21–30 of 167 posts
If you really found the book useful, go write a summary after that conversation. It will be a much stronger summary and also way easier to write.
Well it really depends what your goals are, right? What kind of books are you reading, to what end? I personally struggle to think of any book I have engaged with which I got value out of, that could be meaningfully summarized in a couple of hours. The author was an expert on the subject and they only managed to summarize it down to a few hundred pages - if there was only a couple of pages worth of ideas in there pre…
Well it really depends what your goals are, right? What kind of books are you reading, to what end? I personally struggle to think of any book I have engaged with which I got value out of, that could be meaningfully summarized in a couple of hours. The author was an expert on the subject and they only managed to summarize it down to a few hundred pages - if there was only a couple of pages worth of ideas in there pre…
I’m at 47 books read this year so far and mostly disagree with the author of the article. When you find a book that’s worth summarizing, do it. But I get exposed to many more ideas (and find the ones worth thinking about more) simply by reading more. Also, I just like reading. My goal isn’t to have some kind of personal knowledge base to prove how much I’ve comprehended to myself.
If getting exposed to a lot of ideas is the goal then spending your life on this site and reddit would be the way to go.
When I've done them, I always feel like I benefit from reflective practices like these. Does anyone have tips for successfully building reflection into one's life? In the mean time I'll reflect on it.
I'm testing out a summarization/rephrase feature backed by LLMs that you can try in the demo. In HN fashion I'm trying to build this openly and gather feedback to see what works. I'd like to push this further in the active direction the article mentions with something like a Socratic dialogue mode where you're nudged to re-explain and examine ideas.
If anyone uses this thing/has feedback, let me know. Source is available too [2].
Strong agree from me, though what I do is less involved than the article. I normally just take a few per-chapter summary notes in an org-mode outline, in a filename that starts with the year I read the book. Recently I started creating my own topic index with pointers to which books I found certain insights in. I know I could generate such a thing automatically with tagging, but I enjoy manually curating my index.
When I've done them, I always feel like I benefit from reflective practices like these. Does anyone have tips for successfully building reflection into one's life? In the mean time I'll reflect on it.
Here is a sample one that I use to get out of work mindset: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r65gi7tk4str2h7/After%20Work%20Med...
Well it really depends what your goals are, right? What kind of books are you reading, to what end? I personally struggle to think of any book I have engaged with which I got value out of, that could be meaningfully summarized in a couple of hours. The author was an expert on the subject and they only managed to summarize it down to a few hundred pages - if there was only a couple of pages worth of ideas in there pre…
I feel like this works a lot better with a typical nonfiction novel, and not eg. a reference textbook.