8 ms·
It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read
- perilunar 9y agoWell that's a relief. They are talking about books, but I suppose it applies to all the time we 'waste' on HN and other news sites too.
- zeep 9y agothat's one reason why I really like https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/ and other similar projects
- Maultasche 9y agoI think it was interesting how it was talking about getting different things from the same book at different points in your life. That's certainly how it went for me with the Silmarillion. I read it at 16 just after I had come off of reading Lord of the Rings and it was extremely boring. I read it again at 30 and I found it to be quite interesting. The book hadn't changed, but I had.
- criddell 9y agoI've also found that to be true with movies. When I first watched Jaws 15 years ago, I thought it was boring and slow. I recently watched it again and loved every minute of it. The dialog, characters, and building tension was fantastic. I almost felt like I could smell the beach and the boats.
- kiba 9y agoEh, you still forget 90% of everything you ever read, or just plain learn, and that includes the models you get from reading books about the crusade. If you want to retain anything in more than vague details, you need to intensively practice and study. That is not to say you should practice and study everything in intense details. There's only so many hours to practice being a world class programmer and then something else. It's fine to be an average driver, an average cook, average almost anything. But if you want anymore than an average result, you're going to need to invest more than average effort.
- lhuser123 9y agoKnowledge, use it or lose it.
- ams6110 9y agoWhat I find, is that I will read something, and then "forget" it fairly quickly, but then I'll be doing something else, maybe getting stuck on a problem, and suddenly find that during my thinking or puzzling I will have a memory from that thing I read, and that will help me move forward.
- nxc18 9y agoIf you're reading books for the details, you're doing it wrong. Read books for ideas. You can always look at the book for reference when you forget the details. I despair for the people who are taught that learning is about memorizing facts. Ideas are far more powerful than facts and a heck of a lot harder to lookup.
- roceasta 9y ago>So read always from authors of proven worth [Seneca] Absolutely. The few authors that I love the best are streets ahead of the rest. Reading other authors is for me really just a search for the Next Big Thing. As time marches on, re-reading old favourites rises in value relative to reading new stuff, on average. >Though our eyes may pass over all of the words and our hands may flip through all of the pages, what we read is never the entire book The idea that reading is encompassed by the eyes zig-zagging down the page like a raster scan is an example of the 'bucket theory' of the mind, as Karl Popper put it. This is where knowledge supposedly pours into the brain passively via the senses. Which is a fallacy. >If I read for pure pleasure, what harm is there in forgetting? This is also the reason I've never seriously tried to speed read. Perhaps I'm mistaken about this, but why wolf down an expensive meal? There's nothing to be lost from optimising pleasure since it derives from the meaning i.e. from the true content. >When we read, certain notable phrases, concepts and ideas [...] stand out more clearly from the others. Oh yes. This is the Searchlight Theory of the mind, where our attention is continually homing onto the most interesting or semantically useful bit of whatever we are doing.
- djur 9y agoIt makes me think of Darwin's journals, where you can see him picking up on useful little tidbits from the stuff he's read and observed. His reading of Malthus was a major influence on his development of natural selection theory, but it's not like Origin of Species is a Malthusian tract. Exposure to other people's thoughts helps create our own thoughts. There's a great many scientists and philosophers who were wrong about things but who provided the structure and patterns necessary for later thinkers. From Plato and Aristotle to Smith, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud...
- DavidSJ 9y agoInterestingly, Wallace was also inspired by Malthus in his own co-discovery of evolution.
- tpeo 9y agoThis reminded of a nice little book by Pierre Bayard called "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read", which actually dedicates part of itself not to books which the reader hasn't actually read, but to those which he might have forgotten. Unfortunately, I've forgotten much of the rest of the book, so I really can't say much more about it. Still recommend it, though.
- ams6110 9y agoTalking about a book you haven't read shouldn't be too difficult. Just ask a lot of questions and pursue the interesting answers. Convincingly passing yourself off as having read the book when you haven't, is probably more difficult, but would depend on how deep the discussion gets.
- ridgeguy 9y agoBooks are like lovers. They change you, even if you don't recall the particulars.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI've quarrelled extensively with both.
- jugg1es 9y agoThat information reshapes your brain is something I think that most of the people on this site and reading my comment understand. Johnny 5 said it best - INPUT
- iamatroll_ama 9y agoI forget most things.
- shock 9y agoFor me the following quote from Paul Graham's essay has struck a chord: For example, reading and experience are usually "compiled" at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time. The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. It's changed how I read books. I used to feel that if I needed to re-read a book I did something wrong the first time – now I read a book again after some time just to get a different perspective of the book. It's the same thing that happens the second time you watch a movie: you notice details that you missed the first time around.
