8 ms·

How to forget what you read

137 points by goddessoflists 3y ago

SuperHeavy256 3y ago
I think this applies more to creatives, than to other professions.
Liebnitz 3y ago
As Katarina Janoskova says, "So you read a book. You finished it, liked it, maybe even recommended it to others. It changed your life slightly while you were reading it and for a bit afterwards. And then you moved on with your life." I like that. That says it more succinctly.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- eye-robot 3y ago
  To be honest, I would love to forget some books I read and re-live the thrill of being startled by the plot again. To be perfectly honest, I'd love to be startled by the plot the first time round
taopai 3y ago
I used to take endless notes on .org documents and build myself small wiki sites in django... You know what makes the difference? Take a walk, or catch a train and think about what you read. Find the main ideas and how the material relates to yourself. Play with it and ask yourself questions about it. Then next day try to answer them in paper without extra material. And only after that reread the book to check or find unsolved the answers. Learning is hard. There is nothing as easy learning. The good news is that it can be hand AND fun. About reading: Engage in every sentence, ask yourself what the writer is trying to tell you in every sentence, after that translate it to imagination and relate it with yourself and what you already know. There is shallow reading and deep reading. Deep reading is a must for technical books, but also a joy for fiction. I still remember so vividly the coldness and texture of the walls of the hobbit's first mountain tunnels despite haven't been told about it.
- will5421 3y ago
  * Learning from a book is hard
  - taopai 3y ago
    Books are awesome. Really. But reading is the first step. You never learn only by reading. You have to relate the ideas with your prior knowledge and practice it or apply it somewhere. You also have to get a nice book. And have to practice reading. Reading is a skill, it's an extension of imagination. You have to practice that, and reading is an awesome way.
  - AlwaysRock 3y ago
    This depends a lot on the person. I do not retain information that I read very well. I know this about myself so I try to ensure if I need to learn something I'm using other methods as my primarily way of learning. My brother, and many others, have the ability to read something from a book and retain that information fairly well and without using some other method of learning or reinforcing it. It's unfortunately that I didnt realize this until I was done with my schooling but its been really valuable to know this during my career.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  > hand AND fun I assume you meant hard and fun, and this is something I believe is the issue in adult life, things are unnecessarily hard when they could and should be hard AND fun engagement, quality, innovation might rise by a lot if we focused jobs around that
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  This is a truth about learning that people don't want to hear, but they need to hear it. Everyone wants to hear about magic productivity and learning hacks. They end up speed-reading and playing Anki, but they get nowhere. What's worse is they think they're getting somewhere, especially with the facade erected by games like Anki. There are no shortcuts to learning and memorizing what you read. You have to really digest it, synthesize your own thoughts on it, and use it. You get out of it what you put into it.
rikketikm 3y ago
Last year, I aimed to read 30 books. But I realized I usually forgot most of the stuff, just remembering some main ideas. Really getting the hang of a topic takes time. So this year, I'll read fewer books but focus more on understanding what I'm reading.
- tmaly 3y ago
  Back when I use to listen to a lot of podcasts, there was a guest sitting in for Tim Ferris on his podcast. The guy talked about just trying to take away one idea from what you read rather than trying to take a whole bunch of notes you’ll never remember.
lqet 3y ago
Katarina Janoskova, linked in the article, writes: > Is [reading] just a waste of time? Well, no, I don’t think so. Every book makes a mark. Even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory. Just as every single thing that happens to you does and every person you meet. I once read a short essay by Patrick Süskind (author of "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer"). I am paraphrasing, but in it, he discusses his embarrassment that he cannot remember even major plot details or character names of great works of world literature, although he has read them multiple times and they deeply inspired his own work. He then makes an interesting speculation: if a book really and deeply influences you, then maybe actively remembering facts and insights of the book becomes harder and harder, because the book's ideas have been so deeply ingrained into your brain and thinking that you cannot remember them as facts independent of your own thinking. But this doesn't mean that you have "forgotten" them.
- Gooblebrai 3y ago
  I never cease to be surprised with the attempts to make everything productive nowadays. Of course, everyone can do whatever they want but it seems to me a symptom of how society works nowadays that instead of just enjoying the act of reading and remembering whatever details impact us, we obsess with being able to retrieve information from them
  - jbstack 3y ago
    This assumes that the main purpose of reading is always enjoyment. Often that is not the case; we read because we require the knowledge contained in the book for our work. The converse of only engaging with a book on an emotional level and retaining only those details which are interesting is forgetting those parts which were difficult/boring but useful.
- GamerAlias 3y ago
  Do you happen to have a link to said essay or know the name as I can't find it and would be interested in reading it. I also gladly confess to not remembering the plot of the vast majority of the works of fiction that I've read.
