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The Need to Read

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Need to Read

#161

Post by duckmysick »

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…

> Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and if it sounds awkward (or not like me) then I just delete it and write it again from scratch. Oftentimes it helps to just close my eyes, say what I want to out loud, then write down what I just said.

This does sound like editing to me (in a good way). Unless you meant something else when you wrote that school taught you to focus overtly on the editing stage.

Re: The Need to Read

#162

Post by xboxnolifes »

Silverback_VII wrote: post #158
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...

The goal isn't for someone to read it. We just covered that. The goal is more writing, less reading.

Re: The Need to Read

#163

Post by 2devnull »

PowerPoint is better. Removes a lot of bike shedding over “turn of phrase” and sounding smart, writing good, etc.

Also, more multimedia, better aligned with current communications tech, and designed specifically with the intention of presenting thoughts, persuasion, non-fiction. Books are great, but not optimized for today’s world.

Re: The Need to Read

#164

Post by IntFee588 »

I think it's a tradeoff. As a comparison, I like learning about coding and software architecture through videos and other online resources. The field is so vast that looking at other peoples' code is the easiest way to absorb the broadest amount of material. However, eventually, actually sitting down and writing original software is key to achieving true expertise. I suspect reading & writing follows a similar pattern.

Re: The Need to Read

#165

Post by arcturus17 »

zktrust wrote: post #81
arcturus17 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now But enough to fill a single person's lifetime regardless? So whether you take Shakespeare or Murakami, their individual perspectives are not that different since either of them could have filled their lifetimes with reading. > The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now The burden of proof remains on you. You need to f…

the last point was for a different thread but as u see platform has been making sure i cant respond in timely fashion to all threads. I sequeezed it in there. > The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell. I think it's fair to say that we don't actually know…

Sorry for calling you dishonest; you do not seem so.

Re: The Need to Read

#166

Post by kragen »

akkartik wrote: post #145
kragen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

posting to hn has its disadvantages most of the interactions you get are people trying to prove you wrong this is great when it's with evidence, but half the time instead they accuse you of lying, argue from their own authority, or insult you the options for including equations, data tables, and diagrams are very limited, and these are important when what you're thinking about is objectively falsifiable propositions…

You are already so prolific outside HN, have you considered collecting your HN comments in your own space? Once I started doing this I found HN comments would grow off HN. Now there are a few subjects where I can just point people at a link the next time a subject comes up. And the link has often grown out of repeated iterations of debate on HN and elsewhere. It doesn't bother me that people forget HN comments. I don…

oh thanks

i did edit some hn comments into dercuano, derctuo, and dernocua

which comments of mine here do you think would be worth saving

Re: The Need to Read

#167

Post by dirtyid »

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…

Yes, for me reading can be replaced and optimized by listening text to speech at speeds at faster than my typical reading. Writing still essentialto retain and formalize ideas. Listening doesn't fully replace reading, still need to go back to text to revist ideas when writing, but listening, at least for me, incentivizes approaching new content in first place.

Re: The Need to Read

#168

Post by clolege »

duckmysick wrote: post #161
clolege wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and if it sounds awkward (or not like me) then I just delete it and write it again from scratch. Oftentimes it helps to just close my eyes, say what I want to out loud, then write down what I just said. This does sound like editing to me (in a good way). Unless you meant something else when you wrote that school taught you to focus overtly on the editing stage.

Now that you mention it, my old style of editing might have been something that I learned, rather than was explicitly taught.

I used to frame writing as a painful activity, so once I had a "workable" rough draft, I would break out a scalpel and try to make it readable with word surgery. I would spend hours staring at the same few paragraphs, and it was horrible.

Now I just delete it. It feels like a clean slate, but the slate in my brain has made opinions about what's important to say and how to say it better.

The two approaches exercise completely different muscles, and what I like about the "rewrite" approach is that it exercises some of the same muscles that will help me communicate myself properly on the first try.

Re: The Need to Read

#169

Post by npunt »

Kaibeezy wrote: post #78
npunt wrote: post #13

There’s much more to the story than writing is a way of thinking, and reading is a big input into writing. Specifically, how each interplay with ideas, as most of us after all are in the business of creating things. And here, the most important bit is not reading, its curiosity. Curiosity about others’ ideas drives reading, curiosity about one’s own ideas drives writing. The time we spend chasing each type of curiosi…

Wild guess… Schopenhauer, Einstein, et al, were referring to their peers and associates, many sigmas out on the curve. I’m imagining a sensor of the larger sample reaching the “reading limit”; it would make a neutrino detector look like fireworks at a disco.

The quotes are for the most part about ideas and creativity being stifled by reading, and this can happen to anyone - it's related to the curse of knowledge and the preservation of the beginner's mind.

Reading others' ideas, especially polished ones with a lot of authority behind them, can act as a filter on one's own (delicate, barely formed) ideas. Ideas already have a difficult path into reality, and others' biases and filters are one major contributor.

I regularly choose not to read on a given subject if I have an idea I want to explore or to clarify my own thinking, and only afterwards do I consult what others have said. Usually I wind up in the same place (or a crude version of that) but sometimes I find a new insight and those are worth it!

Re: The Need to Read

#170

Post by eligro91 »

A suggestion for those who do not have time to write: record yourself.

use the time when you commute, when driving, when walking the dogs, cleaning, or anything ritual you're doing on daily basis. just tap the recorder in your phone and start talking about topics that bothers your mind during the day.

I'm maintaining a recording diary, and I'm talking about everything. It's helping me to be more confident on some ideas I want to share with others, to be more prepared to arguments with my wife, and to understand better myself - what I'm thinking about situations, why I'm doing things that I don't like and what I can do about that.

You can as well use it as retrospective analysis. we won't remember 99.9% of the things we did in our life. those recordings can help you in few years, you can extract the data from them and have a easy way to listen / read things you've said 1-2 years ago on some topics and see how you've evolved since then.

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