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How You Know

paulgraham.com

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Re: How You Know

#121

Post by japhyr »

One of the most significant books I ever read was A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. He graduated college in the 70's, wasn't sure what to do, and decide to walk from New York to the Pacific ocean. This book covered the first half of the walk; he wrote it while taking a break in Louisiana along the way.

That book was hugely influential to me. I graduated college and spent two years teaching. The summer after my second year of teaching, I had no obligations to anyone else for the first time in my life. I remembered Peter Jenkins' story, and decided to bicycle across the US. I knew I wanted to travel under my own power as he had done, but I wanted to go a little faster than he did. Bicycling was perfect for me. I ended up doing two cross-country trips over successive summers, and then I spent a year living on my bicycle, circumnavigating North America.

I reread A Walk Across America some years after doing my own trips. I was amazed at how bad I thought the book was. pg observes that

The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life.

This is absolutely true. Now that I'm in my 40's, I'm going to go back and reread the most influential books of my 20's. I might even have to change my HN username after doing so, but I hope not.

Re: How You Know

#122

Post by jordanbrown »

"Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why." -- love this

Re: How You Know

#123

Post by scobar »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #19
nilkn wrote: post #10

There'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…

This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot…

"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."

For me, this quote was the most powerful. I strongly and immediately agreed, yet I hadn't consciously considered the idea before. I now ask myself the question, "Which ones were the important books?" Some seem obvious, but I may have a deeply rooted worldview established a long time ago that needs to be reevaluated. I may have read books that added support to that worldview, and have since forgotten from where that support came.

I'm not very well read yet, but I have a question for those of you who are. What are some methods you utilize to remember which books are the important ones?

Edit: The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753656 contains a great idea. I agree that taking notes and writing a journal can be great solutions, but I don't often read the notes and entries I've written. A personal wiki that is searchable and contains references seems very interesting.

Re: How You Know

#124

Post by programmarchy »

nilkn wrote: post #10

There'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…

This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles. Before adding anything to your model, it should be filtered through proper logic. This makes it easier to build stable models without contradiction in the first place, and also makes it easier to follow a chain of reasoning about a complex viewpoint back to first principles. "Philosophizing in midstream" leads to incoherent thought with unchecked premises.

The method of loci, for building/encoding hierarchical "memory palaces", works well for remembering key ideas or facts and building upon them to compose your models. Also, using software like "The Brain" [1] and other mind mapping tools are useful aids for organizing information so you can easily go back to remember.

[1] http://www.thebrain.com

Re: How You Know

#125

Post by DenisM »

proveanegative wrote: post #55

>Reading and experience train your model of the world. This sounds convincing but then an argument against reading fiction follows since fiction trains your model of the world with fake data.

Learning is not limited to events, it also includes approaches, backgrounds, attitudes. Those are all reusable. But yeah, if you read a "fact" one too many time you will take it to granted despite fictitious provenance. There is danger in that.

Re: How You Know

#126

Post by sixdimensional »

WalterBright wrote: post #96

I have an interesting take on this. Most of the books I've read, I have a copy of. A while back, I endeavored to cut, scan and OCR them all into my computer. One idea was then I could do a full-text search, limited to what I've already read rather than what google thinks is relevant. So far, I've found it very handy to find something if I at least remember which book it was in. But I need a program that can extract t…

This is a great idea. Full-text search for "my knowledgebase", books I've read, thing's I've written, etc. is an area with potential that still seems unfulfilled.

Some ideas: - Apache PDFBox https://pdfbox.apache.org/ - command line: https://pdfbox.apache.org/commandline/#extractText - XPDF has a command line tool you can use in Windows - http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ - pdftotext - If you're going for accuracy, Tesseract is one of the most accurate https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ - Apache Tika is often used the way you suggest: http://tika.apache.org/

Re: How You Know

#127

Post by arasmussen »

I don't like the use of the word "compiled". It's more like a program that modifies it's source at runtime. This reminds me of how JavaScript used to be simply interpreted but now with V8 (and friends) the hottest paths are optimized at runtime so that the result is more performant than any compilation because you have more information than you do statically.

Re: How You Know

#128

Post by sillysaurus3 »

scobar wrote: post #123
arjunnarayan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot…

"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." For me, this quote was the most powerful. I strongly and immediately agreed, yet I hadn't consciously considered the idea before. I now ask myself the question, "Which ones were the important books?" Some seem obvious, but I may have a deeply rooted worldview estab…

What types of books are important to you?

Re: How You Know

#129

Post by Pyret »

chubot wrote: post #23
agentultra wrote: post #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 orde…

I'm definitely a fan of taking notes on things you've read (among other things, the effort to write notes makes you choose what you read more carefully). And I agree that it will help you remember the sources for various ideas. But I think a journal is the wrong model (i.e. time ordered entries, either electronic or paper). I have used a paper notebook in the past, but I would rarely go back and look at things, and i…

I use Anki to remember and memorize the written info. Pretty effective.

Re: How You Know

#130

Post by ejstembler »

Having read Carl Sagan's Cosmos in my youth, I always feel guilty re-reading a book:

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

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