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You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#51

Post by achow »

y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

There is a subtle difference to that than what the author was trying to say in his blog.

The thing is when we read, particularly in growing years, the expectation is that we would remember most of things from the book and apply it somewhere else, ex. in a discussion "...agree, the same I gathered from this excellent book that I read couple of years back...".

And frankly, I'm bummed by it still. I read a lot but when certain situation comes I cannot remember things & facts vaguely, even though I had finished 300 pages of that page turner in one night.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#53

Post by mysecretaccount »

sublinear wrote: post #39
y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

> You still have your free will.

Highly debatable.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#54

Post by NERD_ALERT »

sublinear wrote: post #39
y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

Free will hasn’t been proven. It’s up in the air how much is predetermined, and how to even define “free” in the context of free will. Even if we do have free will it’s still influenced to some degree by our biology.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#55

Post by photochemsyn »

Ever re-read a book you once read a long time ago, only to find your view of it has fundamentally changed in some way? Perhaps you identify with different characters in a story, or your understanding of the author's arguments is entirely different. It's a strange experience, since it's the same book - but you have changed, and so the book has become a kind of time mirror that shows those personal changes reflectively.

(It was Albert Camus' The Plague for me, revealing something of a transition from hopeful idealism to rather jaded realism).

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#56

Post by pvg »

beebmam wrote: post #26
Zambyte wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still encourage you to write though. Writing has seriously transformed the way that I think. I refer to my notes very often too.

How do you know that writing has improved the way that you think? By what metrics did you come to that conclusion? If someone else showed you that by writing their transformed thinking reduced their quality of life, would you be less prescriptive to others?

By what metrics

Before they started writing regularly they were just a Zambit and look at them now. And who knows, you could make beebman following their method.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#57

Post by OnionBlender »

Zambyte wrote: post #22
kromem wrote: post #15

I actually realized recently that this is probably the underlying phenomenon behind "how is my phone listening to my conversations to show me ads/articles?" The other day I was thinking about LLM aggregation and in my internal dialogue used the example of "aliens built the pyramids" as a fringe theory that would be picked up on if tuning for other associated fringe positions by LLMs at places like Gab. Later in the d…

This is why your attention is so insanely valuable. Everyone thinks they're immune to advertising, yet people keep paying billions and billions of dollars to show something on your screen for a few seconds... because like it or not, it works.

I've been using ad blockers and not watching TV for so long that I have very little ad resistance. Whenever I use someone else's computer that doesn't an ad blocker, it makes me wonder how people live like this.

I'm so bad at handling distractions that I have to turn the radio or music off to make a left hand turn.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#59

Post by komali2 »

sublinear wrote: post #39
y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

You have free will, but isn't there still such a thing as an information hazard? For example, you may have free will, but you still just lost The Game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#60

Post by jillesvangurp »

sharadov wrote: post #5

I've always believed that two things will broaden your horizon - travel and reading. If you don't have the means or the time to travel then your next best option is reading.

You don't necessarily have to travel far to experience the benefits. People seem to assume that distance is the main point but the main point is actually just exploring and experiencing new things.

I learned this during Covid when I started taking walks in the city I live in (Berlin) and realized I had only explored a tiny part of it in the fifteen years or so I have lived there.

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