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The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

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Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#61

Post by bayindirh »

mysterydip wrote: post #59
bayindirh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I'm somewhere in between about Audio books. First of all, for some books, that's great. Esp, if read by a good voice actor. It can convert a book to radio theater, that's magic. However, if you're listening while you're driving, or being distracted, you lose the some parts of the picture. Lastly, not all books are good audio books. Some of them need stopping, reflecting, and some re-reading sometimes. So, h…

Personally, even if I lose something listening to an audiobook while driving, I gain more than if I did something else. It's otherwise lost time. I can always re-listen and gain something I missed the first time.

That's one perspective. On the other hand, I find many missing pieces what I'm looking for while driving in silence. When I reach my destination, either have answers or new questions to jot down.

I think silence / noise is another form of breathing. After filling your brains' queues, you need to allow it to process these queues in its own terms. When queues are processed, there is loot to collect at the other end of the bar.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#62

Post by whymememe »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #35
sergioisidoro wrote: post #34

I think reading is an essential skill, but we also need to get reading out of the pedestal. Because a lot of the time these arguments come across as some sort of literary elitism. Like if you're not ingesting information through reading, it doesn't count. This month I spent many hours listening to lectures on youtube about geopolitics on the Asian continent from the naval war college. Sure I could have read it, but n…

I always love this conversation: Snob: "Listening to an audio book doesn't count as reading the book!" Everyone else in the world: "k"

To be pedantic, it’s definitionally not reading. You listened to the book, you didn’t read it.

There’s just an odd legitimacy associated specifically with reading - that people want to access, and so makes other people weirdly snobbish/defensive of it.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#63

Post by DeathArrow »

It would be nice to afford to practice that art. Most people are practicing the art of putting food on their tables.

Most researchers are doing it for a living and they might want to pursue other activities in their free time. Other people do not possess the skill level. Science and research is harder than it was centuries ago.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#65

Post by tpoacher »

markus_zhang wrote: post #28

Don't know about you guys, but reading has become more and more of a burden for me. It is as if -- I have greatly narrowed my interest such that most books are not interesting any more. Even the sci-fi and fantasy books, once I loved, lost their magic. Nowadays there are only two types of books that excite me: 1) those about software/hardware engineering, such as iWoz(I even bought a few Tom Swift JR books for my son…

I have exactly the same experience, and in fact, I'm slowly starting to lose interest in the 'nerdy' books too.

However, I don't necessarily think the problem is books. I think the problem is 'time', and how reading has evolved in my life to be less about "the enjoyment of the action of reading" into "the necessity of acquiring the information" (even if that 'necessity' is intended for 'leisure' / 'pleasure').

It's as if the modern world has conditioned us all to skim-read, prioritise, and optimise information-to-words ratio. I wouldn't "mind" sitting down with an unknown book and giving it a good-old college try, in principle, but in practice, any book I read now competes with some other book in my backlog, which I'm also not ever going to read because that too competes with another book in my backlog, and I simply don't have the time, because I should be reading more stuff for work etc instead.

I remember I told a friend of mine once, that I was practicing speed-reading, and that I was getting good at it, and reading books faster as a result. I remember the look of horror on his face, he thought it was a terrible idea. The whole point of a book is to read it slowly, he said. There was this idea that, if you speed read it, even if you do in fact read everything in it, you've still only just looked at the all content, but you haven't really experienced or savoured the book, or allowed yourself to get lost in it. And he's right, I think, and his words do still echo and haunt me a tiny bit to this day. I do remember what that feeling of getting lost in a good book was like, and I really miss it. But I don't know how to get it back. Certainly not between breaks while reading reports at work.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#66

Post by jdp »

Stamp collecting is a good outlet for research as leisure. If you're the type of person who falls into wiki holes and likes talking about what you learn with other people, it might be for you.

Many stamp collectors follow the research-as-leisure framework naturally as part of their hobby. The article outlines cultivating curiosity, developing questions, gathering evidence, developing answers, and building communities around that process, which is basically what collectors are doing when they're talking about stamps and other philatelic material. They're sharing discoveries they find interesting, often only after identifying the material, looking up its historical context, drawing parallels to current events, and then formulating some kind of answer or conclusion that makes it worthwhile to share what they've found.

I think the experts in a lot of hobbies engage in this sort of recreational research for the joy of it, but it's closer to the norm for casual collectors. There is a whole wide spectrum of collectors though, ranging from aesthetics-driven folks who spend more time on thematic album pages than on researching anything, over to experts in narrow areas like Transylvanian hotel stamps who publish whole books on about how they weren't valid for postal use but were used by hospitality workers nestled up in the Carpathians to get mail from guests back into the official mail stream because the state couldn't be bothered to service up there. If you get into it you'll find there are a lot of curious and motivated people in the middle who are happy to share what they've been reading about (or listening to, or watching) lately.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#68

Post by inktype »

I'm sure it's still out there, but I don't seem to notice as much prevalence of dedicated research trivia as I used to, like Damn Interesting, or Cracked. Lots of the articles would be some niche question that wasn't just a google away and it was obvious that it took effort and time at a library to write. The closest thing that comes to mind now is Asianometry's youtube channel and mailing list.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#69

Post by nicbou »

bayindirh wrote: post #44
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always love this conversation: Snob: "Listening to an audio book doesn't count as reading the book!" Everyone else in the world: "k"

Actually, I'm somewhere in between about Audio books. First of all, for some books, that's great. Esp, if read by a good voice actor. It can convert a book to radio theater, that's magic. However, if you're listening while you're driving, or being distracted, you lose the some parts of the picture. Lastly, not all books are good audio books. Some of them need stopping, reflecting, and some re-reading sometimes. So, h…

I'm paying more attention to an audiobook in my car than at a book in a busy place.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#70

Post by yannis »

janpmz wrote: post #53

I did some leisure research on how the Nazca Lines align with mountain shadows and made a publication. That was a nice weekend. https://zenodo.org/records/11422308

I find this fascinating; I do a lot of reading and writing (leisure work) outside my own specialization; Some I believe are possibly publishable, but I am reluctant so far to attempt to publish them. Is zenodo a good place for this in your opinion?
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