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>The single most helpful thing in figuring out what to write down was noticing when my reading was slowing down (...) > If I have one piece of advice, it’s “le

>The single most helpful thing in figuring out what to write down was noticing when my reading was slowing down (...) > If I have one piece of advice, it’s “learn to recognize the subtle drag of something requiring your attention.” This really resonated with me, but perhaps not in the exact same way as the author. I've recently become more consciously aware of how I react when reading more complex text or parsing more complex points. I read along at a fairly constant speed, not having much trouble following the author's mental model. But at some point the complexity seems to grow beyond what I can comfortably hold in my head without stopping and really trying to parse what's on the page in front of me. I can react to this difficulty in two ways: 1. I let the inertia carry me past the sentence, not really grokking it, instead it becomes a sort of buzz in my mental model (or a 'drag' in the author's words), something like step 2 in south park's famous step 1: do something - step 2: ??? - step 3: profit. I continue on with the text, but now my understanding of it is compromised. 2. I recognize what I'm doing, stop reading, and start re-reading the sentence much more slowly. Look at the surrounding text for illuminating context (sometimes this snag isn't because it's an overly complex point, it's just a poorly structured sentence and the next line clears it up). I may need to start taking notes to parse it. My problem is I'm quite lazy (and I'm usually reading in bed to relax) and tend to default to strategy 1. But I'm trying to change that bad habit and react with strategy 2.

cgriswald 6y ago
It’s only a bad habit if you don’t go back later and make sure you grok it. Reading through can give you an understand of the larger picture of what the author is saying which can help you when you go back and re-read the part that you stumbled on. This might be especially true if you feel like it’s a point where it’s gotten too unwieldy or complex. That may be a sign you don’t yet have the necessary basis or metaphor for the idea as presented.
- rablackburn 6y ago
  There definitely seems to be a balancing act between: * stopping all progress until you fully understand the point * continue moving forward so you don't get stuck and give up Interestingly I've found that leaning towards 'just keep going' seems to be more effective when learning a second language. Whereas slowing down and doing some background reading helps much more with technical topics. Language seems much more natural to learn from pure exposure. So easy a baby can do it :)
  - morty_s 6y ago
    Yes! Very true. I found that I get distracted easily when reading, stopping at an unfamiliar term/concept, looking it up, possibly taking notes, annnddd then not really getting back to what I was reading. Now, I read differently, where I _read to finish_; I try to minimize the time-to-big-picture. Ive found reading with a pen or pencil to be helpful. I also sometimes prematurely seek out an answer to some piece of text that’s expounded on a few lines later. So my recipe now is, open book (or whatever), write the date and time, read the table of contents, read through and annotate, write questions and answers in the margins, and get to the other cover quickly; each time I pick up the text I read over something I previously noted (in fifo order). These second passes are slow, the first pass continues at the same speed.
  - Kye 6y ago
    This was my experience learning music theory. So much of the reference material tries to describe the motion of notes while not providing any visuals. I guess that works for a lot of people, but I didn't really get stuff like chords and scales and the relationship between them until I spent years painting notes out on a scale-snapped MIDI roll. I still can't make sense of what they're talking about half the time despite being on the other side of it, regularly using concepts they try to explain, but I let my inability to follow that way of explaining be a road block to learning-by-doing for way too long. See also: math. I thought I was bad at it! It turns out the books in school and the teachers just didn't teach it in a way I could follow. It's a weird inversion of my usual problem. For most things, I learn best with text and illustration and struggle to follow videos. For math, I can't follow text and most illustrations might as well be blank, but videos work. It's the same with music: I made most of my progress from watching videos. I would implore anyone who thinks they're "bad at math" or they "can't learn to make music", or anything they struggle with, to skip the ways they've tried in the past and go at it from another angle. There are so many angles. So many.
