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The Need to Read

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Need to Read

#151

Post by byteflip »

clolege wrote: post #150
byteflip wrote: post #142

I’ve always been quite mediocre at reading and writing. This has been confirmed by my grades over the years. Just this week, I’ve been writing a script for a YouTube video and it is difficult for me. Organizing my thoughts and making it “seamless” is a lot of work. In my software job I usually default to bullet points for technical writing — which I feel is a cop out. I had decided before reading this article that I…

I've also been trying to improve my writing recently. What's helped me was to read through a couple of resources on how to write better [0,1,2], and then: 1. Apply the better writing advice to my everyday speech 2. Focus on writing down exactly what I wanted to say, and how I would have said it School taught me to be super wordy and focus overly on the editing stage. Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and i…

Nice tips and resources thanks!

Re: The Need to Read

#152

Post by sasha_fishter »

breck wrote: post #108

I highly recommend the book "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler. I've been rereading it every few years since it changed my life in high school (turned me into a lifelong autodidact).

I've seen this popping up every now and then. I just put it on my wishlist for next order...

Re: The Need to Read

#153

Post by layer8 »

> A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

Exactly the same is true for coding.

Re: The Need to Read

#154

Post by clolege »

> You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.

I find it hilarious that pg chose to use two double negatives to get across this point.

Double negatives sound profound, but they use more contextual overhead to convey less information than their positive counterparts. pg is a much better writer than me, but I think it would be more accurate (and stick better) if it instead was just:

Your reading limits your writing, and your writing limits your thinking.

Re: The Need to Read

#155

Post by abledantheman »

exhaze wrote: post #139
balaji1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weatherford, in his Genghis Khan book, says there isn't much surviving text about that period and region. But whar sources he uses in that book are all by "chroniclers" of that era - my understanding is that the chroniclers are average reporters of that period, with a decent patronage; just documenting things on paper as they hear/research/study it; without the intention of publishing for widespread readership. So he…

> average reporters of that period, with a decent patronage; just documenting things on paper as they hear/research/study it; without the intention of publishing for widespread readership. We don’t really have that anymore though right? The current internet is economy strongly incentivizes people to write things in favor of engagement. Sometimes this aligns with ground truth (e.g. Gergely Orosz, who has documented Mu…

> Who is supposed to be the historical record keeper, at this time, when trust in record keepers is at an all time low?

All of us.

I don't think we need to get hung up on 'who', not really. I mean with regard to historical sources, how we do know that these were always 'true' reporting and not (deliberately or otherwise) untrustworthy, at best misunderstood, by whoever wrote them because they may have not had all the informarion or reporting second/third hand or an agenda.

Sometimes it isn't necessarily what is written as much as it is who wrote it and when and under what circumstances.

Re: The Need to Read

#156

Post by wskish »

wskish wrote: post #5

Here is the output of GPT reading and summarizing this (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363 ). Model seems to be hallucinating the author. Any thoughts on how to improve it? "The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has be…

I tweaked the GPT prompt to include the domain name from the story url as additional context. That fixes this one and a few other problematic ones. Here is a typical summary of this story now:

"This is an essay written by Paul Graham in November of 2022. In it, he talks about how reading is necessary not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning to write well. He argues that there is no substitute for reading, and that people who want to have ideas need to be good at reading."

Re: The Need to Read

#157

Post by duckmysick »

amelius wrote: post #110
antirez wrote: post #55

Many of us are programmers. Some of us are also trying to be writers. Trust me: writing is like programming. Reading code is very useful to become a better programmer, but you learn programming mostly by writing code. Similarly you mostly learn how to write prose by writing prose, tons of it. Reading is especially useful if you identify certain books that are very high in style (for me one of such books was "Vite di…

Personally waiting for the day when you can layout your thoughts in a bulletpoint list, and GPT-3/4/5 turns it into a coherent and pleasant to read whole.

If you don't want to wait, you can get someone on fiverr to do it for you.

Re: The Need to Read

#158

Post by Silverback_VII »

personjerry wrote: post #26

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing . And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to wr…

>Start a blog!

but do not expect someone to read it! because with GTP-3 automated content creation I'm increasingly less interested in everything which will be or is already heavily affected by it i.e. News articles, blogs and new books...

Re: The Need to Read

#159

Post by [deleted] »

mck- wrote: post #148
personjerry wrote: post #26

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing . And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to wr…

If blogging is like a webpage, then a Zettelkasten is like a Wikipedia for your brains. Inspired by a thread on HN ~2 years ago, I’ve now written 1,075 interconnected notes, and no longer feel that I forget 80% of any non-fiction book I read. Linking is key; it allows you to connect any new insight to your existing externalized knowledge base, resulting in deeper understanding and retention. It also creates the space…

[deleted]

Re: The Need to Read

#160

Post by thoughtpeddler »

For two decades I've been a heavy "event-driven journaler" (i.e. I journal when events occur in my life that I need to think through by writing, vs. journaling as a routine daily practice).

This has been an immensely helpful way to structure my thinking, in the way PG writes about. It also develops a record of thoughts that I refer back to and reflect on. It's driven my personal growth, and helped me uncover personal blindspots.

In more recent times, life is busier, and journaling the way I used to is harder to make time for. (Either that, or the Day One app just isn't doing it for me anymore, I'm not sure.)

Instead, I've started to use the voice memos app to voice dictate my thoughts, as if I'm being interviewed on a podcast. My tone is that of an interviewee, providing their answer, sharing their reasoning on a topic, debating the pros and cons, and arriving at a conclusion.

I use this format for both personal matters or thoughts related to professional endeavors. It's really working for me. It's a higher velocity way to get my thoughts out, yet still keep them structured. Thanks to increased playback speeds, I can go through my past thoughts more easily too. I highly recommend more people try this, especially if writing/typing it out seems like a chore.

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