I like handwriting, but it struggles when you need to copy it in your obsidian
It's a bummer that Apple Pencil support isn't better in the iPadOS version of Obsidian.
Writing by hand is good for your brain
391–400 of 708 posts
Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain
#392I always wrote by hand - probably because I spent over a decade in academia dealing with equations. I always have a pen in my pocket (without a pocket protector!) About a decade ago I went back to writing with fountain pens after a nearly two decade hiatus. Oh, the joy! But very sad he has no (real) tips on dealing with hand fatigue - other than to write in cursive. I always had hand fatigue for writing long stretche…
> But very sad he has no (real) tips on dealing with hand fatigue I also spent a good amount of time in academia (math & physics), wrote everything by hand (dozens of pages per day), and I, too, suffered from serious hand fatigue & RSI for years, even when using a fountain pen. My recommendations: - Use as light and as thick a fountain pen as possible. Also, very thin & hard pen tips may be nice but in my experience…
> Use as light and as thick a fountain pen as possible. Also, very thin & hard pen tips may be nice but in my experience they make it harder to write.
I use Fine-Medium nibs (some fine nibs are too fine, and some medium nibs are too thick).
Amusingly, I've discovered recently that my handwriting is much worse with thick pens. I write better with pens slightly on the thin side (but not too thin). Of course, that doesn't mean it's better for my wrist!
Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
My intention is less "talk down" and more "Socrates was right." Too much of note-taking is a ritualistic behavior that actually hinders understanding and retention. I think highlighting / circling / crossing out / etc is by far the worst, but margin notes are also bad. It is very frustrating the number of people who say "it's their property, they can do whatever they want" and similar comments, all of which are missi…
Ok then please explain why Socrates is better than margin notes for an assumed purpose, because that is not reasonable common knowledge. If by that you meant to suggest that for formal study, some kind of self-review process combined with cold written practice/rehearsal sustained under interleaved spacing, then that is likely the gold standard for comprehension and memorization. But most people don't even know that,…
You are correct that the reference is a little obscure -- if my memory serves it's Plato's Phaedrus.
Plato argues, in a book, in the voice of his mentor Socrates, that books will destroy knowledge. And the reason is precisely to do with the thing that Socrates is famous for, his Socratic Method of asking his students (or rival politicians or anyone) questions about what they claimed to know, engaging them in a real discussion where we come to things that we agree about and then build that agreed knowledge-base incrementally. For Socrates, a book could never provide that experience; you cannot ask the book a question.
Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain
#394A corollary to this is, when reading books, mark them up! Don’t be precious with them. Destroy the spine so it’s easier to read, fold pages, write the important stuff inside the front cover of the book. Cross out stuff you disagree with, draw a big circles around the stuff that resonates. Not only does it make consumption a lot more engaging, it makes a revisit of that book extremely rewarding. Don’t get caught up tr…
I buy used books: it sucks to see someone else's notes scribbled all over the page. It's like a really annoying guy whispering at you with vapid explanations while you're trying to pay attention to a lecture. "Cross out stuff you disagree with" actually makes me sick. It also seems useless for understanding and retention, since highlighting is almost always misleading and margin notes are almost always empty. If you…
Totally agreed. I find it distracting working through a book that's been marked up by someone else. In fact, I get the same feeling even if I marked it up myself, which is why I stopped writing in books. I would prefer to keep my thoughts and the author's thoughts separate. When I want to know what the author thinks, I'll go to the book; when I want to remember what I thought, I'll go to my notes.
Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain
#395Used to write all meeting notes by hand to help me focus on the meeting and actually retain information. Fell out of the habit but must get back into it! Definitely helps especially if it's not a topic that's naturally gripping to me.
Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
I buy used books: it sucks to see someone else's notes scribbled all over the page. It's like a really annoying guy whispering at you with vapid explanations while you're trying to pay attention to a lecture. "Cross out stuff you disagree with" actually makes me sick. It also seems useless for understanding and retention, since highlighting is almost always misleading and margin notes are almost always empty. If you…
Then don't buy used books? They are _used_. If you want a new book, buy a new book?
I read two books recently that are out of print. One of them (Georges Rey's Contemporary Philosophy of Mind) is $150 on Amazon, and out of stock. The other (Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, and Ends) isn't on Amazon at all. Used bookstores are the only viable option.