samuell 3y ago
I think there is more to be said about the topic that organically sticks to you. I have realized that this depends a lot on what you are "up to" at the moment. In my experience, I have a really hard time internalizing information about a topic that is far from some topic or work I'm engaged with at the moment. This means, I think: 1. That you can to some extent influence what you are "up to". 2. That you should probably organize your reading and other learning activities around the seasons of thinking themes in your life [1] [1] E.g. to me, that often means I'm into quite different themes during work days versus weekends, where I'm often exploring some slightly different topics.
- tmaly 3y ago
  This reminds me a little bit of the idea of affirmations as a filter on the mind. We tend to notice stuff based on our affirmations.
voidhorse 3y ago
Spot on. Just another symptom of a quantity obsessed culture. It's telling that people ask how many books did you read this year and not what was the best book you read about (a question of quality, over quantity).
- dustincoates 3y ago
  It's how you end up with Blinkist. Don't get me wrong, most books are overly stuffed and could stand to be much shorter, but you aren't going to take much from 5 minutes of a summary alone. I'm convinced that it's not really a learning app as much as it is for puffery.
  - helboi4 3y ago
    Yeah I really can't think of anything worse than reading only summaries of books in an attempt to retreive efficient information. The point of the book is the journey and how it makes you feel. Even a non-fiction book.
  - tmaly 3y ago
    Summaries just like asking ChatGPT to state the key takeaways of a book all lack the story and connection that helps us relate to the information in a human way.
- mejutoco 3y ago
  Like in the little prince, where it is stated that adults always ask questions about numbers and quantities :)
freetonik 3y ago
I distinguish between forgetting the content VS. forgetting the effect. When new information is ingested, it "changes you", i.e. is having an effect on your views and thought processes. Sometimes subtle, sometimes profound. So I might not remember what a book was about, and upon re-reading I have this weird experience: it feels familiar, ideas were somehow already processed in my brain, but due to forgetting the content I feel like I already read this in a past life. I forget the content of most books, articles, movies, etc., and I have to constantly remind myself that not remembering it is not a bad thing, is not a failure, and it was not useless. It's like my brain RAM + cache are large, but short lived, but the permanent storage is small, too abstract and incompatible with the raw data content.
hasoleju 3y ago
Learning from a book without having a real life problem I want to solve with this learning is really hard for me. If I have a problem I want to solve and use a book to find a path to the solution within it's pages, learning from the book is no problem at all. If I have no real life problem to solve and only read the book because I like the topic or want to learn from it for my future I only remember the broad concepts. But nevertheless, at least you know what's in that book and if you encounter a problem in the future you can revisit the book again.
shubhamjain 3y ago
> The first reason for this is that forgetting is a filter. When something you read resonates with you sufficiently for you to recall it without effort, that means something; it means it connects with your ideas and experiences in some relevant way. I take an issue with this assumption. When I leaf through my past notes, highlights—hell, even stuff I have written myself—I am surprised at many relevant things that I completely forgot about. It's true forgetting is a filter, but one mustn't underestimate the brain's capacity to forget useful stuff too. Maybe it's something you didn't need in a while, and need it now. Maybe it has become more relevant than it was in the past. For eg, I have restarted journaling recently, and this highlight from "On Writing Well", immediately hit me: > “Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. … Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past. It's written for a different context, but it made me realize a different way to approach my journaling. However, I agree wanting to retain everything is needlessly ambitious, and counter-productive. I was once obsessed with making notes about everything I read, but soon, I realized how unenjoyable it was making my reading. The better approach, I found, is to just make highlights. And go over them once in a while (a few months or so). That's enough of a knowledge-retention system for me.
- 3abiton 3y ago
  Totally agree with your take, forgetfulness is also a function of time, and the less we repeat an idea the more likely we are to forget it.
- tmaly 3y ago
  I think the zettelkasten method works so well not because people record single thoughts, but because there is a process of revisiting and reviewing those thoughts and how they relate to other thoughts.
p0w3n3d 3y ago
To be honest, I would love to forget some books I read and re-live the thrill of being startled by the plot again.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > To be honest, I would love to forget some books I read and re-live the thrill of being startled by the plot again. To be perfectly honest, I'd love to be startled by the plot the first time round :-/
CrypticShift 3y ago
I believe the root of the problem is a misconception of how humans function. The prevalent trends in related fields, from AI/Neuroscience [1] to PKM/TFT [2], are further entrenching this crude rational/willpower-based perspective. Perhaps the true (meta)rational perspective is to actually understand how to embrace the larger complexity of human experience (including sensibility/creativity/play...). Maybe the real willpower is to stop obsessing over this limited viewpoint (and the fears it produces) all the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain [2] https://numinous.productions/ttft/ https://numinous.productions/ttft/
