How You Know
paulgraham.com
How You Know
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Re: How You Know
#2This goes both ways.
Sometimes I avoid rereading books for the same reason. There was a Summer where Catcher in the Rye felt very important. I'd hate to reread it under my new, adult perspective. I'd prefer to let it linger in nostalgia.
Re: How You Know
#3"The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times. "
I also find that this rings true with movies as well.
Re: How You Know
#4I don't like the flavor of this post. It feels very much like navel-gazing and, if it wasn't for the domain name, it likely would have been lost to /newest.
Where is the knowledge here? That we don't have immediate recollection of retained information? Knowledge is based on a beginning and ending context.
Re: How You Know
#5This goes both ways. Sometimes I avoid rereading books for the same reason. There was a Summer where Catcher in the Rye felt very important. I'd hate to reread it under my new, adult perspective. I'd prefer to let it linger in nostalgia.
I had the same same thing with the much less erudite Stranger in a Strange Land. Re-read it 20 years later and was disappointed. On the positive side, I should consider how much I've moved forward in that time :) or sideways :-S
Re: How You Know
#6This goes both ways. Sometimes I avoid rereading books for the same reason. There was a Summer where Catcher in the Rye felt very important. I'd hate to reread it under my new, adult perspective. I'd prefer to let it linger in nostalgia.
The same thing happens to me with video games on a regular basis. Younger me simply had much lower expectations and poorer taste, back when a NES controller (with all of four buttons and a D-Pad) sufficed.
Re: How You Know
#7If you haven't seen it, S01E03 of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, deals exactly with what PG describes at the end of this post: technology that lets you review and relive your past. It's very much worth watching, and was recently added to Netflix's library:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/
http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&trkid=33258...
Re: How You Know
#8I remember reading something very similar to this (but can't remember where, ha), where it said the important thing about reading is how if affects your general thinking rather than the individual pieces of information that you're likely to remember (or not).
I spent several years reading a ton of different books on economics and I can recall very few facts from those books, but it did and has completely altered my world view of many things.
pg's analogy of a program where you've lost the source code doesn't feel quite right, because you can't make modifications to the program without the code. Some sort of machine learning model seems more appropriate, where you've lost the original training data but can still update the model later with fresh data (a new book), and end up with a better/different model, but then lose that training data again.
Re: How You Know
#9> Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of.
Hence the important art of keeping a journal. You can keep a transaction log of changes. The act of replaying the journal allows you to identify patterns in your thought processes and identify cognitive dissonances. The very act of reading should induce a reactive compulsion to write.
As Burroughs taught in his later creative writing courses -- in order to become a better writer one must first learn to read (I'm paraphrasing here).
Part of becoming a better thinker is learning how to think. In order to do that one must catch one's self in the act.
Re: How You Know
#10There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world.
I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten.