20 ms·

You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

• kevindamm 3y ago
  Is the Internet a great enabler or is it holding the majority of us back? Does this mean I'll never escape the influence of those decades of corporate email?
  • mondobe 3y ago
    I would argue it's not an either-or. The Internet enables us to share the information that's most relevant/efficient, and it makes this information so accessible that the opportunity cost for NOT accessing it is increasingly high.
  • 7222aafdcf68cfe 3y ago
    It might be both ? I like to believe the internet is a great enabler when it comes to finding or accessing information, unfortunately discovery has become progressively worse for a long time now. The internet is also a massive distraction as Sturgeon's Law applies fully, and certain participants optimize for capturing attention with low value content. It definitely holds us back, and leads to multiple adverse outcomes. imo, engaging with the current day Internet must be done carefully as it's not all good, some days that works better than others.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• bugbuddy 3y ago
  What about people that don’t read at all? Are they nothing?
  • mondobe 3y ago
    The anecdote at the end of the post expands it to what we hear/learn in general.
  • tombert 3y ago
    I suppose we could abstract this to "you are your experiences, even if you don't always remember them."
  • Boogie_Man 3y ago
    They're illiterate, which is a tragedy.
    • komali2 3y ago
      Unless they grew up in a culture of oral history, in which case they may know a great many things.
      • 0xDEADFED5 3y ago
        i don't mean to alarm you, but i think you're failing the literacy test
        • forgotpwd16 3y ago
          Although the common definition of illiterate is unable to read and write, at least one dictionary also defines it (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/illiterate https://www.dictionary.com/browse/illiterate) also being used as having very little or no education or/and showing lack of culture.
  • rramadass 3y ago
    "The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them." - Mark Twain
  • joshthecynic 3y ago
    [dead]
• sharadov 3y ago
  I've always believed that two things will broaden your horizon - travel and reading. If you don't have the means or the time to travel then your next best option is reading.
  • bugbuddy 3y ago
    We need to qualify what we mean by “travel.” Airline pilots, stewardesses, and other people that travel a lot for work or other purposes do not necessarily have the “broadest horizon.” I think we should use another term to mean “experience other cultures and ways of life.” The same can be said about reading. Reading the entire One Piece manga series is not necessarily gonna broaden your horizons.
    • datameta 3y ago
      I those those people you mention would see it more as "commuting" and not the colloquial definition of "travel".
    • aworks 3y ago
      e.g. the movie Accidental Tourist
    • krick 3y ago
      Exactly. We "need" to qualify that, but I don't think we really can. And that's the problem with all such grand generalizations. There was a point in my life when I was very self-conscious about the fact I haven't really traveled by some people's standards. It kinda gave birth to that silly desire to "compete", to mark as "visited" as many countries as I could. And, I mean, traveling sure is nice, there was some void I filled doing that. But it was much quicker than I could expect, that this contest of sorts became totally meaningless, and I found out that I cannot even tell how many "countries" I visited. First off, if the only time I was in a country was a long time ago on some guided tour, it somehow feels dishonest to me now to say I've "been there". I feel like I need a refresher for it to actually count. Like, otherwise it's as good as seeing a movie. Right? Then, the mere saying that "I have visited a country" became kind of meaningless. What does it mean, to visit France? Nice is very different from Paris. Spending a couple of weeks in Alpine mountains (technically in France) kinda isn't what people mean when they say they've been in France. So, how much of it I need to see to say I've traveled France? Ok, probably it makes more sense to count cities. But what does it mean to visit a city? Do 6 hours in the downtown while I wait for a connecting flight count? Do a couple of days meaninglessly wandering the city count? Does a work trip (which I mostly spent in some office and in some hotel) count? Does spending several night drunk and high in Paris count "visiting Paris" same as walking famous museums and such? What is "better"? Maybe I should rather limit my accounting to specific places, like offices, restaurants, museums? Like, instead of saying that I've been to Paris, should I say "I've been in Louvre"? By the way, how many days do you need to "see Louvre"? How long do I have to stare at each paining for it to count? Does it count at all, if I have no fucking idea what I'm staring at, and there's nobody to tell me, why it's significant? I don't want to sound cliche, especially in that way, but, honestly, I cannot even say that I'm completely familiar with the city I've been living in for the most of my life. There is not a "good enough" degree of "visiting a place". It doesn't exist. Your "traveling" isn't necessarily more meaningful than airline pilot's "traveling" (or "commuting", as another person in this thread tried to insult them). And there is no such thing as "experience other cultures and ways of life". Experience your life and culture first and then come back to talk. (I wish to add "in the next life", but it's not like that "next life" of yours can be totally identical to the one you live now, even if it is spent at the same place, so I guess you'll have to experience it first too.) I wanted to also say a couple of things about reading the books, but this post is excessively large as it is. So, to summarize, all these "horizon broadening" contests are just vain and meaningless. Do whatever you want, read or visit whatever you want, and don't feel inadequate if you don't.