dangus 3y ago
> Otherwise, wasn’t reading it in the first place a waste of our precious time? I weirdly wish the article entertained the answer of “yes!” Instead of doing that it barely backs the knowledge-obsessed away from the cliff in an attempt to convince them to just don’t take quite so many notes, maybe step back and stop pretending like you’re crunching for an exam and absorb the information you’re reading. But I would actually take this a step further for a lot of people and say that, depending on what you’re reading and why you’re reading, it might be quite literally a waste of time, especially if you’re reading not for enjoyment but because you feel pressure to gain knowledge and constantly upskill. There’s a concept of the movie buff being cursed to watch worse and worse movies over time. They start with the best must-watch movies and it’s all downhill from there. They get done watching something like (wildly random examples) Amelie, Spirited Away, or the original Star Wars trilogy and hunt for something that scratches the same itch, only to find out that they just watched the best/only example of that particular concept done well. In the same way, something I notice about frequent readers is that they’re reading utter trash, and probably for a similar reason. Luckily for them, there are far more books than movies, but I think there’s merit to this concept. Obviously, there’s a ton of value in reading especially during grade school as it helps you gain valuable language and writing skills, but I think my advice on top of what this article says is that you don’t have to read shit if you don’t want to. Life isn’t really only about knowledge-based enlightenment, that’s just one feature of life among many.
- helboi4 3y ago
  I dunno there are tons and tons of really good books out there. I don't think you could go through them all in one lifetime. Books are easier to create and have been around for much longer than movies. Executing a whole movie well requires at least thousands, if not millions of dollars, loads of equipment, a huge team of people who need to all be top notch at a variety of different specialist skills, extras, onsite permissions and often years of time. A book can be written in about one year or less through the work of only one person, using just one skill that we all learn as a child. It's way easier to execute a book well. So, as you said, theres more of them, and definitely because of this theres tons of good ones. Experts or people with interesting lives really don't have the time, resources or skills to make a film but loads of them write books. Most people who read almost constantly do read a decent amount of books that are less good than the others. Though they will often read more good books than you too. When I used to read books constantly, I could read faster and retain more. I could also write better. Now I read rarely because I only care to read the most useful things, it takes me way longer to read, I am less focused and retain less and my writing is somewhat worse. So I do think it's worth reading often for those benefits. Reading is so unenjoyable to me now I don't do it frequently. But it's not like I'm doing more useful and enjoyable things with my time either. Life isn't only about knowledge-based enlightenment, I agree, but it is usually about wasting a certain amount of time, whether you like it or not. So you might as well waste it well. In this case, waste it by reading lighter material so that your brain is always primed to read the good stuff efficiently. At least, that's my new years resolution.
jlengrand 3y ago
I've done something quite simple that has worked for me this year. I read with a highlighter pen, just highlighting the places I find interesting, and maybe cornering a few pages once in a while. That costs no more energy than just reading the book, if anything highlighting allows my mind to stay focused on the book. couple weeks after the book is finished, I'll come back only to the highlighted parts and write some of them down in a a4 page, which I then fold in the book. That way I have a personal 1 page book summary which I come back to from time to time. I liked an idea I saw on Youtube from someone saying "for each chapter, I find something actionable I commit to do for a week". A bit on the heavy side, but I like the actionable aspect of it
- rramadass 3y ago
  Having a A4 size book summary along with the book itself is a Great Technique! The chapter/book actionable task(s) idea is also great. Did you come up with the idea yourself or were inspired from some place else? Any more ideas you can share?
  - jlengrand 3y ago
    The second one I picked up from https://www.youtube.com/@askvinh https://www.youtube.com/@askvinh, found it a good idea. The summary thing, honestly it's just because I was frustrated to feel like I had forgotten everything about the books I read a few weeks later, so I decided to find a reason to go back to them to try and retain more :). The only other tip I can think of is to start a book club at your workplace. It's a great way to commit to it a bit more while getting suggestions you wouldn't have had yourself.
    - rramadass 3y ago
      Your A4 summary page technique is ingenious. It forces one to focus on the absolute essentials gleaned while reading a book rather than fluff which is actually an art in "Note-taking". It is the same as "Precis Writing" but for a book. In case you didn't already know, you might find the following useful; 1) SQ3R - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R 2) Cornell Note-taking method - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes
infertainment 3y ago
