There's a fine line between "I don't need to understand" and "I have no idea what's going on". At some point it becomes unworkable and you have to give up.
The joy of reading books you don't understand
111–120 of 263 posts
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#112I'm halfway through Neal Stephenson’s "Baroque Cycle" and it's absolutely delightful but it sure requires frequent dictionary/Wikipedia consultation, at least for me.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#113This reminds me of something that I heard once from a Chinese teacher. I can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but he was definitely on to something : In the West, it is assumed that it is the speaker's job to make himself understood to his listeners. In the East, it is the other way around. In recent times, it seems like we've gotten even more extreme. The speaker or writer must not only spoon-feed the understanding,…
I read this comment before the post, and now I feel bad. I watched a spy movie from the 1960s recently with someone. We got 20 minutes in before she was confused about why the movie is just about a depressed drunk who lost his job in a spy agency, before my movie-watching accomplice looked up the plot of the movie on Wikipedia. Spoiler alert, there's a twist, and the movie didn't tell the viewer that. It's interestin…
I also strongly suspect you watched "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold". If you enjoyed this movie and the way it is narrated, please do yourself a favor and watch all the BBC mini series from the 70ies/80ies based on John Le Carré books, namely "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", "Smiley's People", and "A Perfect Spy" (or read the books, John Le Carré is an excellent writer, and "A Perfect Spy" can be compared to works by Dickens). You usually have no clue what is going on, and only learn about it later.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#114This reminds me of something that I heard once from a Chinese teacher. I can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but he was definitely on to something : In the West, it is assumed that it is the speaker's job to make himself understood to his listeners. In the East, it is the other way around. In recent times, it seems like we've gotten even more extreme. The speaker or writer must not only spoon-feed the understanding,…
I work in academia, and the pessimistic/cynic standpoint is that university is not about teaching, but about filtering. Making a lecture "fun", comprehensible, or even "innovative" may not have the desired effect of improving the level of understanding among all students, because a fun and easy course is a worse filter than a hard course.
Personally I always learned the most in courses that were very hard and had a nerdy teacher/professor who did not care at all whether you could follow the stuff on the blackboard / in the presentation. Theses courses required work on your own: you had to read the actual literature again and again to even remotely understand the topics on the weekly exercise sheets, or to pass the exam. This "learning by yourself" lead to a much deeper understanding than just memorizing some concepts from a streamlined lecture.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#115This reminds me of something that I heard once from a Chinese teacher. I can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but he was definitely on to something : In the West, it is assumed that it is the speaker's job to make himself understood to his listeners. In the East, it is the other way around. In recent times, it seems like we've gotten even more extreme. The speaker or writer must not only spoon-feed the understanding,…
> If a reader can't follow the argument, it's automatically the author's fault and a waste of the reader's time. Heaven forbid the reader might need to exert some effort and grow in the gleaning.
I've experienced the receiving end of this a couple of times on HN. I once posted a blog post and it was extremely obvious that the detractors (who, despite toxic being a bit of an overblown word now, were being toxic and breaking HN rules and got away with it) hadn't even read perhaps a third or less before getting angry in the comments.
I don't care if people don't like the suggestion but I believe blocking should be implemented.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#116I do like some "hard" fiction like the Stephenson mentioned in TFA, as well as Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but my mind immediately went to some of the harder technical writing I've enjoyed - The Art of Computer Programming; SICP and other Lisp texts, math books, etc. I once spent a very pleasant short vacation on a beach on Lake Michigan reading Peter Gabriel Bergmann's "Introduction to the Theory of Relativity…
> "but my mind immediately went to some of the harder technical writing I've enjoyed [...] math books"
What are your favorite Math books, and what texts did you enjoy the most? Could you please share the titles?
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#117It's like watching 3Blue1Brown. A look into the soul of the universe causing a sense of awe and wonder, but little understanding.
Depends on one's background, really.
I understood some videos really well on the first watching, but some videos on the same technical level were like- "what?... Ooh, maybe that's okay... Oh... Yeah". Total discomfort.
It's the areas of Math where you already have decent groundings, you will find that you can take more with you from 3b1b.
Same with Feynman's Lectures. If you are a smart person but no formal background in Physics, they are fun, sure. But you read the same lectures as a Physics undegrad in your Junior or Senior year, your 'return' from reading those lectures goes up five-fold.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#118This reminds me of something that I heard once from a Chinese teacher. I can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but he was definitely on to something : In the West, it is assumed that it is the speaker's job to make himself understood to his listeners. In the East, it is the other way around. In recent times, it seems like we've gotten even more extreme. The speaker or writer must not only spoon-feed the understanding,…
Oversimplification is bad, but there is a reason why Western/US universities are so much better at teaching students.
Imagine your professors and textbooks werent there to teach you, but they were there to show off their knowledge or to prove you that you know nothing.
A very known problem in my country is that a professor is not making a lecture to teach you something or to explain you something, the professor wants to show off his knowledge - that he is the king and you are a nobody.
Then you get unreadable textbooks full of big words (sometimes you think authors dont grasp them)... which are just plain student unfriendly.
I remembet that I had borrowed some statistics books from USA - and they were easier to read in English than the crap I had in my own language. They were easier to read and easier to understand. No big words. Just explanations and examples.
On a side note, they taught us physics with English abbreviarions. When most students didnt know English.
Think you are in 5th grade and they nake you memorize things like: d = s x t
You have to figure out that it is distance, speed and time.
Note that those abbreviations have nothing to do with the local language. Also why even use abbreviations? Lazy teacher (AND lazy textbook) could have used full words at least. In own language, not English.
Most people from US dont realize how much easier you have. For starters you dont spend a lot of time learning English as a foreign language. Then the non-Americans can get books that are written to teach you something* not to show that the author is great. (* although now I think most textbooks are written for profit).
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#119Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, Marx's Capital, Foucault's work, von Neumann and Morgenstern' Game Theory, and the Perl 6 Apocalypses and Exegeses from the early 2000's.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB) - too much for me.
It was very readable to me. I really enjoyed reading the book.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#120This reminds me of something that I heard once from a Chinese teacher. I can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but he was definitely on to something : In the West, it is assumed that it is the speaker's job to make himself understood to his listeners. In the East, it is the other way around. In recent times, it seems like we've gotten even more extreme. The speaker or writer must not only spoon-feed the understanding,…
my Chinese teacher supplied me with this supposedly ancient piece of Chinese scholarly wisdom: read any book a hundred times, and its meaning will be obvious. i have found this to work amazingly well -- particularly with poorly written technical papers. your comment also reminded me of this one time I was hanging out and watching the Matrix (for the 100th time probably) with a film maker friend. and he was pointing o…
> American film editing guides you with a rather heavy hand on where to look on the screen
There are notable exceptions, and I think the most commercially successful US director who largely ignored this advice was Francis Ford Coppola. In the "Godfather" trilogy, nothing is spelled out. You are not guided to anything. If you miss a minor detail in some scene, you are on your own, and you might not be able to follow the plot to the end.