on huggingface/reddit, you'll find all the best models. Look for the "ggml" ones which means its supported by llama cpp. But like I mentioned before, llama cpp has been doing so many model breaking changes so using TheBloke's models is your best bet because s/he updates really frequently. I personally prefer wizard-vicuna 13B, the uncensored one is pretty damn amazing.

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