"I Was wrong About Snake Oil"
I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
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Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#72I read extremely slowly compared to most, but seem to come up with more insights as well as debunkings.
A relative of mine is a natural born speed reader. She can read several 500+ page dense works a day. This is suggested to be impossible. I've personally tested her on her recall after having her quickly digest a work she's never seen before. She has perfect recall and can tell me what page a given passage appeared on, and recall from memory what comes next.
It's a savant ability. Probably less than 1 in a million, or perhaps billion.
She can't do anything with the ability. It's useless to her practically. She works minimum wage jobs, is married to an unemployed guy, and is always poor. She doesn't have any marketable talents. She continues to read huge amounts of material when she can find it. She long ago read all of the books in her small town library's fiction section. Discussing a topic she can cite references to it as if she is a search engine, but like the search engine, she doesn't have any insights into what any of it means.
I've suggested to her she try to market the ability, do a tour and show off. But she hates attention and craves nothing more than a quite reclusive life free from other people. Being publicly acknowledged as a freak would be the worst possible outcome for her, as far as she is concerned.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#73The recommendations for more effective reading largely match those in Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book , particularly chapters 2 (The Second Level of Reading: Inspectional Reading) and 7 (How to X-Ray a Book). Both address how to rapidly determine a book's structure . More generally, Adler suggests approaching reading with intent , that is, what are your goals in reading a book, often corresponding to the type of…
I am a huge Mortimer Adler fan, do you have any other recommendations in the same vein? You might also like the books by https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~zbyszek/
Just got done reading Adler's How to Read a Book a few days ago.
Recommend: Ward Farnsworth.
Apparently some law school dean who has written some books on law, none of which I have read. I personally just picture him more as a classicist.
His grasp on English writing knocks me off my feet. It is seriously something to behold.
His book on explaining chess tactics (also available online free[0]) is an absolutely amazing display of effective communication in writing.
In another writing style, he has three books[1][2][3] and apparently an upcoming fourth[4] where he presents an idea/concept, cites meaningful examples in the wild of their use, and provides his own commentary to touch up on his chosen topics. They make for delightful reading.
[0]: chesstactics.org [1]: Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric [2]: Farnsworth's Classical English Metaphor [3]: The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual [4]: Farnsworth's Classical English Style
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a huge Mortimer Adler fan, do you have any other recommendations in the same vein? You might also like the books by https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~zbyszek/
Just got done reading Adler's How to Read a Book a few days ago. Recommend: Ward Farnsworth. Apparently some law school dean who has written some books on law, none of which I have read. I personally just picture him more as a classicist. His grasp on English writing knocks me off my feet. It is seriously something to behold. His book on explaining chess tactics (also available online free[0]) is an absolutely amazin…
I also like to read some Mary Beard blogs/articles from time to time.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#75I practice what could be called "speed listening" -- listening to audiobooks and podcasts (and watching videos) at 2x to 3x speed. It saves a lot of time, and I only wish I'd started sooner.
I suspect this has a higher mental cost, leading to physical fatigue and slowed cognition later. We know chess players burn huge amounts of calories from thinking. IOW, there's no free lunch.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#76Reading speed strikes me similarly to typing speed when it comes to programming. It's fun to read/type fast, but it's not really the bottleneck.
The best way to speed read is if the writer reduces the number of words required to communicate and educate. Of course this takes extra effort, and is also goes against human perception of value. E.g. if you reduced Tim Ferris's book to a single sheet of A4 you could get the point across, but who's going to pay $20 or so for a sheet of A4? Well some execs might pay $2000 - but you won't sell millions of copies like t…
One way to verify your thesis is to read summary books. If they do it diligently and industriously, all books will look alike and contain just common senses. Like Blinkists ;)
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#77I took a speed reading course one summer when I was in college. My mother thought that it would give me an edge. First they test you and my reading speed was already on the high end of normal. In the course I did theoretically more than double my reading speed. But my comprehension was based on the test they gave me. Plus I noticed that I tired quickly doing speed reading. I was a kid who loved to read and had no pro…
This article feels like a vindication of sorts, for my own speed reading experience. Years ago, I read a book on speed reading, and just as we think everything that is in a book must be written by an expert, starting adopting the techniques without second guessing it. Blamed myself for not being smart enough for loosing comprehension when these techniques have obviously worked for everyone else. Reading this is somewhat liberating.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've worked with some programmers who were so slow at typing I would find myself reluctant to help them with their "hands on" work, like directing them to try something in the REPL for example, or even just asking them to run a shell command. It was a struggle for me not to excuse myself as soon as possible once they started typing. They seemingly couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hu…
> couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hunt down other places in the code so they could copy paste that 6 character variable name The latter seems a good strategy for coping with the former, does it not?
A far better solution would be setting up their IDE to have autocomplete enabled, no time searching for variables, as they come up with the first few letters entered.
The search and copy suggests method they're not using their tools to their best extent.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#79Reading speed strikes me similarly to typing speed when it comes to programming. It's fun to read/type fast, but it's not really the bottleneck.
I've worked with some programmers who were so slow at typing I would find myself reluctant to help them with their "hands on" work, like directing them to try something in the REPL for example, or even just asking them to run a shell command. It was a struggle for me not to excuse myself as soon as possible once they started typing. They seemingly couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hu…
One of the best courses I ever took was a 2 week summer school class in typing in the 8th grade. We were taught to touch type on a heavy mechanical typewriter where you really had to hammer the keys.
Those few hours have paid off enormously for me. Not having to look at the keys while typing about doubles the speed. The letters painted on my keys have long since worn off anyway :-)
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? I didn't know how to pronounce many of the words when learning English, yet I knew what they meant. I did make up my own pronunciation, if that's what you mean.
As a native English speaker who read a lot as a kid, there are many words I've found as I got older that I was pronouncing entirely incorrectly. So I think this is quite common (I know several others like this)
Yes very common among people considered "bookworms" as children. Learning vocabulary through reading not hearing. Can sometimes be embarrassing but it's better to know what a word means and pronounce it wrong than to not know the meaning at all.