• ysofunny 3y ago
  except when an AI does it they call it "copyright violation"
  • joedwin 3y ago
    human can't experience it whole of internet like ai.so it is a very bad comparison.
    • ysofunny 3y ago
      we cannot even experience the whole of our bodies AND brains so I contend it is not such a bad comparison
  • bugbuddy 3y ago
    Replace AI with the words “a very large computer program run by extremely rich entities” and it now makes sense.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• al_borland 3y ago
  >I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me. I heard those quote for the first time about 4 years ago. I had often been a bit disappointed with myself for not taking more notes while reading, or reviewing what I read in a way where I could be one of those people to bring up quotes and concepts, citing back to the original source, with freakish accuracy. This quote made me feel better about simply reading, getting whatever I get out of it, and trusting that I’ve gained some perspective, even if I can’t cite all the sources that built my perspective on a topic.
  • rramadass 3y ago
    > simply reading, getting whatever I get out of it, and trusting that I’ve gained some perspective, This is the way to approach it, particularly in these times when knowledge is so vast and there is so much to read. The principle to keep in mind is "Knowledge for Knowledge sake." But what has happened ever since Industrialization is the focus on output (for a Economy). Hence everything is supposed to be done for a job/money/fame/etc. which i believe is detrimental in the general case.
    • verisimi 3y ago
      Who has knowledge though? Is the acceptance of this or that thought of another person's 'knowledge'? Are you filling up on knowledge or nonsense?
      • rramadass 3y ago
        This is where your Intellect's "Power of Discrimination" comes into play i.e. you are the decider on what is "Knowledge" or "Nonsense" for you. A good example is "Organized Religion".
    • _aavaa_ 3y ago
      > particularly in these times when knowledge is so vast and there is so much to read. I come down on the other side of this. The implicit assumption here is that more is better, but it's like drinking from the firehose. > The principle to keep in mind is "Knowledge for Knowledge sake." The other position is that knowledge is only useful if it lets you do something that you couldn't do without it. If you're gaining knowledge for the pleasure of gaining it, and I see no need to justify why one would do this, then whether you read deeply or read widely doesn't make much of a difference. But if you want to do something with that knowledge, the approach you take should be informed by what you want to do.
• landmammals 3y ago
  "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
  • 082349872349872 3y ago
    > The present is the past rolled up for action and the past is the present unrolled for understanding. —A&WD
• kromem 3y ago
  I actually realized recently that this is probably the underlying phenomenon behind "how is my phone listening to my conversations to show me ads/articles?" The other day I was thinking about LLM aggregation and in my internal dialogue used the example of "aliens built the pyramids" as a fringe theory that would be picked up on if tuning for other associated fringe positions by LLMs at places like Gab. Later in the day I saw in my news feed an article on "how were the pyramids built?" (One of my interests is Egyptian and LBA Mediterranean archeology, so on topic.) At first I thought "how the heck did it read my mind?" But then as I thought about it more I remembered that usually my go to example of a fringe position is flat earth. So why was I suddenly using pyramids as the example in my internal dialogue. What must have happened was that I initially saw the article headline in my feed in passing and didn't consciously register it, but when I was reaching for a fringe position example had been primed for that, and then only after having consciously been reflecting on the topic actually noticed the article in my feed. Which IMO is a much more alarming explanation for the phenomenon - that my thinking was being written to a degree by my feed - than that my phone was somehow listening in on things or reading my mind. It reminds me of a graffiti artist in NYC who used to write graffiti about how in reading it he had effectively graffitied your mind.