- jakubp 9y agoI also noticed this with books. My impression is that the same book can be called "great" by one person and "boring" or "uninteresting" by another, and it says really more about those people in relation to the book at that point in their lives, than about the book itself. It can show you what developmental stage these people are in. For some, reading a simple book on emotions will be a game changer, while for others it will be stating the obvious and they won't even read more than a chapter or two, deciding that the book was too basic or even "bad". I've developed a habit of buying and beginning a lot of books, but many I discard or set aside for the future. Few books seem "too basic" for me, with many I sense that their time is yet to come, or their utility at this point in my life is unclear. BTW I have the same experience with movies; some of them have a great number of really interesting detail that I often miss the first time around.
- petra 9y agoOr maybe, just maybe, non-fiction books(not textbooks) are a terrible medium to learn anything, in light of what we know of how memory works ,and in light of various knowledge management technologies, which don't work terribly well with books ? And books only exist because they are the lowest common denominator for someone to share an idea, and they are a good form of entertainment, similar to facebook posts ?
- mxschumacher 9y agoI posted this 5 days ago, why does HN not pick it up as a duplicate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15111163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15111163
- iRobbery 9y agoI see the irony here :)
- sctb 9y agoSorry yours didn't get any attention! It's mostly up to chance, so the software lets through resubmissions of earlier posts that are too old to save but didn't get any discussion.
- mxschumacher 9y agoMaybe the time stamp on the original post should just get updated in case of a re-submission of a previously unsuccessful post. The community deserves to get information quickly and there should be only one thread per post to avoid redundant arguments)
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago“However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them.” As comrade Schopenhauer put it ( https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/301471-however-for-the-man-who-studies-to-gain-insight-books https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/301471-however-for-the-man-... ) Later, Wittgenstein echoed that item - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder
- sodumb 9y agoSchopenhauer was not a socialist.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoPicked up that habit from P.G.Wodehouse's comrade Psmith. A harmless affectation. No real socialism involved.
- brango 9y agoWasn't this story on here last week?
- replicatorblog 9y agoI used to stress about this until I came across this quote: “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson Even if you don't have a photographic memory, reading changes our perspective in important ways.
- Vinnl 9y agoThis is both a blessing and a curse. I'm always afraid that I will read false or unreliable things, actually recognise it for what it is, but still have it linger in my brain enough that I will believe it in the future...
- emodendroket 9y agoIn fact a number of psychological studies have found that people will remember false information as true if you tell it to them and then immediately explain it is false. At least that's how I remember it. :)
- rwnspace 9y agoI really hope that the other direction gives the desired result.
- emodendroket 9y agoThat seems doubtful.
- emodendroket 9y agoI should hope so or I'd need to stop reading. Incidentally, Sherlock Holmes never said "elementary, my dear Watson."
- mkalygin 9y agoI noticed that if I read a book, I don't understand it immediately truly deeply. Some sort of analysis happens and then after few months or even years my mentality becomes different and I start to think in a different way. So it takes time to build a different mentality by reading books.
- tw1010 9y agoIf you want to learn how to program, surely you would go asking the software engineering community how to do it? But rarely do we pay attention to how the people who're serious about reading and writing say you're actually supposed to read. I thought I knew how to read a book. But then I read the Well-Educated Mind and realized that I had went about it all wrong. English majors read books way differently than most people do. It is crucially important for retention and understanding of a book to actually write down thorough notes about it.
- kentt 9y agoThanks for the book recommendation. I'm going to check it out.
- sn9 9y agoJust from looking at the description, it seems to cover the same territory as Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. I'd read Adler's book first, but reading two different presentations of what might be the same idea is better than reading only one.
- krishicks 9y agoOn re-reading books: The first time I read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace I found myself unable to determine what was Important for much of the first few hundred pages. None of it made sense and I couldn't figure out what The Point of the book was. I kind of read the pages but didn't really take any of it in. The second time I read it was a completely different experience: those first pages immediately made sense, and I derived a sense of pleasure in reading them that I didn't have the first time around.
- tw1010 9y agoTangentially, I've had a similar experience when teaching myself some areas of pure mathematics via books. The first time around I had a hard time figuring out which theorems were significant and worth more attention than others. The second time around the most important ones were a lot more obvious.
- JankyTurtle 9y agoA lot of comments in this thread make it sound like if you're not going to perform rote memorization of what you read then it's not worth reading at all. Learning is more than memorization. To simply write-off all knowledge as just regurgitating facts is exactly what's wrong with the modern education system. Read for the sake of reading, explore new ideas and grow.
- stonelazy 9y agoEverywhere when there is a context about reading.. Ppl talk only about physical books, doesn't the same ideology apply for an article that you read online.. Be it HN articles? I even forget from what I read in HN.
- CPUstring 9y agoIt depends. When you read, you're approaching a well to drink the knowledge therein. When you're approaching a place that streams- HN, reddit, twitter- you're approaching a river. You approach rivers and wells differently, and so you probably forget books and "flow"-based articles differently.
- alborzmassah 9y agoHonestly, this makes sense to me too, but what scientific evidence is there of reading creating/affecting mental models for people? The article seemed like a lot of opinion, but not much evidence. When I listen to audiobooks or read for personal development or business, I make an effort to apply things I've learned from the books to derive value.