>forgetting is a filter Exactly. Spaced repetition is a remarkably effective learning technique, but it can't tell you what to learn. At some point I think we have to stop listening to external authorities and rely on our own judgement about what to learn, and how to do so, as signalled by feelings of excitement about particular authors and ideas. One of the effects of formal education is to dampen or corrupt that intuition, e.g. by instilling the desire to learn things 'properly' (say in a certain prearranged sequence) or by the desire to only learn prestigious topics in order to impress other people. If we are engaged meaningfully with reality we will inevitably revisit particular subjects or authors multiple times. This is an organic form of spaced repetition. Forgetting certain things is part of that: we learn to swim during the winter and to skate during the summer.
- bunderbunder 3y ago
  I'm coming to wonder if tools like Anki are even detrimental for most learning tasks. Because SRS is built around rote memorizing a bunch of isolated factoids, while the most important part of mastering most subjects is not memorizing facts, it's learning interactions and patterns that let you make use of those facts. Like, imagine if someone learning to program put a huge amount of their effort into using flashcards to memorize the functions in their preferred language's standard library. I think most people would agree that this person is wasting their time because IDE tooling and Internet searches make it really easy to look up that information on an as-needed basis. So the real effort should be put into learning skills like domain modeling or how to read and debug code. I think that the same principle might apply to most subjects. Even in language learning, one of the places where SRS is most popular. Academics seem to be pretty skeptical of using any sort of flashcarding to learn vocabulary. In part because the empirical evidence doesn't actually seem to support it, and in part on theoretical grounds. The contemporary model for how the brain models language is fundamentally connectionist. Definitions and lemmas aren't something we naturally memorize as a list of facts and then plug into a grammar, which is why native speakers often have difficulty reciting conjugation tables or defining words. I think that formal education's tendency toward representing subjects as lists of factoids is fundamentally another manifestation of the McNamara Fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy). As long as educators have a mandate to (ostensibly) objectively quantify students' progress with grades and scores, they will have a need to represent the subject manner in a manner that permits easy quantification. And they will have to do so regardless of whether it actually makes sense to do so for whatever subject they're teaching.
oglop 3y ago
Completely agree based on my experience. The author's experiences are shared by me and what finally forced me to change my process was reading Alexander Grothendieck. I was not expecting such a prolific writer to espouse such relaxed principles to learn. More than anything, I noticed he emphasized taking time to just _sit and think_. Put things into your own words and pictures as you do. Don't act like a hammer trying to crack the nut, but instead simply "sit and listen to the voices of things". I also just enjoy life more with this method, no more rush. Much more listening.
8lahaj 3y ago
I started learning some introductory maths on my own recently--via a relatively rigourous proof oriented text, a format of which I had no background with--and on one of the first few pages the author says something along the lines of 'if you're learning this for the first time, you should be spending at least an hour per page'. I was shocked at first, a bit incredulous, an hour? per page? ridiculous -- until I started reached the actual text. I thought I was bright as a child, not studying, but as I got older I realized this was not the case (albeit still holding out some hope). At first, in this endeavor, I was discouraged spending so long, but then, oddly enough, I found myself proud of the fact I spent so much time trying to understand the content. Reading and re-reading until I understood what was going on -- and then the next day, I would forget some of it, so I would read it again (this time spending less time (woohoo!)), until I could now not only recite the content but understand it.
teecha 3y ago
this one really hit me at just the right time as a book I've really been enjoying, Thanks for the Feedback, has been lying unread on my shelf as I increasingly had decided the need to jot down everything that might be important as a read previously, i devoured, and loved, difficult conversations by the same authors and found quite a lot of things that resonated with me personally and professionally. some of these i've continued to use and integrate into my daily job as an assistant principal with staff, students, and parents, with great effect the long and short of it is that i gleaned quite a lot from simply reading through one book while stalling out on the second in an attempt to get everything out of it that i can. it is clear to me that simply reading through the first one was not only an experience enjoyable for it's own sake but also helpful in my day to day i'd say this hits on a few things that have come about to me recently - embracing finitude, ala four thousand weeks by oliver burke, that we can't and won't be able to learn or know everything while simultaneously embracing the fact that it is okay to simply do something for the sake of enjoyment, feeling awe, etc. - people tend to change in fits and spurts and massive changes are relatively uncommon in a short time span. think of oneself as a growing plant as opposed to a suddenly exploding fire - i've long felt that we think and understand the world around us in metaphors. read this in 'metaphors with live by' in college and since then the connections have tended to be endless. i'd say i am moving towards a different metaphor for people, not sure exactly how i'd word it, but it is moving away from humans as a machine or time is money and more towards humans a plant needing care and cultivation and..i don't have one for time yet
friedaanton 3y ago
[dead]