  • nsagent 3y ago
    Responding to something in your visual field unconsciously is very reminiscent of split-brain studies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
  • Zambyte 3y ago
    This is why your attention is so insanely valuable. Everyone thinks they're immune to advertising, yet people keep paying billions and billions of dollars to show something on your screen for a few seconds... because like it or not, it works.
    • OnionBlender 3y ago
      I've been using ad blockers and not watching TV for so long that I have very little ad resistance. Whenever I use someone else's computer that doesn't an ad blocker, it makes me wonder how people live like this. I'm so bad at handling distractions that I have to turn the radio or music off to make a left hand turn.
• lazydon 3y ago
  This is relevant not only in the context of books and blogs, but also for the shorter forms of reading that we do more often like HN or Reddit comments, tweets etc. One way to think about it is that reading on the internet, no matter how casual, is like scattering seeds on the soil of your mind. Some of these seeds will grow into trees and influence your actions and decisions, whether you're aware of it or not.
  • rramadass 3y ago
    Like all things, the effectiveness of the above depends on a good balance i.e. distraction by simply jumping amongst topics vs. concentrated thought on any one idea at a time. They are not the same. In Hindu/Buddhist philosophy there is a concept of "Samyama"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samyama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samyama) and "No-Mind" (one aspect - https://thetealetter.com/japanese-tea-ceremony/mushin-discovering-the-mind-of-no-mind https://thetealetter.com/japanese-tea-ceremony/mushin-discov...). What this means is that when you are reading/working/etc. on something, your mind is completely occupied with it to the exclusion of everything else. Even if that activity is of only a very short duration your mind is completely possessed by it and when it ends, your mind drops everything to do with it and moves on to the next activity to occupy itself completely. This is the basic idea behind meditation/mindfulness/etc.
• begueradj 3y ago
  Same thing is true about all your other habits: your thoughts, your food, your friendships, your music, what you buy and so on. Tell me your habits, I will tell you who you are.
• y04nn 3y ago
  Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.
  • p0w3n3d 3y ago
    Very close to "I am a product of my environment"
    • Nevermark 3y ago
      You are a product of how you process and interact with your environment. Be alert, situationally aware. Process actively, notice and distill patterns. Try things. Push the environment.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Which also reminds me of "You are the average of the few people you interact the most with".
    • wyclif 3y ago
      I don't think it's quite that close. There is still a distinction between being a product of your environment and being influenced by your environment. My HS college prep English teacher, who was one of the best teachers I ever had, put it this way: "Garbage in, garbage out." His point was that it simply isn't rational to believe that you can read nothing but National Lampoon, Mad Magazine, or the county newspaper and become a great writer. You have to read, digest, and breathe the air of the great works of fiction and literature and allow it to do its work in influencing your prose style, cadence, and structure.
  • daniel_reetz 3y ago
    Hmm. The experiences that changed and benefited me most were least predictable. As a result, I try to manage experiences less, and choose the unknown more. But in the spirit of what you've said, I try to avoid doing dumb, damaging, or boring things twice.
• thorum 3y ago
  One form this takes is that, even when you forget the details, you retain the general shape of the subject matter. You might not remember all the details about XYZ, but now at least you know XYZ exists: your internal map of the world is expanded and corrected, even if parts are a bit fuzzy.
  • ahazred8ta 3y ago
    There's a trick when reading nonfiction: read the table of contents, then flip ahead and read the entire index. You now have a good understanding of what topics the book covers, and where in the book they are. You can crank through a stack of 10 or 20 books and get a good sense of which ones are really worth reading. 'Half of all knowledge is simply knowing where to find the knowledge.'
