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Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

andreasfragner.com

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Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#61

Post by rolisz »

jameshart wrote: post #42
MichaelNolan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> retaining lots of disconnected facts has never really been something I've needed to solve for. At in regards to Anki usage, the “disconnected facts” seem to be something that only students (high school/college) or people new to Anki do. These people are very much using Anki for a short term goal like passing a test or class. For that use case, “disconnected facts” works just fine. The people who use Anki (long term…

If I've looked at a concept enough to write cards attacking it from different angles... why would I need to see those cards again? At that point I know that concept.

One of my use cases is to memorize function names that I use about once a month - not often enough to memorize them from usage only, but frequently enough that the gains from not having to Google their name every time are worth it.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#62

Post by LorenDB »

charlie0 wrote: post #56
cout wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why obsidian?

Mainly because it's open source and has a ton of functionality. I can bring text docs, diagrams, spreadsheets, images, audio, and even video under one single pkm. Because it's an offline app, it doesnt have any of the drawbacks of the online proprietary solutions.

Obsidian is not open source. It's a widely held idea that is unfortunately false. Don't believe me? Try to find a repository for it. You can't.

It's a shame, because Obsidian is kinda neat software (although I'm not the note taking type myself).

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#64

Post by donutshop »

I disagree with this. Reading for the sake of summarizing takes the joy away from reading itself. I don't know anybody that'll read just because they want to read more books.

If I wanted to read summaries I would just read from Coles notes or Sparknotes, but both are essentially me just skimming headlines, and not getting to the juicy bits of the materials.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#65

Post by TheFreim »

travisporter wrote: post #50
wenc wrote: post #45

It’s not worth summarizing every book. I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name, and the takeaway is that the first reading of a book should be a quick one (table of contents, skimming, dipping into pages). Only after a book is shown to have promise are we then to engage in deep reading which not only involves summarizing but also syntopical reading, which is t…

This may be cultural but I just cannot bring myself write in a book even in pencil. post-its notes for me this is a great idea if I have the discipline

It may help to look at it this way:

A book you won't write in is a book that owns you, rather than you owning the book. A book is designed to convey information on the page, writing in your book only adds to and fulfills it's purpose.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#67

Post by jameshart »

jonsen wrote: post #41
jameshart wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a nonfiction novel?

Could be an autobiography.

An autobiography is not a novel, because it lacks the fundamental aspect of being fictional.

There is such a thing as an autobiographical novel, but that is not nonfiction.

Because novels are, by definition, works of fiction.

The closest thing to a ‘nonfiction novel’ is probably the historical novel, which is a fictionalized historical account… but I’m not sure why such a thing would particularly be suited to this summarization methodology.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#68

Post by cosou »

donutshop wrote: post #64

I disagree with this. Reading for the sake of summarizing takes the joy away from reading itself. I don't know anybody that'll read just because they want to read more books. If I wanted to read summaries I would just read from Coles notes or Sparknotes, but both are essentially me just skimming headlines, and not getting to the juicy bits of the materials.

I don't think that this author's point is that we read for the sake of summarizing, per se, but rather that the act of summarizing forces us to engage more thoughtfully with what we've just read. It's that engagement itself that enriches our understanding of the book. By all means enjoy what you're reading while you're reading it!

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#69

Post by rahimnathwani »

dmotz wrote: post #27

I built a tool for myself for the purpose of grokking ideas from books called Emdash [1]. Over the years I've collected reams of highlights from books and articles but until recently, rarely reviewed or absorbed them. The core of this app uses on-device ML to show related passages with similar ideas from other books you've read, and I find that going broad and exploring concepts from different angles really helps in…

I tried 'related' with a couple of passages. For the first passage, the first result was a good semantic match, but the rest were a little too far off. For the second passage, the results were amazing.

Perhaps for the first you just didn't have any more snippets that were closer?

Are the related snippets taken from a selection of snippets you created, or from the full text of other books?

A nice workflow might be to select a passage I'm reading in a book, and then see related passages from other books. But that requires I have DRM-free ebooks, and that these have already been chunked and indexed.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#70

Post by teodorlu »

No, don't summarize. Remix! Write about your own ideas!

Your mind is a living collection of your own ideas, and a history of their significance to your prior life. Not a dead library of pointers to other dead libraries.

Books are great. But you shoudn't outsource your brain. The learning happens when you think for yourself. Reading is good. Thinking about what you've read is even better. But don't stop with the summary! Go further. Apply it to your context. Try it, it's fun.

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