I think this applies more to creatives, than to other professions.

As Katarina Janoskova says, "So you read a book. You finished it, liked it, maybe even recommended it to others. It changed your life slightly while you were reading it and for a bit afterwards. And then you moved on with your life." I like that. That says it more succinctly.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
eye-robot 3y ago
To be honest, I would love to forget some books I read and re-live the thrill of being startled by the plot again. To be perfectly honest, I'd love to be startled by the plot the first time round

taopai 3y ago

I used to take endless notes on .org documents and build myself small wiki sites in django... You know what makes the difference? Take a walk, or catch a train and think about what you read. Find the main ideas and how the material relates to yourself. Play with it and ask yourself questions about it. Then next day try to answer them in paper without extra material. And only after that reread the book to check or find unsolved the answers. Learning is hard. There is nothing as easy learning. The good news is that it can be hand AND fun. About reading: Engage in every sentence, ask yourself what the writer is trying to tell you in every sentence, after that translate it to imagination and relate it with yourself and what you already know. There is shallow reading and deep reading. Deep reading is a must for technical books, but also a joy for fiction. I still remember so vividly the coldness and texture of the walls of the hobbit's first mountain tunnels despite haven't been told about it.

will5421 3y ago
* Learning from a book is hard
- taopai 3y ago
  Books are awesome. Really. But reading is the first step. You never learn only by reading. You have to relate the ideas with your prior knowledge and practice it or apply it somewhere. You also have to get a nice book. And have to practice reading. Reading is a skill, it's an extension of imagination. You have to practice that, and reading is an awesome way.
- AlwaysRock 3y ago
  This depends a lot on the person. I do not retain information that I read very well. I know this about myself so I try to ensure if I need to learn something I'm using other methods as my primarily way of learning. My brother, and many others, have the ability to read something from a book and retain that information fairly well and without using some other method of learning or reinforcing it. It's unfortunately that I didnt realize this until I was done with my schooling but its been really valuable to know this during my career.
agumonkey 3y ago
> hand AND fun I assume you meant hard and fun, and this is something I believe is the issue in adult life, things are unnecessarily hard when they could and should be hard AND fun engagement, quality, innovation might rise by a lot if we focused jobs around that
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
This is a truth about learning that people don't want to hear, but they need to hear it. Everyone wants to hear about magic productivity and learning hacks. They end up speed-reading and playing Anki, but they get nowhere. What's worse is they think they're getting somewhere, especially with the facade erected by games like Anki. There are no shortcuts to learning and memorizing what you read. You have to really digest it, synthesize your own thoughts on it, and use it. You get out of it what you put into it.

rikketikm 3y ago

Last year, I aimed to read 30 books. But I realized I usually forgot most of the stuff, just remembering some main ideas. Really getting the hang of a topic takes time. So this year, I'll read fewer books but focus more on understanding what I'm reading.

tmaly 3y ago
Back when I use to listen to a lot of podcasts, there was a guest sitting in for Tim Ferris on his podcast. The guy talked about just trying to take away one idea from what you read rather than trying to take a whole bunch of notes you’ll never remember.

lqet 3y ago

Katarina Janoskova, linked in the article, writes: > Is [reading] just a waste of time? Well, no, I don’t think so. Every book makes a mark. Even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory. Just as every single thing that happens to you does and every person you meet. I once read a short essay by Patrick Süskind (author of "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer"). I am paraphrasing, but in it, he discusses his embarrassment that he cannot remember even major plot details or character names of great works of world literature, although he has read them multiple times and they deeply inspired his own work. He then makes an interesting speculation: if a book really and deeply influences you, then maybe actively remembering facts and insights of the book becomes harder and harder, because the book's ideas have been so deeply ingrained into your brain and thinking that you cannot remember them as facts independent of your own thinking. But this doesn't mean that you have "forgotten" them.

Gooblebrai 3y ago
I never cease to be surprised with the attempts to make everything productive nowadays. Of course, everyone can do whatever they want but it seems to me a symptom of how society works nowadays that instead of just enjoying the act of reading and remembering whatever details impact us, we obsess with being able to retrieve information from them
- jbstack 3y ago
  This assumes that the main purpose of reading is always enjoyment. Often that is not the case; we read because we require the knowledge contained in the book for our work. The converse of only engaging with a book on an emotional level and retaining only those details which are interesting is forgetting those parts which were difficult/boring but useful.
GamerAlias 3y ago
Do you happen to have a link to said essay or know the name as I can't find it and would be interested in reading it. I also gladly confess to not remembering the plot of the vast majority of the works of fiction that I've read.