    • bashd4 3y ago
      Thank you for commenting this. I can imagine this being supremely useful, especially if you decide to go ahead and read a book and it tells you much more than you would've guessed :) (either the titles/index are bad, or the content is good)
    • vasco 3y ago
      Also read the last page of every chapter, and you can avoid 90% of the fluff if it's non-fiction. Authors start with a short draft that is only juice and then add spam to make it into a book. That initial juice is the summaries of chapters that you find on the last page or two. The initial part of the chapter is just fluff and examples to drill the point down because they think you need 10 examples for each concept in order to justify paying as much for a blog post as you would for a book.
    • 082349872349872 3y ago
      Some authors even put fanservice in the index.
  • rramadass 3y ago
    Well put! This is exactly why i tell people to always get a book on any subject that catches their fancy and browse them at the very least. Many parts will be fuzzy if you are not using/working with them but that is no excuse for not knowing about them. Once the mind is exposed to various concepts/ideas it automagically stitches them into a coherent whole without you being conscious of it. A good way to think about it is the description of Mycroft Holmes by Sherlock Holmes; "The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearinghouse, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience; now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant."
• tux2bsd 3y ago
  [dead]
• akashkahlon 3y ago
  I realised this some years back, after an advise that if you find reading hard, read faster. Don't spend too much time understanding each word and line. Good advise
  • gverrilla 3y ago
    That will only work if the author also rushed to write the piece. Understanding is more desirable than finishing a book.
    • eszed 3y ago
      I'd take issue with your first sentence. The most challenging task is to distill a difficult topic into something that can be quickly understood. That inevitably takes time. When I write rapidly and unreflectively I often make readers confused.
• nojs 3y ago
  One approach I like is to relax and read the book quickly the first time, don’t take notes or anything. If it’s good, read it again (and again periodically). If not, don’t. This gives natural spaced repetition on the good stuff, and also you pick up different things in subsequent readings.
  • mindcrime 3y ago
    This is close to what I do sometimes (and I should be more disciplined about doing it all the time, TBH). I'll often read a non-fiction book once, at a leisurely pace, no notes or anything. Maybe I'll stick a few page flags in to highlight things that really stand out to me. Later, if I deem it worthwhile, I'l re-read the book and take notes. After that, I'll re-read my notes and try to consolidate my thinking and distill out the most important elements into a separate notes document. And on rare occasions, I may later re-read the original book a third time and refine my notes even further. If I'm reading a group of books on a related topic, I may open a new document and then read/re-read my earlier notes on each book, and put the synthesis into the new doc. The biggest problem with all of this is simply that it's very time consuming. But when doing a pointed, intentional "deep dive" into something specific, I've found it to be effective.
• Brystephor 3y ago
  test
• abbyck 3y ago
  I'm hackernews
• 7e 3y ago
  Citation needed. Assertions without evidence.
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  Ever re-read a book you once read a long time ago, only to find your view of it has fundamentally changed in some way? Perhaps you identify with different characters in a story, or your understanding of the author's arguments is entirely different. It's a strange experience, since it's the same book - but you have changed, and so the book has become a kind of time mirror that shows those personal changes reflectively. (It was Albert Camus' The Plague for me, revealing something of a transition from hopeful idealism to rather jaded realism).
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ThePallas 3y ago
  I found “How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read” by Pierre Bayard to be a fascinating look at how we remember and fail to remember what we do and do not read. (Yes, I read it.) https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-talk-about-books-you-havent-read-9781596917149/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-talk-about-books-you-ha...
• modeless 3y ago
  This is why blocking and muting (especially "mute words") are essential on social media. You have to be intentional about the diet of language you feed your brain, just as you have to be intentional about the diet of food you feed your stomach.
