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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

#181

Post by jll29 »

graycat wrote: post #82

Common current computing can greatly ease the effort to "remember" what have read, written, thought, learned, etc. E.g., to help "remember" I have a general purpose file that I read/write with my favorite text editor and with some surprising statistics: Date started: September 2nd, 2005 Number of entries: 8412 Number of lines: 60,436 Number of bytes: 4,736,380 Really simple. Works really well. A little laptop compute…

Plain text is the most durable medium for knowledge management. Let everyone else commit knowledge suicide by PowerPoint, SharePoint and such.

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

#182

Post by kieckerjan »

A corollary of this idea that also the bad stuff that you read leaves a trace, and not necessarily a good trace. To continue the food metaphor: like junk food there is junk reading and while it may satisfy some need it is all informational empty calories and transfats. Which brings up a subject I pondered many times: to go on an information diet. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.

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

#183

Post by dchichkov »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #174
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…

You are precisely the continuous difference of everything else.

There is no You.

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

#184

Post by Terr_ »

vasco wrote: post #132
Terr_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sure, we're trying to hack your brain to enrich ourselves at your expense, but it's traditional. "

Without advertising in the world, it'd be a much poorer place. Advertising exists for more than a thousand years and it's the only way for other people to know what you can do for them in exchange for something.

It's easy to make a strong argument when it's also woefully incomplete. :P

If all advertising were just abstract economic information that a service or product existed with certain features at a certain price-point, then we're left with a whole bunch of inexplicable mysteries, including-but-not-limited-to:

* Why would there be some expensive messages that lack any of that economic information, such as those which show a succession of nice things (that aren't being sold) closing with a brand-name the viewer is already aware of?

* Why would senders deliberately seek to ensure that the same person sees the same repeated message multiple times, even after they declined to purchase the first time and their situation wouldn't have changed?

* Why would any info-packets be crafted to make previously-neutral viewers experience fresh fear and dissatisfaction?

* Why would someone spend unnecessary money on funny mascots or catchy music?

* Why would (where not illegal) the product have a time-limited discount that wasn't actually time limited nor discounted?

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

#185

Post by piloto_ciego »

ben_w wrote: post #124
piloto_ciego wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours? I routinely chose things to think about or things to concentrate on. It’s not like all thoughts leap into my mind fully formed either. Hell, I edited this message before hitting reply.

> You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours? My tongue-in-cheek answer here is: Correct, badly, and it looks like the obsessive-compulsive desire to check social media and/or the news.

Choose to stop then? I mean social media that is - but seriously. Choose to say, “I’m not driven by my pleasure sensors” and do something hard for the sake of doing it - not for glory, not for nothing. Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places.

Sometimes I feel like a lot of the folks I hear advocating against free will (which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its core) have never had to make any real “no-shit” choices in their life with serious consequences. I don’t mean to sound like an ass, but I both pity and envy these folks. Obviously you don’t have control over a lot of things, but the idea that this is all on rails screams “I’ve never had to do anything that had any real risk to it.”

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

#186

Post by gr8r »

al_borland wrote: post #12

>I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me. I heard those quote for the first time about 4 years ago. I had often been a bit disappointed with myself for not taking more notes while reading, or reviewing what I read in a way where I could be one of those people to bring up quotes and concepts, citing back to the original source, with freakish accuracy. This…

> where I could be one of those people to bring up quotes and concepts, citing back to the original source, with freakish accuracy

If you cannot retrieve a few timeless (to you or in general) quotes/concepts/dialogues and a few trending ones (trending in big or small circles) - there is some amount of info/tasks overload going on.

Also I think we find people who can "bring up quotes and concepts with freakish accuracy" cool for some reasons.

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

#188

Post by JacobiX »

keiferski wrote: post #153

I love reading as much as anyone, and probably finish on average, 100 books a year, but - I’ve gradually become skeptical of the idea that books are an ideal format for acquiring and retaining knowledge. I’ve written a few little comments about this in the past [1] but I’ve been meaning to explore the idea further. I originally began thinking this when I realized I could only remember a handful of details from books…

I agree with you, maybe books are not the ideal format for acquiring knowledge.

I read a lot of fiction books, mainly classics for pleasure. And what I found unique is that only in books I have access to the interior monologue of the characters, their thoughts, and on some occasions, direct access to their "stream of consciousness".

I love it, and I discovered that some characters (but in reality it's the authors) have a similar process of thought, and some others do not, and notice and sense things differently ...

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

#189

Post by _zamorano_ »

Nowadays, I'm re-reading books that left a mark on me.

It's not uncommon to discover that some clever ideas I thought I came up with have been, in fact, read in a book. Humbling.

The thing is, you cannot get to that point by following productivity hacks. It's true that most divulgation books can we summarized in 2 pages. But the way good authors present the same idea again and again, through different examples and viewpoints is what remains in your brain.

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

#190

Post by strogonoff »

csomar wrote: post #148
piloto_ciego wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Diogenes answer would be to walk across the room and slap you: “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me.” That’s tongue and cheek sure, but the point I feel stands. Free will is certainly constrained, and our material and biological conditions do matter - there’s no amount I can will to make myself fly, but they are not necessarily as rigid of constraints as many would have you believe. We can overcom…

> We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though. Hmm, no we can't. And the few people who seemingly can do that, it's because their biology/environment allowed that. So kind of circling back to determinism. Free will is a myth that's used to lock people up. If you slap someone in the face, we'll lock you up somewhere because we don't know i…

If you believe in determinism, then it is likely you also believe in physicalist monism (“there is only the matter and consciousness arises/derives fully from it or is an illusion”).

Normally there is not much I can say to change your mind on that, but just note—there are other views, like idealistic monism, which unlock other possibilities wrt. free will, and which cannot be disproven or proven compared to physicalist monism (which cannot be proven or disproven either).

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