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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

#71

Post by rahimnathwani »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #10
dahves wrote: post #4

Next step reviewing (rewriting) those summaries. Currently using Anki for this, anyone has success using other tools?

I love Readwise.

I love Readwise Reader, and subscribed within a few days of trying out Reader Beta.

Despite my best intentions, though, I've not started to turn my highlights into flashcards, or started a daily review habit.

To GP: AIUI the workflow in Reader is meant to be (i) add to library, (ii) read and highlight, (iii) review highlights and create flashcards, (iv) review flashcards.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#72

Post by brudgers »

teodorlu wrote: post #70

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 summa…

I don’t disagree. I think this article isn’t written for people like me.

What I mean is I f someone is already remixing, they’re already writing about what they read and probably don’t need advices from articles like this because they already read differently from what the author imagined.

On the other hand, the article encourages people to write about what they read outside a formal academic context, and most people don’t have that habit.

To put it another way, writers don’t need rationale to write. But writers are not the target audience.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#74

Post by summarity »

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’ve built a similar thing at https://findsight.ai

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#75

Post by dmotz »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #69
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…

Yes, the demo mode is a random subset of things I've highlighted and it's heavily weighted around certain topics and sparse on others, so that's why some passages don't have the strongest semantic matches.

You're right that it would be nice to see things in situ as you're reading, but it would seem that most e-reading experiences are locked down. I appreciate the feedback!

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#76

Post by konto »

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…

Can you share some books you reread?

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#77

Post by quest88 »

jameshart wrote: post #34
quest88 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's up to you. For me, I may write the parts I presently find most useful in detail. And some high-level summaries for reference. Then I can search my notes to know what book I need.

I'm still not sure why someone would need to do this? What kind of information are you obtaining from books that you later find yourself wanting to search for? These kind of productivity tips always confuse me when they lack context of what the person writing is trying to do . Like: Anki flashcards and spaced repetition. I see a lot of people advocating for them. I have never understood why because, in my personal ex…

Facts I find interesting and relevant at the time I was reading them. As an example, the book "Invisible Women" has a lot of great data in it. I don't wanna know the exact numbers, but concepts like:

- The normal human dummy in crash tests define "normal" to be like a man, so women tend to have more injuries in car crashes.

- Women are more at risk for cardiac failure because their heart attacks go undiagnosed. Women experience different symptoms of heart attack than men, and most doctors have been trained using research done on males. For example, men feel it in their chest and left arm whereas women experience pain in their stomach.

The process of writing it or summarizing helps me remember these things so I don't need to look them up as often. But going through my notes again I saw I forgot some things! I don't know when I'll use them when I'm writing them, but I have referenced them conversations before.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#78

Post by syntaxing »

syntaxing wrote: post #60
sendfoods wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how this compares to [PrivateGPT]( https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT ). I am honestly at the point of choice paralysis with all these new tools

It's more or less the same exact idea! Use langchain, import llm and embedding model, and query against it. The repo you provided does the same exact thing but using llama cpp python as the backend. I opted to write my own custom llm class with using textgen as the api backend so I can use the gpu since its way faster. But with the new cuBLAS support on llama cpp, it's a game changer so you can use either now. I do f…

Here's some example output how fast it is running 13B on a 3090 with a Ryzen 9 5900X

In [5]: output = llm("Q: Name the planets in the solar system? A: ", max_tokens=32, stop=["Q:", "\n"], echo=True)

llama_print_timings: load time = 209.23 ms llama_print_timings: sample time = 11.39 ms / 32 runs ( 0.36 ms per token) llama_print_timings: prompt eval time = 209.16 ms / 15 tokens ( 13.94 ms per token) llama_print_timings: eval time = 1806.98 ms / 31 runs ( 58.29 ms per token) llama_print_timings: total time = 3033.91 ms

In [6]: print(output) {'id': '', 'object': 'text_completion', 'created': 1684604167, 'model': './models/Wizard-Vicuna-13B-Uncensored.ggml.q5_1.bin', 'choices': [{'text': 'Q: Name the planets in the solar system? A: 1. Mercury, 2. Venus, 3. Earth, 4. Mars, 5. Jupiter, 6. Saturn', 'index': 0, 'logprobs': None, 'finish_reason': 'length'}], 'usage': {'prompt_tokens': 15, 'completion_tokens': 32, 'total_tokens': 47}}

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#79

Post by martinflack »

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

I prefer to write on ruled paper and tuck it into the front cover for the following reasons:

- ruled paper is easier to write on

- you won't run out of space (just add sheets)

- you can rewrite summaries as you revisit books decades later and retuck the new summary

- you can quickly scan the papers to archive a digital copy

- you can remove your notes to lend the book (or not)

- you can transfer your notes to a new edition trivially

- you can be more candid in what you write, knowing it's trivially discarded without giving up the book

- all the notes are in one place and you don't have to thumb through the book looking for where you wrote an idea that you half-remember

- you have space to draw diagrams if appropriate

- you can find something on the internet that importantly relates, print off a page or two, and adjunct your notes

- you can do extensive internet research and build a whole matching folder of contents on your laptop, but you can print a page of Title/URL's to adjunct your notes as a backup (and for anyone who borrows the book+notes)

(edit: formatting)

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#80

Post by ssgh »

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've been looking for something like this to review books. Two suggestions: 1. allow to load a book from a url, so notes could be added to arbitrary books; 2. allow to select text and add notes to that selection.
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