  • faeriechangling 3y ago
    I thought for the longest time I could tune it all out, that I was calloused. It's only in hindsight that I see how much of the toxicity I willingly looked at deeply affected me. Mostly because I started believing that everybody was like the worst, loudest people on the internet and believed what they did.
  • purple-leafy 3y ago
    Why not just get rid of social media? That’s what I did. Well, I have a hackernews account but that’s it
    • inatreecrown2 3y ago
      do you watch YouTube videos?
      • purple-leafy 2y ago
        Increasingly less. I’m giving away my tv tomorrow lol. I realise YouTube is just as bad with its influencers
    • modeless 3y ago
      There is a lot to be gained from social media, once filtered. It's not all bad.
      • purple-leafy 2y ago
        I think there is lots to gain from Wikipedia, but increasingly social media is being gamed and politicised and manipulated. For me the cons outweigh the pros heavily. I don’t even read the news. I feel incredibly free and happy with basically no online presence. Best I’ve ever felt. All I need is Wikipedia, hacker news, and a couple of books. Coding and coding books gives me all I need. Next step is to buy some GPUs to get away from hosted LLMs and start running them locally. Then I am truly free and information dense and self sufficient
• graycat 3y ago
  Common current computing can greatly ease the effort to "remember" what have read, written, thought, learned, etc. E.g., to help "remember" I have a general purpose file that I read/write with my favorite text editor and with some surprising statistics: Date started: September 2nd, 2005 Number of entries: 8412 Number of lines: 60,436 Number of bytes: 4,736,380 Really simple. Works really well. A little laptop computer handles this file for zero apparent effort. Of course, a lot more can be done, e.g., something like everyone having a Google just for their own life, but it is shocking how much can be done with just the statistics here.
  • jll29 3y ago
    Plain text is the most durable medium for knowledge management. Let everyone else commit knowledge suicide by PowerPoint, SharePoint and such.
    • graycat 3y ago
      I agree. As I explained to my sister in law, I try to stay with just plain text. Pushed to something else has me tempted to scream, say loudly enough to blow down trees for a radius of 20 miles.
• mo_42 3y ago
  Is this actually true? I know the text sounds really nice. Also citing nicely crafted words from famous poeple helps. I guess roughly, this is right. But there's more to add. I have a brain with a certain configuration. This configuration is partly genetic and partly environmental. The environmental part has been shaped by every sensory input so far, including all the books. However, some books resonate well. They make me think about the topic weeks after finishing them. Other books don't resonate at all. My brain's is not fit for them. It just ja sequence of words (e.g., the books my high school literature teacher made me read). I guess humans aren't a ANN that treats every training sample equal. Our brain has a mechanism to put more or less weight on sensory input given previous input. Some ideas are utterly confusing and don't stick at all. I think this happens a lot when people of different religions or political camps interact.
  • cdrini 3y ago
    I think everything you're saying is correct, but doesn't discredit what the post says. I think even books we don't necessarily resonate strongly with can have small, hidden impacts on our behaviour and thinking. They might give us an example of what a person does in a certain situation, and we internalise how we might respond in a certain situation. In this I think it is kind of similar to an LLM, where we kind of predict what our response to something should be, drawing from our past experiences on an abstract level. I think books we do resonate with can have a larger impact for the reasons you mentioned, but I think they all have an impact. I like to think of books as planets, and you're a spaceship. If you're not paying attention, as you graze a planet it'll slightly alter your course. Maybe in perceptibly so. If you are aware of it and resonate with it, you can kind of use its gravity to swing you into a different direct -- presumably onto a direction you want to go in.
    • onemoresoop 3y ago
      Almost everything we do, everything we hear, everything we see, everything we experience etc.. they all have an impact. And while books do shape our thinking the statement "You are what you read" is nothing different from the hyperboles/metaphors "You are what you eat" or "You are who you associate yourself with" etc.
• samlhuillier 3y ago
  I like to think of this like fine-tuning LLMs. When you fine-tune an LLM it doesn't pick up and memorise all of the training data. Rather it adjusts its weights/perspectives based on the content trained on/read.
