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1. Map it to your life or people or situations somewhere..
2. Explain it to yourself..
But I usually don't read books about my core areas, I like to learn about them practically and by facing things. Someone else's experience about it would bias my mind.
Basically, when you take notes, summarize them in your own words. Look at a tool like Obsidian which uses markdown to save notes in plaintext. Look at people using this on YouTube if you want to dive deeper into the ecosystem.
* https://www.google.com/search?q=smart+notes+ahrens+site:news...
Not sure if Anki counts as fancy, but it certainly is orders of magnitude more efficient than taking notes or active reading. See also: Make It Stick [1]. If you're trying to memorize content spaced repetition is unmatched. I've durably memorized entire 300-page programming design books (e.g. Effective Java) in under a month of 30 min/day reading+Anki usage.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18770267-make-it-stick
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do this too using my remarkable (reader tablet )and then scripts that export highlights / notes which I then index for as plaintext - it makes this process much more seamless.
I’ve heard that the Remarkable does not function well as a reader. Is that true?
Where did you hear that?
It's similar to the sentiment that the only way to understand a poem is to be able to recite it from memory, or the fact that some pianists play nothing else but Bach and yet reach mastery. Everything's already in there, or most of it anyway.
Requires a different mentality, one that treats reading or perception and deep study as the thing to care about, not 'absorbing information' or 'knowledge'.
Umberto Eco once pointed out that the size of the unknown, the books one has not read are magnitudes larger than the books one has read, so to treat knowledge as some sort of priced possession to climb in the pecking order is meaningless, what matters is being adequate in understanding the few things one actually has the time to study.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I misinterpreted that entirely
I'm pretty sure what they mean is "No idea could be further from the truth than the idea that consuming information is the same thing as acquiring knowledge". In which case, unless I misunderstand badly Koshkin's implied criticism of charles_f is entirely unfair. Koshkin, if in fact you think that what OP means is "Actually, consuming information is the same thing as acquiring knowledge", why do you think that?
For me taking notes is a big part of it. For scientific papers reading the cites and then re-reading the paper helps cement things. For fiction I just seem to remember them and that makes re-reading kind of irritating/boring so not as keen on re-reading those.
But as the article touches on, for me it is the "why" sometimes that is key. Mathematics rarely sticks in my head unless I have a specific application for which the math is useful.
I bought a reMarkable 2 earlier this year and have loved it. I have a notebook per subject and I can append to each without carrying multiple paper notebooks or getting upset by the lack of organization in a single commonplace notebook.
If you like paper but hate disorganization, and have the disposable income, give it or another eInk tablet a try.