Books are treasures. The second book is an enormously valuable source of wisdom. I am glad nobody vandalized that wisdom with marginalia and highlighting.
Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Paper books are just decaying bundles of plant fiber — and the ideas within them are likewise ephemeral. We still have 1000 year old codex in quite good conditions. A paper book will still be readable 500 and 1000 years into the future, if properly stored. A digital file will be effectively lost in decades, if not mere years.
Most likely though is your kids, or a company paid for from your estate, will chuck it all in a skip (dumpster) and it will be dumped somewhere to rot, or be burnt to make electricity. Millennia old codices are extremely rare, and they've survived either by dumb luck or because they were treasured. Maybe OP is a famed thinker, whose disciples will carefully preserve their notes; or their house is in a cave that will…
The current generation cannot bear the accumulated weight of all past generations. Loss and compression are inevitable.
99% of an individual's life experiences are lost when they pass. 99.99% of what's left moves from distinct memory to amalgamated collective experience within a generation.
Even for those of us who are blessed with loving friends and family, nearly everything will fade away. The adolescent me harbored mild delusions that history might care about my notes. The mature me is no longer burdened by those expectations, and my notes are better for only having a single audience.
Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain
#398I find his dismissal of iPad writing to be unconvincing. He talks about how we have calibrated our writing utensils over centuries to involve the proper amount of friction, and how that knowledge goes out the window when you're writing on an iPad. That may be true, but it's not like you can't just re-acclimate to the experience of writing on an iPad. Most people don't handwrite much, period, so if they start handwrit…
I went down the physical-writing-digital-capture system over a 10 month period. Bought the right stylus tips, the paper-like screen cover, etc.
Ultimately went back to my moleskine that fits in my back pants pocket and I don't have to worry about battery life.
Perhaps the biggest reason why my experiment failed was that I found it difficult to look back at digital written notes beyond a week. There is no physical flip...
Equally important though, I didn't retain information quite as well when writing against a screen. I can't explain it. I wanted the system to work, but it didn't. Maybe I tried to write too verbose, more carefully than I would a paper page... hoping my more careful writing would be captured by OCR better. I don't know but it was different. Intended focus matters.
Less effort = more retention to me. Digital writing, at least at that time, was more effort to me it seems
Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain
#399[dead]
Re: Writing by hand is good for your brain
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say this is a problem with the seller's communication, not the use of the book. If the seller didn't specify that the book was marked up, I agree with your sentiment. The act of writing in a book and selling it isn't the issue, but setting false expectations to whoever you're selling it to is. > and it's a shallow way of taking notes to begin with Are we really going to speak down to how someone uses a bunch of p…
My intention is less "talk down" and more "Socrates was right." Too much of note-taking is a ritualistic behavior that actually hinders understanding and retention. I think highlighting / circling / crossing out / etc is by far the worst, but margin notes are also bad. It is very frustrating the number of people who say "it's their property, they can do whatever they want" and similar comments, all of which are missi…
We don't even know if Socrates not writing his teachings was a principled stance to begin with, so "Socrates was right" is a shaky place to start your argument. Also "Socrates said writing is bad, so don't write in this piece of writing that you didn't force me to buy" is one of the weirdest pieces of circular logic I've ever come across.
Even if we take for granted that it was principled, it almost certainly wasn't pointed at marginalia. The argument (that Plato put in his mouth, through written text, no less) is that writing that substitutes for internal recollection can't answer back. It's an argument against outsourcing a thought to fixed text. A margin note is the opposite: it's the reader talking back to the text.
You have a personal preference about buying unmarked books, and you retreat to a Grand Unifying Socratic Theory whenever someone challenges it.
> it almost certainly harms their own understanding of the book
What? For all people who ever mark up a book in the margins or highlight passages? How could you possibly know that?
> they're doing something that is guaranteed to harm overall human knowledge
Also what? Human knowledge is necessarily a collaborative effort. Reading a text with another person's notes alongside it is just another way to engage with it. I'll maybe grant you highlighting since it's been shown to not help with retention all that much.
We have a deeper understanding of some of the most famous thinkers in history because we have books that they marked up to help us understand how they engaged with specific texts. This is invaluable for "overall human knowledge."
Herman Melville marked up his copies of Shakespeare's works and that shaped how scholars read Moby-Dick. Did he "harm overall human knowledge" by doing that?