samuell 3y ago

I think there is more to be said about the topic that organically sticks to you. I have realized that this depends a lot on what you are "up to" at the moment. In my experience, I have a really hard time internalizing information about a topic that is far from some topic or work I'm engaged with at the moment. This means, I think: 1. That you can to some extent influence what you are "up to". 2. That you should probably organize your reading and other learning activities around the seasons of thinking themes in your life [1] [1] E.g. to me, that often means I'm into quite different themes during work days versus weekends, where I'm often exploring some slightly different topics.

tmaly 3y ago
This reminds me a little bit of the idea of affirmations as a filter on the mind. We tend to notice stuff based on our affirmations.

voidhorse 3y ago

Spot on. Just another symptom of a quantity obsessed culture. It's telling that people ask how many books did you read this year and not what was the best book you read about (a question of quality, over quantity).

dustincoates 3y ago
It's how you end up with Blinkist. Don't get me wrong, most books are overly stuffed and could stand to be much shorter, but you aren't going to take much from 5 minutes of a summary alone. I'm convinced that it's not really a learning app as much as it is for puffery.
- helboi4 3y ago
  Yeah I really can't think of anything worse than reading only summaries of books in an attempt to retreive efficient information. The point of the book is the journey and how it makes you feel. Even a non-fiction book.
- tmaly 3y ago
  Summaries just like asking ChatGPT to state the key takeaways of a book all lack the story and connection that helps us relate to the information in a human way.
mejutoco 3y ago
Like in the little prince, where it is stated that adults always ask questions about numbers and quantities :)

freetonik 3y ago

I distinguish between forgetting the content VS. forgetting the effect. When new information is ingested, it "changes you", i.e. is having an effect on your views and thought processes. Sometimes subtle, sometimes profound. So I might not remember what a book was about, and upon re-reading I have this weird experience: it feels familiar, ideas were somehow already processed in my brain, but due to forgetting the content I feel like I already read this in a past life. I forget the content of most books, articles, movies, etc., and I have to constantly remind myself that not remembering it is not a bad thing, is not a failure, and it was not useless. It's like my brain RAM + cache are large, but short lived, but the permanent storage is small, too abstract and incompatible with the raw data content.

hasoleju 3y ago

Learning from a book without having a real life problem I want to solve with this learning is really hard for me. If I have a problem I want to solve and use a book to find a path to the solution within it's pages, learning from the book is no problem at all. If I have no real life problem to solve and only read the book because I like the topic or want to learn from it for my future I only remember the broad concepts. But nevertheless, at least you know what's in that book and if you encounter a problem in the future you can revisit the book again.

shubhamjain 3y ago

> The first reason for this is that forgetting is a filter. When something you read resonates with you sufficiently for you to recall it without effort, that means something; it means it connects with your ideas and experiences in some relevant way. I take an issue with this assumption. When I leaf through my past notes, highlights—hell, even stuff I have written myself—I am surprised at many relevant things that I completely forgot about. It's true forgetting is a filter, but one mustn't underestimate the brain's capacity to forget useful stuff too. Maybe it's something you didn't need in a while, and need it now. Maybe it has become more relevant than it was in the past. For eg, I have restarted journaling recently, and this highlight from "On Writing Well", immediately hit me: > “Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. … Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past. It's written for a different context, but it made me realize a different way to approach my journaling. However, I agree wanting to retain everything is needlessly ambitious, and counter-productive. I was once obsessed with making notes about everything I read, but soon, I realized how unenjoyable it was making my reading. The better approach, I found, is to just make highlights. And go over them once in a while (a few months or so). That's enough of a knowledge-retention system for me.

3abiton 3y ago
Totally agree with your take, forgetfulness is also a function of time, and the less we repeat an idea the more likely we are to forget it.
tmaly 3y ago
I think the zettelkasten method works so well not because people record single thoughts, but because there is a process of revisiting and reviewing those thoughts and how they relate to other thoughts.

p0w3n3d 3y ago

To be honest, I would love to forget some books I read and re-live the thrill of being startled by the plot again.

lelanthran 3y ago
> To be honest, I would love to forget some books I read and re-live the thrill of being startled by the plot again. To be perfectly honest, I'd love to be startled by the plot the first time round :-/

