Read fewer books and feel better about it • Hacker News Board

Re: Read fewer books and feel better about it

#51

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 12:19 PM UTC

wenc wrote: post #9

woliveirajr wrote: post #3

> If you’re finishing every book you start you’re doing something wrong: you’re probably finishing books not worth your time This is how you'll have time to read a lot of interesting books: by not finishing all books you started. If you read half of a book and it still didn't gave you good feelings, the last half probably won't. Save your time.

I'm an incorrigible book non-completist. I only read to get what I need and I duck out. Now with ChatGPT-4, I can read and comprehend even faster. For dense books in areas I'm unfamiliar with, I ask ChatGPT to, not summarize, but to break things down for me. For me, it's the new efficient way for doing syntopical reading (Mortimer Adler's technique for reading deeply). https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-get-…

[deleted]

Re: Read fewer books and feel better about it

#52

Post by ethanbond » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

wenc wrote: post #47

ethanbond wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying this with books I was familiar with yielded extremely disappointing and off-base results.

I’m curious as to how?

It lost all the rhetorical force of the argument, got factual things wrong, and failed to point out important misunderstandings on my part.

IMO good books are ones that collide with your priors and compel you to reconfigure your worldview.

I can only describe this GPT exercise as allowing me to mold the book around my priors as opposed to helping (or even allowing) the book to really impact them head-on, how the author knew they ought to be attacked. I think it’s really insidious for someone to do this and come out thinking their prior worldview survived collision with the book.

Re: Read fewer books and feel better about it

#53

Post by wenc » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 5:35 PM UTC

ethanbond wrote: post #52

wenc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious as to how?

It lost all the rhetorical force of the argument, got factual things wrong, and failed to point out important misunderstandings on my part. IMO good books are ones that collide with your priors and compel you to reconfigure your worldview. I can only describe this GPT exercise as allowing me to mold the book around my priors as opposed to helping (or even allowing) the book to really impact them head-on, how the auth…

Interesting. Curious if you were using GPT 4 or the free tier?

I have a different experience. GPT4 has enhanced my reading by allowing me to correlate it with history, sociology etc.

I don’t have the explicit objective of having my priors challenged — I have very complex priors. I seek more new connections that I never made before. GPT4 has been able to do both for me. Take Malthus — I asked it for the historical positions for and against Malthusian hypothesis and asked it to speculate what would happen in a reality where people believed it. It’s a purely intellectual exercise but I was able to see more perspectives than what I could imagine.