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The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

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Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#101

Post by bookofjoe »

rottc0dd wrote: post #54
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…

This is a personal take. I agree if you are actively participating and grappling with the material in your mind. One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step. So, it forces me to actively participate, argue and understand the text. In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding. I heard, that is why Fey…

"When in doubt, read on." — Alfred Korzybski, the father of modern semantics, in his foundational 1933 book, "Science and Sanity."

https://archive.org/stream/alfred-korzybksi-science-and-sani...

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#102

Post by _fat_santa »

awongh wrote: post #84

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours. >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to ever…

Personally I still go on Wikipedia deep dives where you end up going from link to link for hours. I think the author is entirely incorrect with that quote, the whole idea of leasure research is that there are no rules, some will go ask an LLM, others will go read 'foundational text' while others will just browse Wikipedia.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#104

Post by TeMPOraL »

NalNezumi wrote: post #89
rottc0dd wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a personal take. I agree if you are actively participating and grappling with the material in your mind. One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step. So, it forces me to actively participate, argue and understand the text. In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding. I heard, that is why Fey…

I think your personal take is more so that you require "interaction" in the learning process; which is extremely common and universally accepted as best way to learn stuff. >If I don't understand I cannot move on to next step Everytime you encounter new hard concept, you really have to actively think/interact with that information to make it yours. This is often lacking in the "lecture" style teaching. One key benefi…

> This is probably why Private tuition is so valuable (and very very often used in East Asian nation); whichever fence of preference you fall to, a someone dedicated to teaching you is an extreme advantage.

That's gonna be a money printer for LLMs (even if for a short while - "no moat" & stuffs). Many people are fine with LLM-assisted learning, and able to navigate the hallucination problem. Then there's the (in)famous NotebookLM, that's known for only one of its many features: the ability to blend a bunch of source documents and generate an engaging podcast out of them. And a feature they're testing is letting the listener interrupt the podcast with their own questions. Meanwhile, OpenAI's "advanced voice" has been demonstrating for close to a year now, that a spoken conversation with an LLM can be done and feels... natural.

It's not hard to see the convergence of these ideas into ad-hoc experts: blend some textbooks, replace a podcast with a conversational "advanced voice" model, and suddenly you may experience "talking to Feynman". Not a real one - nowhere near as smart or likely to be correct - but still better than anything else you or me have access to.

(Whether or not you believe LLMs are good enough for this, or are too dumb a markov chain stochastic parrot something - it still begs to be tried, and someone will try it soon.)

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#105

Post by fastasucan »

awongh wrote: post #84

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours. >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to ever…

>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts

Leisurely and "must include" sounds very contradicting.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#106

Post by doubled112 »

thfuran wrote: post #91
spoiler wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with reading it's more of an active or deliberate choice. With listening or watching it "just happens" naturally as the medium progresses. I'm also a slow learner (and reader) so I think reading also suits me better because I allows me to control the pace better.

You've never gotten distracted while reading and then found that you've scanned over a bunch of text while thinking about something else?

I've never read anything _without_ realizing I had skipped most of the text while thinking of something else.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#107

Post by luizfzs »

My gut feeling (with bias) is that most people don't think about things around them because society is in a constant state of hurry. If someone is wondering 'how did zoning laws came to be?', they are not being productive. And our western society seems to value the individuals based on how much they produce.

The person working, or commuting to/from work, is tired and doesn't have the energy to ponder about the world around us.

The 'first researchers' if I may call them that, were the Ionians, a Greek island of merchants, that had the time and resources to pursue the interests of the mind.

That's of course, only part of the story. The other part, I'd say, is to have the habit of questioning and wondering about the world around us. That comes with practice. And ironically, lots of parents indirectly discourage their kids from asking questions by becoming annoyed at how many 'whys' their kids ask.

Our educational system is also discouraging of such way of thinking. It's mostly a production line of workers.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#108

Post by mobilejdral »

awongh wrote: post #84

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours. >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to ever…

The author also asks "If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would you want to have with you?" which I also can't answer.

I would fall into the category of someone who does research as leisure. I have been slowly unraveling the genetics behind gender dysphoria. Yes I have borrowed a few biology books from libraries, but it has mostly been reading 70 years of research papers, piecing together all the evidence to make a hypothesis, comparing it to all the research data and iterating. In the last year I have also started getting a fair number of WGS (Whole Genome Sequenced) files, and I have a whole separate pile of anecdotal that just because it isn't published doesn't mean I can ignore it either. These are about as far from books as you can get. It is something I do for leisure, so my investigation has been somewhat random, following whatever I found interating at that time including dead ends. Been doing this very open ended research for years now and at this point we have a really solid understanding of it, so the edge cases are actually now the fun stuff. I never would have made anywhere near the progress I did if I had been forced to start with reading a bunch of random unrelated biology books.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#109

Post by awongh »

nluken wrote: post #100
awongh wrote: post #84

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours. >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to ever…

I think you're generally right about the OP, but I don't see your alternative method as a tonic to the problem the author is discussing. I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong, and that the original post tends towards hierarchy in an almost reactionary way, yet at the same time I also see that many people tend to ingest information from other forms of media less critical…

Yea, it's the classic conflation of the format of the media with other factors- it's not the fact that you're reading from a screen instead of a paper page that's making you intellectually incurious.

But the disingenuous thing is that I don't think these arguments are really meant to examine why people might be less curious- it's just to sound cooler than people who read the OP and imagine the writer in some cafe pouring over a big stack of hardcover books.

>> aren't you doing the kind of leisure research that the original post is talking about anyway?

I would say the distinction is that I don't need to be precious about why I would look at foundational texts. Maybe foundational texts are a bit over-hyped- anything written 100 years ago was made for the context of that time, and even if the ideas are universal to a certain extent, it's better digested through a modern lens in light of how those ideas have affected everything since then. How much more do you get out of an idea reading it from the original? It feels like there's a bit of a diminishing return in a lot of cases.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#110

Post by bee_rider »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #95
bee_rider wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot say what works for other people. For me, unless I’m reading with my eyeballs, taking notes, and working examples, I’m not really convinced I’m learning anything difficult.

disagree. You just have to actively listen, and cannot let your mind wander. you can also read and have no idea what you just read if you let your mind wander. Currently learning spanish via a podcast and its very effective, I just have to pause and rewind constantly to make sure I fully understand whats going on

I was pretty clear that I was just describing what works for me, right? So, as the authority on the topic, I declare you incorrect.

It is fine if you think I’m not representative or usual, but I’m telling you, I’ve tried listening very hard in many different contexts, it just doesn’t work.

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