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Read to forget

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Re: Read to forget

#41

Post by tombert »

sevensor wrote: post #40
tombert wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read papers depth-first recursively. I read the abstract and see how much I understand. If there's a lot of stuff I don't understand, I hop down to the references, find one of those papers, and try again. I do this until I get to a paper I more or less understand and bubble upwards. I take pretty aggressive notes in Obsidian for each paper [1], which carries the benefit of being able to MediaWiki-tag definitions as…

I read the abstract and skim the intro before committing to a read. The authors have to convince me that they know the field, they think they’ve done something interesting, and I think what they’ve done is plausible. If it passes that bar, I assume the most adversarial possible mindset and look for holes in their methods. If their methods are junk, I may skim the conclusion just to see what kind of unfounded nonsense…

I tend to work in more theory-heavy CS (at least when I'm reading papers), so sometimes even the abstract is obscured by lots of scary terminology, so if I want to understand even the basics, I need to do it recursively.

Re: Read to forget

#42

Post by jagged-chisel »

tonyarkles wrote: post #37
skinkestek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot remember all the naughty movies I have seen even though they made me ...... Exactly.

Honestly, I actually take OP’s somewhat flippant remark as a very real counterpoint to both the article and to the Emerson quote: be careful what you consume, lest you become it. I have met people whose core sexuality is obviously shaped by porn, I’ve met people who eat unhealthy food every day and are surprised that they’re unhealthy, and I’ve met people who read/watch a ton of useless shit and it subconsciously or…

As long as you’re taking an active role in considering your intellectual intake, it’s all taking a role in shaping you.

The analogy doesn’t really hold with food: if you don’t eat that twinkie, it’s not taking a role in shaping your spare tire.

Re: Read to forget

#44

Post by blueridge »

We See from the Periphery, Not the Center: Reflections on Literature in an Age of Crisis, Alfred Kazin:

"How in 1977 can any great book help me to live better, I who am a creature of anxiety, involved against my will in all twentieth-century injustices and cruelties? How can Kafka relieve me of guilt, he who knew as a Jew even before the Nazis murdered his sisters, since powerlessness is a crime that invites exploitation, that "not the murderer but the victim is considered guilty"? How can Proust, who died to the world in order to live again through his great book retracing the past-how can he relieve me of my dread of death, when I can no longer accept the next world, the world of imagination, promised to me by his last-minute discovery of art in the volume Time Recaptured? But these are rhetorical questions whose emptiness I do not wish to conceal.

Because no book has enabled anyone to live better. The influence of any book on my consciousness is necessarily intermittent, a flash, a hope, an illusion, a picture. No more than any other external agent can a book effect a transformation that lasts.

What a great literary work does do for me is to clear my mind, to rearrange the order of my thinking, to show me, in the immortal words of Porgy and Bess, that "it ain't necessarily so." The real power of a literary work consists in presenting us with alternatives. If the work is emotionally effective enough, it can be an antidote to our usual mental confinement. It is the vision of another mind, another way of thinking, not a lasting way out."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40133281

Re: Read to forget

#45

Post by gabriel666smith »

tonyarkles wrote: post #37
skinkestek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot remember all the naughty movies I have seen even though they made me ...... Exactly.

Honestly, I actually take OP’s somewhat flippant remark as a very real counterpoint to both the article and to the Emerson quote: be careful what you consume, lest you become it. I have met people whose core sexuality is obviously shaped by porn, I’ve met people who eat unhealthy food every day and are surprised that they’re unhealthy, and I’ve met people who read/watch a ton of useless shit and it subconsciously or…

[flagged]

Re: Read to forget

#46

Post by notcodingtoday »

This is a good approach to take when assisted with building knowledge base (with your choice of retrieval system, ex. LLMs). 'Train' your brain like the article suggests, defer mental load to another system.

Re: Read to forget

#47

Post by gcanyon »

I've long thought that most "opinion" books -- self-help, historical analysis, scientific commentary, policy-recommendations etc. -- are 3-5% the actual point they want you to take away, and 95-97% of the material is the anecdotes/cites they use to try to convince you they're right.

Agreeing with the article, you don't need to remember the justification nearly as much as you do the bare facts. Except: in the future, remembering some of the anecdotes helps you remember why you believe what you (now) believe in the first place. It also helps you convince other people of the rightness of the ideas.

Re: Read to forget

#48

Post by manwe150 »

tombert wrote: post #31
kenanfyi wrote: post #30

This does not sound realistic for work in academia or technical stuff. In fact there are some techniques to read a technical paper. I never read a paper just once an move on. An abstract says a lot if a paper worths reading and after that I skim that quickly. Then I skim again more deeper a day or so later. Only after that I read it throughly and take notes. On taking notes/highlighting I agree with the author. A gen…

I read papers depth-first recursively. I read the abstract and see how much I understand. If there's a lot of stuff I don't understand, I hop down to the references, find one of those papers, and try again. I do this until I get to a paper I more or less understand and bubble upwards. I take pretty aggressive notes in Obsidian for each paper [1], which carries the benefit of being able to MediaWiki-tag definitions as…

I don’t highlight often, but when I do it is for the same reason I take notes. I never refer back to either one. But they focus my mind to stay on track so it cannot wander as much, in the moment, and prompts me to immediately reflect on or quickly reread what I think might be important or interesting.

Re: Read to forget

#49

Post by sbinnee »

tombert wrote: post #31
kenanfyi wrote: post #30

This does not sound realistic for work in academia or technical stuff. In fact there are some techniques to read a technical paper. I never read a paper just once an move on. An abstract says a lot if a paper worths reading and after that I skim that quickly. Then I skim again more deeper a day or so later. Only after that I read it throughly and take notes. On taking notes/highlighting I agree with the author. A gen…

I read papers depth-first recursively. I read the abstract and see how much I understand. If there's a lot of stuff I don't understand, I hop down to the references, find one of those papers, and try again. I do this until I get to a paper I more or less understand and bubble upwards. I take pretty aggressive notes in Obsidian for each paper [1], which carries the benefit of being able to MediaWiki-tag definitions as…

Hopping to the references right away doesn’t work for me. I prefer just going through the whole paper once and coming back. To me it’s analogous to reading a book in a language not familiar to me. You read it lengthy chuck of texts even though you come across words you don’t know. Then you can find the meaning of words and read the texts again for better understanding . This way I think is more helpful to grasp the whole topic and intention of texts faster.

Re: Read to forget

#50

Post by neilv »

kenanfyi wrote: post #30

This does not sound realistic for work in academia or technical stuff. In fact there are some techniques to read a technical paper. I never read a paper just once an move on. An abstract says a lot if a paper worths reading and after that I skim that quickly. Then I skim again more deeper a day or so later. Only after that I read it throughly and take notes. On taking notes/highlighting I agree with the author. A gen…

> A general behavior I observe in colleagues or co-workers is that they highlight half of a paper, but they never do anything with that highlights.

They might be using this exercise to help them focus and absorb what's important on their first pass of reading -- they might not expect anyone to ever use their highlights.

People will have been taught different techniques, and adapted their own.

I never got into highlighters. We were taught to keep our books unmarked, for the next year to reuse them, or for resale value.

In grad school, I was told paper-reading techniques closer to what you describe.

(Skim abstract, decide whether to keep reading, skim results/conclusions, decide whether to keep reading, look at citations, cynical joke about citation politics, decide whether to keep reading, then some order of skimming introduction and related work and other parts that I don't recall because I didn't follow that guidance, and then eventually you might give the whole thing a close read.)

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