CrypticShift 3y ago

I believe the root of the problem is a misconception of how humans function. The prevalent trends in related fields, from AI/Neuroscience [1] to PKM/TFT [2], are further entrenching this crude rational/willpower-based perspective. Perhaps the true (meta)rational perspective is to actually understand how to embrace the larger complexity of human experience (including sensibility/creativity/play...). Maybe the real willpower is to stop obsessing over this limited viewpoint (and the fears it produces) all the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain [2] https://numinous.productions/ttft/ https://numinous.productions/ttft/

dangus 3y ago

> Otherwise, wasn’t reading it in the first place a waste of our precious time? I weirdly wish the article entertained the answer of “yes!” Instead of doing that it barely backs the knowledge-obsessed away from the cliff in an attempt to convince them to just don’t take quite so many notes, maybe step back and stop pretending like you’re crunching for an exam and absorb the information you’re reading. But I would actually take this a step further for a lot of people and say that, depending on what you’re reading and why you’re reading, it might be quite literally a waste of time, especially if you’re reading not for enjoyment but because you feel pressure to gain knowledge and constantly upskill. There’s a concept of the movie buff being cursed to watch worse and worse movies over time. They start with the best must-watch movies and it’s all downhill from there. They get done watching something like (wildly random examples) Amelie, Spirited Away, or the original Star Wars trilogy and hunt for something that scratches the same itch, only to find out that they just watched the best/only example of that particular concept done well. In the same way, something I notice about frequent readers is that they’re reading utter trash, and probably for a similar reason. Luckily for them, there are far more books than movies, but I think there’s merit to this concept. Obviously, there’s a ton of value in reading especially during grade school as it helps you gain valuable language and writing skills, but I think my advice on top of what this article says is that you don’t have to read shit if you don’t want to. Life isn’t really only about knowledge-based enlightenment, that’s just one feature of life among many.

helboi4 3y ago
I dunno there are tons and tons of really good books out there. I don't think you could go through them all in one lifetime. Books are easier to create and have been around for much longer than movies. Executing a whole movie well requires at least thousands, if not millions of dollars, loads of equipment, a huge team of people who need to all be top notch at a variety of different specialist skills, extras, onsite permissions and often years of time. A book can be written in about one year or less through the work of only one person, using just one skill that we all learn as a child. It's way easier to execute a book well. So, as you said, theres more of them, and definitely because of this theres tons of good ones. Experts or people with interesting lives really don't have the time, resources or skills to make a film but loads of them write books. Most people who read almost constantly do read a decent amount of books that are less good than the others. Though they will often read more good books than you too. When I used to read books constantly, I could read faster and retain more. I could also write better. Now I read rarely because I only care to read the most useful things, it takes me way longer to read, I am less focused and retain less and my writing is somewhat worse. So I do think it's worth reading often for those benefits. Reading is so unenjoyable to me now I don't do it frequently. But it's not like I'm doing more useful and enjoyable things with my time either. Life isn't only about knowledge-based enlightenment, I agree, but it is usually about wasting a certain amount of time, whether you like it or not. So you might as well waste it well. In this case, waste it by reading lighter material so that your brain is always primed to read the good stuff efficiently. At least, that's my new years resolution.

jlengrand 3y ago

I've done something quite simple that has worked for me this year. I read with a highlighter pen, just highlighting the places I find interesting, and maybe cornering a few pages once in a while. That costs no more energy than just reading the book, if anything highlighting allows my mind to stay focused on the book. couple weeks after the book is finished, I'll come back only to the highlighted parts and write some of them down in a a4 page, which I then fold in the book. That way I have a personal 1 page book summary which I come back to from time to time. I liked an idea I saw on Youtube from someone saying "for each chapter, I find something actionable I commit to do for a week". A bit on the heavy side, but I like the actionable aspect of it

rramadass 3y ago
Having a A4 size book summary along with the book itself is a Great Technique! The chapter/book actionable task(s) idea is also great. Did you come up with the idea yourself or were inspired from some place else? Any more ideas you can share?
- jlengrand 3y ago
  The second one I picked up from https://www.youtube.com/@askvinh https://www.youtube.com/@askvinh, found it a good idea. The summary thing, honestly it's just because I was frustrated to feel like I had forgotten everything about the books I read a few weeks later, so I decided to find a reason to go back to them to try and retain more :). The only other tip I can think of is to start a book club at your workplace. It's a great way to commit to it a bit more while getting suggestions you wouldn't have had yourself.
  - rramadass 3y ago
    Your A4 summary page technique is ingenious. It forces one to focus on the absolute essentials gleaned while reading a book rather than fluff which is actually an art in "Note-taking". It is the same as "Precis Writing" but for a book. In case you didn't already know, you might find the following useful; 1) SQ3R - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R 2) Cornell Note-taking method - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes

infertainment 3y ago

>forgetting is a filter Exactly. Spaced repetition is a remarkably effective learning technique, but it can't tell you what to learn. At some point I think we have to stop listening to external authorities and rely on our own judgement about what to learn, and how to do so, as signalled by feelings of excitement about particular authors and ideas. One of the effects of formal education is to dampen or corrupt that intuition, e.g. by instilling the desire to learn things 'properly' (say in a certain prearranged sequence) or by the desire to only learn prestigious topics in order to impress other people. If we are engaged meaningfully with reality we will inevitably revisit particular subjects or authors multiple times. This is an organic form of spaced repetition. Forgetting certain things is part of that: we learn to swim during the winter and to skate during the summer.

