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A system to help you remember more of what you read

robertheaton.com

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Re: A system to help you remember more of what you read

#31

Post by knight17 »

larkeith wrote: post #14

While I agree that the author's method likely helps comprehension and retention, I disagree with his premise that it is necessary for these, or even particularly time-efficient. His key factor seems to be "Learning comes from repetition"; though important to he learning process, repetition is neither the sole, nor even the primary factor. When it comes to retention of concepts, rather than raw data, comprehension and…

The author mentions writing down a summary after every chapter in the book itself. The final notes are prepared from each chapter's annotations and handwritten summaries. If anyone is interested in reading to retain more, try How to Read a Book [1] by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler. Reviews and summaries of the boook [2, 3].

[1] : https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/...

[2] : https://fourminutebooks.com/how-to-read-a-book-summary/

[3] : http://oxfordtutorials.com/How%20to%20Read%20a%20Book%20Outl...

Re: A system to help you remember more of what you read

#32

Post by danial »

I only record facts that I read in non-fiction (the mark-as-Q method from the article). I highlight them in Kindle while reading ebooks. I then transfer them into Anki flashcards after I'm done reading it.

I don't highlight analysis and commentary. I don't highlight how the author reached a certain conclusion, just the end result.

Some examples of what I am highlighting while reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins:

"This is the neocortex, a thin sheet of neural tissue that envelops most of the older parts of the brain."

"the neocortex is about 2 millimeters thick and has six layers,"

"Stretched flat, the human neocortical sheet is roughly the size of a large dinner napkin. The cortical sheets of other mammals are smaller: the rat’s is the size of a postage stamp; the monkey’s is about the size of a business-letter envelope."

I wish there was a good way to transfer these highlights from my Kindle into Anki flashcards automatically (if someone knows a way to do this, I'm happy to hear from you). It feels like a chore right now, so I often forget to do it.

Re: A system to help you remember more of what you read

#33

Post by coldtea »

fantispug wrote: post #22

I don't want to remember more of what I read; I want to have access to a breadth and depth of ideas I can justify with evidence. Repetition and flashcards will help you remember the content, but it won't help you understand it. That's only done by actively engaging with the content and connecting it to and comparing it with other facts and ideas. The summarising, keeping lists of questions, and writeups will help you…

>I don't want to remember more of what I read; I want to have access to a breadth and depth of ideas I can justify with evidence.

That's bad, because without remembering you don't have the ability to quickly know where to look for those ideas and how to evaluate them. Nor do you know how to justify them with evidence (because that depends on remembering domain knowledge of evaluating, classifying and using the evidence itself).

Even if we assumed that you kept a working memory of "first principles" of every knowledge domain you're interested in, and only cared to search and evaluate ideas on demand, you'd still be at a disadvantage to anybody who remembered not just first principles but also higher level information about the knowledge domain -- and thus could skim through tons of BS or bad ideas and sources of information and quickly pick and evaluate only what's relevant.

Re: A system to help you remember more of what you read

#34

Post by repsak »

danial wrote: post #32

I only record facts that I read in non-fiction (the mark-as-Q method from the article). I highlight them in Kindle while reading ebooks. I then transfer them into Anki flashcards after I'm done reading it. I don't highlight analysis and commentary. I don't highlight how the author reached a certain conclusion, just the end result. Some examples of what I am highlighting while reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins:…

I don't own a kindle but it looks like it's possible to download your highlights.

You could then bulk import them, possibly after some minor formatting manually or with a script

https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#importing-text-fil...

You would still have to go trough them and add cloze delitions.

If it's possible to add notes to your highlights you might be able to specify delitions there and then parse them.

I might actually do this myself for fun :)

Re: A system to help you remember more of what you read

#35

Post by emilga »

danial wrote: post #32

I only record facts that I read in non-fiction (the mark-as-Q method from the article). I highlight them in Kindle while reading ebooks. I then transfer them into Anki flashcards after I'm done reading it. I don't highlight analysis and commentary. I don't highlight how the author reached a certain conclusion, just the end result. Some examples of what I am highlighting while reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins:…

Just a suggestion:

If you download Kindle Mate (kmate.me), you can import your Kindle highlights to your PC and export them as a text file. Then you could make a script that parses this file line by line and saves it as a csv-file. Then use Anki csv-import.

EDIT: fixed the link.

Re: A system to help you remember more of what you read

#36

Post by maaaats »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #16

I have a somewhat similar system but without writing anything in the book, because I use ebooks, and it's not quite as intensive. An example is here[0] but basically I keep notes on: Places Things Characters Plot Nothing too long and it's all filled in in a few seconds in an Evernote notebook/note as I read along. The main reason this is effective for me is that I can very quickly look up a character/place/plot in on…

Kindle has this as a feature called XRay. Can click a name for instance, and quickly see relevant info so far.

Re: A system to help you remember more of what you read

#37

Post by jseliger »

lucb1e wrote: post #28

Relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html > What use is it to read [hundreds of books in my life] if I remember so little from them? [...] > 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.

I use this method: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/06/30/how-i-remember-what-i-rea...

Re: A system to help you remember more of what you read

#38

Post by repsak »

QasimK wrote: post #15
repsak wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just skimmed the article but underlining only seemed to be one small part of the method. Understanding by summarizing into Anki cards and then making sure you remember it trough spaced repetition (both "output") seemed to be the most important part. Distributed learning, practice testing and Interleaved practice all seem to have some scientific backing.

What is distributed learning? Is it spaced repetition?

It just means distributing your learning trough time, so basically the opposite of cramming.

I guess spaced repetition can be seen as a combination of distributed learning and practice testing.

I got the terminology from here

http://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full

Here is a nice summary of the results

http://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/s...

Re: A system to help you remember more of what you read

#40

Post by danial »

repsak wrote: post #34
danial wrote: post #32

I only record facts that I read in non-fiction (the mark-as-Q method from the article). I highlight them in Kindle while reading ebooks. I then transfer them into Anki flashcards after I'm done reading it. I don't highlight analysis and commentary. I don't highlight how the author reached a certain conclusion, just the end result. Some examples of what I am highlighting while reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins:…

I don't own a kindle but it looks like it's possible to download your highlights. You could then bulk import them, possibly after some minor formatting manually or with a script https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#importing-text-fil... You would still have to go trough them and add cloze delitions. If it's possible to add notes to your highlights you might be able to specify delitions there and then parse them.…

That's right. Adding to Anki is more straightforward than downloading from Kindle.

There are two ways to download my Kindle highlights. Either I can scrape it from read.amazon.com, or I can mount the device as a usb disk and parse the notes file from there. Neither is ideal for set-and-forget automation.

Keep me posted on your progress if you decide to tackle this problem.

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