  - nescoiquid 6y ago
    Interestingly, there is a lot of good advice on this in various writings on learning to read Latin fluently. Word order is very free due to the language's inflected nature, and of course, vocabulary requires constant attention. The most highly regarded advice to breaking through into fluency is to break the habit of re-reading just as you get into trouble, or breaking off to look up a word. Instead, push through to the end of the sentence, holding as much of it in your head as possible, and being ready to re-interpret any chunks (phrases or clauses) that might admit of more than one interpretation. When you've reached the end of the sentence, consider what you think was meant by it. Only then, go back and re-read the sentence. In some cases, it may be necessary to read more than a single sentence together. At any rate, I think a lot of people agree with your observation.
bsder 6y ago
Sometimes, though, it is important to keep going until you hit the wall and then go back to the first point that started to get hazy. Often, knowing the direction the author is going to go helps in understanding why the author explains something a certain way.
pessimizer 6y ago
It may seem weird, but I think I've always dealt with this by not bookmarking the page I've ended on when I stop reading. I find it next time by skipping the stuff I understand, and stopping when things are unfamiliar and/or confusing. I find a night of sleep (or some significant time away) to be a good way to passively consolidate what I've read so far. This has devolved to reading the same section over and over again a few times, but I think that's usually because the author made a logical leap that I had a problem with, or simply that I wasn't as interested in the subject as I thought I was.
- lvncelot 6y ago
  That's a really smart trick, it reminds me of trying to learn a musical piece and getting really proficient at the parts that come just before a section I struggle with because I play them the most often.
chrisweekly 6y ago
Congrats on your progress w metacognition. Seriously, it's a profoundly powerful tool.
cle 6y ago
Maybe we're using different words for the same thing. But I've found that when I get "stuck" like that, it's because I'm trying to fit too much into my working memory, and I start losing track of it and am unable to recall parts of it, leading to confusion. So I do what you say, except it's much more deliberate than just "slow down" and "re-read". I try to break the concepts down into chunks, and focus on being able to recall specific things about each chunk. First I convince myself that each chunk makes sense in isolation, and then what its "contract" is (how it interacts with related concepts and fits into the bigger picture). When I can easily recall both of those in a coherent way, I'm ready to move on. I use a variety of ways to practice recall, depending on whatever's most ergonomic (Anki, study sheet, deliberate practice, etc.). Sometimes I find that I lack enough understanding of other concepts to really understand a chunk, so I have to go recursively do the same thing for other concepts. So I see it as more of a memory problem and not "understanding". I don't really know what "understanding" means, to me it's all just memory--memorizing why something is true/makes sense (by relating it to stuff I already know/memorized), and then memorizing how that thing fits into other contexts. If I can't load that stuff quickly into my working memory, then I don't "understand" it.
- rablackburn 6y ago
  It's a different phenomena. I experience the running out of RAM problem that you describe as well and take basically the same approach to you. That's much closer to how I read code. My issue really is just a tendency to keep reading even if I didn't actually parse the sentence properly. It seems to be a complexity threshold rather than a volume one. I think it's just what happens when I try to read a text at the top of, or beyond, my reading level. I imagine that anyone who struggled in school with reading comprehension may have a similar experience, or perhaps its like that feeling when you read a garden path sentence[1]. I struggled to even recognize that I was facing this issue because I found reading very easy during school. Facing a text that was too difficult to instantly parse and understand was rare enough that I never had to develop the mental tools to deal with it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