bunderbunder 3y ago
I'm coming to wonder if tools like Anki are even detrimental for most learning tasks. Because SRS is built around rote memorizing a bunch of isolated factoids, while the most important part of mastering most subjects is not memorizing facts, it's learning interactions and patterns that let you make use of those facts. Like, imagine if someone learning to program put a huge amount of their effort into using flashcards to memorize the functions in their preferred language's standard library. I think most people would agree that this person is wasting their time because IDE tooling and Internet searches make it really easy to look up that information on an as-needed basis. So the real effort should be put into learning skills like domain modeling or how to read and debug code. I think that the same principle might apply to most subjects. Even in language learning, one of the places where SRS is most popular. Academics seem to be pretty skeptical of using any sort of flashcarding to learn vocabulary. In part because the empirical evidence doesn't actually seem to support it, and in part on theoretical grounds. The contemporary model for how the brain models language is fundamentally connectionist. Definitions and lemmas aren't something we naturally memorize as a list of facts and then plug into a grammar, which is why native speakers often have difficulty reciting conjugation tables or defining words. I think that formal education's tendency toward representing subjects as lists of factoids is fundamentally another manifestation of the McNamara Fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy). As long as educators have a mandate to (ostensibly) objectively quantify students' progress with grades and scores, they will have a need to represent the subject manner in a manner that permits easy quantification. And they will have to do so regardless of whether it actually makes sense to do so for whatever subject they're teaching.

oglop 3y ago

Completely agree based on my experience. The author's experiences are shared by me and what finally forced me to change my process was reading Alexander Grothendieck. I was not expecting such a prolific writer to espouse such relaxed principles to learn. More than anything, I noticed he emphasized taking time to just _sit and think_. Put things into your own words and pictures as you do. Don't act like a hammer trying to crack the nut, but instead simply "sit and listen to the voices of things". I also just enjoy life more with this method, no more rush. Much more listening.

8lahaj 3y ago

I started learning some introductory maths on my own recently--via a relatively rigourous proof oriented text, a format of which I had no background with--and on one of the first few pages the author says something along the lines of 'if you're learning this for the first time, you should be spending at least an hour per page'. I was shocked at first, a bit incredulous, an hour? per page? ridiculous -- until I started reached the actual text. I thought I was bright as a child, not studying, but as I got older I realized this was not the case (albeit still holding out some hope). At first, in this endeavor, I was discouraged spending so long, but then, oddly enough, I found myself proud of the fact I spent so much time trying to understand the content. Reading and re-reading until I understood what was going on -- and then the next day, I would forget some of it, so I would read it again (this time spending less time (woohoo!)), until I could now not only recite the content but understand it.

teecha 3y ago

this one really hit me at just the right time as a book I've really been enjoying, Thanks for the Feedback, has been lying unread on my shelf as I increasingly had decided the need to jot down everything that might be important as a read previously, i devoured, and loved, difficult conversations by the same authors and found quite a lot of things that resonated with me personally and professionally. some of these i've continued to use and integrate into my daily job as an assistant principal with staff, students, and parents, with great effect the long and short of it is that i gleaned quite a lot from simply reading through one book while stalling out on the second in an attempt to get everything out of it that i can. it is clear to me that simply reading through the first one was not only an experience enjoyable for it's own sake but also helpful in my day to day i'd say this hits on a few things that have come about to me recently - embracing finitude, ala four thousand weeks by oliver burke, that we can't and won't be able to learn or know everything while simultaneously embracing the fact that it is okay to simply do something for the sake of enjoyment, feeling awe, etc. - people tend to change in fits and spurts and massive changes are relatively uncommon in a short time span. think of oneself as a growing plant as opposed to a suddenly exploding fire - i've long felt that we think and understand the world around us in metaphors. read this in 'metaphors with live by' in college and since then the connections have tended to be endless. i'd say i am moving towards a different metaphor for people, not sure exactly how i'd word it, but it is moving away from humans as a machine or time is money and more towards humans a plant needing care and cultivation and..i don't have one for time yet

friedaanton 3y ago

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