11–20 of 58 posts
Spot on. Just another symptom of a quantity obsessed culture. It's telling that people ask how many books did you read this year and not what was the best book you read about (a question of quality, over quantity).
Don't get me wrong, most books are overly stuffed and could stand to be much shorter, but you aren't going to take much from 5 minutes of a summary alone. I'm convinced that it's not really a learning app as much as it is for puffery.
When new information is ingested, it "changes you", i.e. is having an effect on your views and thought processes. Sometimes subtle, sometimes profound. So I might not remember what a book was about, and upon re-reading I have this weird experience: it feels familiar, ideas were somehow already processed in my brain, but due to forgetting the content I feel like I already read this in a past life.
I forget the content of most books, articles, movies, etc., and I have to constantly remind myself that not remembering it is not a bad thing, is not a failure, and it was not useless. It's like my brain RAM + cache are large, but short lived, but the permanent storage is small, too abstract and incompatible with the raw data content.
If I have no real life problem to solve and only read the book because I like the topic or want to learn from it for my future I only remember the broad concepts. But nevertheless, at least you know what's in that book and if you encounter a problem in the future you can revisit the book again.
Spot on. Just another symptom of a quantity obsessed culture. It's telling that people ask how many books did you read this year and not what was the best book you read about (a question of quality, over quantity).
It's how you end up with Blinkist. Don't get me wrong, most books are overly stuffed and could stand to be much shorter, but you aren't going to take much from 5 minutes of a summary alone. I'm convinced that it's not really a learning app as much as it is for puffery.
Spot on. Just another symptom of a quantity obsessed culture. It's telling that people ask how many books did you read this year and not what was the best book you read about (a question of quality, over quantity).
I used to take endless notes on .org documents and build myself small wiki sites in django... You know what makes the difference? Take a walk, or catch a train and think about what you read. Find the main ideas and how the material relates to yourself. Play with it and ask yourself questions about it. Then next day try to answer them in paper without extra material. And only after that reread the book to check or fin…
I assume you meant hard and fun, and this is something I believe is the issue in adult life, things are unnecessarily hard when they could and should be hard AND fun
engagement, quality, innovation might rise by a lot if we focused jobs around that
I take an issue with this assumption. When I leaf through my past notes, highlights—hell, even stuff I have written myself—I am surprised at many relevant things that I completely forgot about. It's true forgetting is a filter, but one mustn't underestimate the brain's capacity to forget useful stuff too. Maybe it's something you didn't need in a while, and need it now. Maybe it has become more relevant than it was in the past. For eg, I have restarted journaling recently, and this highlight from "On Writing Well", immediately hit me:
> “Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. … Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past.
It's written for a different context, but it made me realize a different way to approach my journaling.
However, I agree wanting to retain everything is needlessly ambitious, and counter-productive. I was once obsessed with making notes about everything I read, but soon, I realized how unenjoyable it was making my reading. The better approach, I found, is to just make highlights. And go over them once in a while (a few months or so). That's enough of a knowledge-retention system for me.
> The first reason for this is that forgetting is a filter. When something you read resonates with you sufficiently for you to recall it without effort, that means something; it means it connects with your ideas and experiences in some relevant way. I take an issue with this assumption. When I leaf through my past notes, highlights—hell, even stuff I have written myself—I am surprised at many relevant things that I c…
Perhaps the true (meta)rational perspective is to actually understand how to embrace the larger complexity of human experience (including sensibility/creativity/play...). Maybe the real willpower is to stop obsessing over this limited viewpoint (and the fears it produces) all the time.