cgriswald 6y ago

It’s only a bad habit if you don’t go back later and make sure you grok it. Reading through can give you an understand of the larger picture of what the author is saying which can help you when you go back and re-read the part that you stumbled on. This might be especially true if you feel like it’s a point where it’s gotten too unwieldy or complex. That may be a sign you don’t yet have the necessary basis or metaphor for the idea as presented.

rablackburn 6y ago
There definitely seems to be a balancing act between: * stopping all progress until you fully understand the point * continue moving forward so you don't get stuck and give up Interestingly I've found that leaning towards 'just keep going' seems to be more effective when learning a second language. Whereas slowing down and doing some background reading helps much more with technical topics. Language seems much more natural to learn from pure exposure. So easy a baby can do it :)
- morty_s 6y ago
  Yes! Very true. I found that I get distracted easily when reading, stopping at an unfamiliar term/concept, looking it up, possibly taking notes, annnddd then not really getting back to what I was reading. Now, I read differently, where I _read to finish_; I try to minimize the time-to-big-picture. Ive found reading with a pen or pencil to be helpful. I also sometimes prematurely seek out an answer to some piece of text that’s expounded on a few lines later. So my recipe now is, open book (or whatever), write the date and time, read the table of contents, read through and annotate, write questions and answers in the margins, and get to the other cover quickly; each time I pick up the text I read over something I previously noted (in fifo order). These second passes are slow, the first pass continues at the same speed.
- Kye 6y ago
  This was my experience learning music theory. So much of the reference material tries to describe the motion of notes while not providing any visuals. I guess that works for a lot of people, but I didn't really get stuff like chords and scales and the relationship between them until I spent years painting notes out on a scale-snapped MIDI roll. I still can't make sense of what they're talking about half the time despite being on the other side of it, regularly using concepts they try to explain, but I let my inability to follow that way of explaining be a road block to learning-by-doing for way too long. See also: math. I thought I was bad at it! It turns out the books in school and the teachers just didn't teach it in a way I could follow. It's a weird inversion of my usual problem. For most things, I learn best with text and illustration and struggle to follow videos. For math, I can't follow text and most illustrations might as well be blank, but videos work. It's the same with music: I made most of my progress from watching videos. I would implore anyone who thinks they're "bad at math" or they "can't learn to make music", or anything they struggle with, to skip the ways they've tried in the past and go at it from another angle. There are so many angles. So many.
- nescoiquid 6y ago
  Interestingly, there is a lot of good advice on this in various writings on learning to read Latin fluently. Word order is very free due to the language's inflected nature, and of course, vocabulary requires constant attention. The most highly regarded advice to breaking through into fluency is to break the habit of re-reading just as you get into trouble, or breaking off to look up a word. Instead, push through to the end of the sentence, holding as much of it in your head as possible, and being ready to re-interpret any chunks (phrases or clauses) that might admit of more than one interpretation. When you've reached the end of the sentence, consider what you think was meant by it. Only then, go back and re-read the sentence. In some cases, it may be necessary to read more than a single sentence together. At any rate, I think a lot of people agree with your observation.

bsder 6y ago

Sometimes, though, it is important to keep going until you hit the wall and then go back to the first point that started to get hazy. Often, knowing the direction the author is going to go helps in understanding why the author explains something a certain way.

pessimizer 6y ago

It may seem weird, but I think I've always dealt with this by not bookmarking the page I've ended on when I stop reading. I find it next time by skipping the stuff I understand, and stopping when things are unfamiliar and/or confusing. I find a night of sleep (or some significant time away) to be a good way to passively consolidate what I've read so far. This has devolved to reading the same section over and over again a few times, but I think that's usually because the author made a logical leap that I had a problem with, or simply that I wasn't as interested in the subject as I thought I was.

lvncelot 6y ago
That's a really smart trick, it reminds me of trying to learn a musical piece and getting really proficient at the parts that come just before a section I struggle with because I play them the most often.

chrisweekly 6y ago

Congrats on your progress w metacognition. Seriously, it's a profoundly powerful tool.

cle 6y ago

Maybe we're using different words for the same thing. But I've found that when I get "stuck" like that, it's because I'm trying to fit too much into my working memory, and I start losing track of it and am unable to recall parts of it, leading to confusion. So I do what you say, except it's much more deliberate than just "slow down" and "re-read". I try to break the concepts down into chunks, and focus on being able to recall specific things about each chunk. First I convince myself that each chunk makes sense in isolation, and then what its "contract" is (how it interacts with related concepts and fits into the bigger picture). When I can easily recall both of those in a coherent way, I'm ready to move on. I use a variety of ways to practice recall, depending on whatever's most ergonomic (Anki, study sheet, deliberate practice, etc.). Sometimes I find that I lack enough understanding of other concepts to really understand a chunk, so I have to go recursively do the same thing for other concepts. So I see it as more of a memory problem and not "understanding". I don't really know what "understanding" means, to me it's all just memory--memorizing why something is true/makes sense (by relating it to stuff I already know/memorized), and then memorizing how that thing fits into other contexts. If I can't load that stuff quickly into my working memory, then I don't "understand" it.

rablackburn 6y ago
It's a different phenomena. I experience the running out of RAM problem that you describe as well and take basically the same approach to you. That's much closer to how I read code. My issue really is just a tendency to keep reading even if I didn't actually parse the sentence properly. It seems to be a complexity threshold rather than a volume one. I think it's just what happens when I try to read a text at the top of, or beyond, my reading level. I imagine that anyone who struggled in school with reading comprehension may have a similar experience, or perhaps its like that feeling when you read a garden path sentence[1]. I struggled to even recognize that I was facing this issue because I found reading very easy during school. Facing a text that was too difficult to instantly parse and understand was rare enough that I never had to develop the mental tools to deal with it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]