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How To: Read more books

aaronsw.com

91–100 of 107 posts

Re: How To: Read more books

#91
post #6
post #4

tl;dr: Stop visiting hacker news, reddit and other blogs; stop interacting with people; get books from the library for free. My opinion: seriously, blogs should count as minibooks and everytime I read a particularly good and in depth blog or something that elicits the "I'm smarter for reading that" moment, I'm going to keep a tally. That tally I'll consider a chapter of a book. At 300 chapters, I'll count that as a b…

I dont know if this was meant as a quasi-sarcastic comment or not, but i have to say, i seriously agree with you. For me, blogs are micro books. And i have daily "aha" moments, that i cant get from books at this frequency. And if you start including video, (If the speech was converted to text), then lets just say my number is close to 2 or 300 if not more. Ultimately it's about having many "i am smarter" moments

> daily "aha" moments, that i cant get from books at this frequency.

You’re reading the wrong books.

Re: How To: Read more books

#92
how to read more books: pirate them. or buy them online or to an ereader. however you get them, convenience is key. i read 2,000-3,000 pages a month since putting books on my computer. love it.

Re: How To: Read more books

#93
post #21

"#3 Alienate everyone close to you" is the complete opposite of what I do. My favorite technique is to read a book out loud to my wife (and before I was married, to friends). It improves my reading/pronunciation and we discuss the book as it progresses. We learn something new while spending time together. Someday I hope to read to my kids and have them read back to me. I like reading by myself too but I'd rather read…

Reading aloud is fun, and can be useful, but it is extremely slow. No one reads 100 books aloud per year.

Re: How To: Read more books

#94

If I may, I would like to point out the following related discussion at Infinite Injury and Less Wrong on the virtues of reading original sources in the sciences: (original) http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-origin... (response) http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ul/for_progress_to_be_by_accumulati... (I agree mostly with the arguments made in the Less Wrong post, viz. "If one wants to know the Standard Mod…

The infinite injury article is (IMO) complete hogwash. Its author assumes (but never explores or explains the assumption) that there's some unidirectional arrow of improved understanding and pedagogy through time (“progress”) and that therefore modern explanations are inherently more sophisticated/subtle/polished than the original grapplings with a subject.

What he misses is that the seminal papers in any field are forced to really grapple with a subject for its own sake, while later works fetishize dogma and ceaselessly pander to the interests of whoever is paying for the work to be done, simplifying concepts to be understood by those of uncertain prior experience, and packing in features (ooh, glossy pictures! companion website!) that will sell copies.

There are some areas where studying the originals is not especially helpful, because subjects weren’t yet understood. For instance, the founders of quantum mechanics really had no clue what was going on at the beginning, and their early papers are mishmashes of math pulled from other sources which sometimes fortuitously explained their experimental results. So by all means, go grab Townsend’s Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics (2002) as a more practical and informative work.

In other areas, the famous “originals” (which is to say, those works which were good enough to last centuries while their contemporaries faded into oblivion) are wonderful. There’s much more insight packed into Machiavelli, Tocqueville, or James Madison’s writing than any modern political science textbooks.

And yes, economics as a field would be way better off if its practitioners had any idea what its foundational assumptions were about, or tried really deeply considering (e.g.) Smith, Veblen, Marx, or Keynes (or even, say, Von Neumann and Morgenstern), who had a real world to answer to, not just other economists.

Re: How To: Read more books

#95
post #24

The biggest consumer of time is undoubtedly other people, in large measure because talking to other people is so fun that you don’t notice time going by. By keeping yourself away from other people (living alone is a good start), you free up an enormous amount of time for reading. I find this is particularly useful in reading books, since books can usually substitute for human company... How sad, especially coming fro…

I'm sensitive enough to criticism and guilt that I actively avoid people a lot of the time. I didn't blink reading that. It makes sense to me.

Re: How To: Read more books

#96
A PDA with a good ebook reader boosted my reading rate by about 1 book a week. During the day, there's an innumerable amount of 1 - 10 minute pauses in your life that you can use to whip out a PDA and read a couple of pages.

Unfortunately, now I have an iPhone where the web browser is better than the ebook reader so I find myself reading hacker news rather than novels.

Re: How To: Read more books

#99
post #98

Why not to read more books: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/lit/chap...

You might like this quote, which is in a similar vein:

  Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind 
  too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who 
  reads too much and uses his own brain too little 
  falls into lazy habits of thinking.
  
      -- Albert Einstein

Re: How To: Read more books

#100
I read about 40 books a year[1]. The main way I do this is not alienating my friends but by not watching TV. I have started watching DVDs and Netflix instant stream recently and this has cut into my reading time.

I do recommend requesting books at your library. It is awesome, like Netflix for books.

I would like to try blocking my favorite websites. I don't know if I would read more, but I certainly would work more.

[1] I have kept track of this since 2006, inspired by Kevin Drum. Here's my lists:

http://justlooking.recursion.org/2009/Jan/2#books-2006

http://justlooking.recursion.org/2007/Dec/31#books-2007

http://justlooking.recursion.org/2009/Jan/2#books-2008

http://justlooking.recursion.org/2010/Jan/24#books-2009

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