• porushpuri 3y ago
  Guess that makes me part mysterious novel and part forgotten grocery list.
• jbverschoor 3y ago
  Your body is what you eat and how you use it. Your mind is what you read, hear, and how you apply it.
• lencastre 3y ago
  That and the constant feeling of deja vu
  • jfoutz 3y ago
    You might want to get that checked out. Occasionally mis writing a memory is pretty normal. Constant deja vu is usually an indicator of bad stuff happening in your brain. Like busted hardware.
• WA 3y ago
  If I read something with a critical eye, it’s not the content that shapes me, but the way I engage with the text. Otherwise, every conspiracy theory I read about would shape and change me.
• shrubby 3y ago
  Yes. So much this.
• hi-v-rocknroll 3y ago
  My biological father once claimed he was "totally immune" to advertising; I nearly fell over dead that instant with laughter. Roger Ailes, Edward Bernays, and William Randolph Hearst applied similar principles, leaving lasting influences on the course of American history: one bent a hundred-fifty million Americans towards a retreaded version of the Nixon ideology, one made cigarettes appeal to women and had democracies overthrown for fruit companies, and the latter decided how to spin the news, became a Nazi, and nearly convinced America fascism was a "good idea". I don't see how any human alive, unless they lived under a rock, can reasonably trace the origin of any of their beliefs or preferences. So, I must conclude beliefs, preferences, and ideologies are more or less arbitrary because most people don't spend metacognition effort on analyzing their formation or their change.
• hscontinuity 3y ago
  This is going to come off as esoteric or metaphysically based. However, that is not my intention. I base the understanding of simple and/or complex ideas/theories on context alone. Meaning, much can be extrapolated if you simply philosophize the workings of a given system rather than detailing how the system is actually deployed/executing. Example - if all matter we interact with in our world (and manipulate) is essentially compiled in different formations but derived from the very same essence of building blocks. . . then every living organism and inate object is inherently linked together somehow, someway. The same goes then, for human experience (and thus a reflection of material basis and external fields applied). If a ferromagnetic material (iron) is capable of becoming ferromagnetic permanently and also capable of existing without, then not only is the inherent expectation of matter to transform from one form to another; external experiences applicably experienced result in the same manifestation. But once again - If you happen to concede the notion that all things in the physical universe are essentially built from the same blocks, then so are the experiences of humans as well and as expected would appear to be connected in some way as well. Meaning, the experience affects the subatomic or quantum levels, thus changing quantum properties resulting in a formal change to the underlying building blocks (genes, DNA copy, etc). That's my take. To me, this OP is just an example of exposing this on a philosophic level.
  • rramadass 3y ago
    You might find the "Samkhya" school of Hindu Philosophy relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya
    • hscontinuity 3y ago
      Thank you for linking. Very much appreciated.
• keefle 3y ago
  Reminds me of an old Arab tale (paraphrased, from memory, translated): Once upon a time a man wanted to be handed the title of a poet, so he went to the king of poets at his time, and asked him to give him the title of a poet. The king of poets asked the man, "Do you memorize tens of thousands of the best poetry?", the man said "I do not", the king of poems asked of him: "go memorize them then come back to me". The man went to a faraway isolated monastary, spend a couple of years memorizing the poems, then came back to the king of poets shouting in excitement "I've memorized the tens of thousands of poems! Can you hand me the title of a poet now?". The king of poets asked of him "Now forget them". Only after years again spent in the monastery forgetting the poems, was the man given the title of a poet. (Side note: this story also kinda remind me of LLMs, and how they kind of "memorize" text initially but the more data is poured in the more they "forget" the exact texts)
  • JacobiX 3y ago
    I find this tale quite interesting. Could you please point me to its origin or name?
    • keefle 3y ago
      Of course! It's from a book containing a collection of old tales. It's called "one thousand tales and a tale" (the book only contains a hundred) You can find it here. The tale I referenced is on page 61. (Unfortunately I didn't find an English copy of the book but there might be one) https://archive.org/details/ar108roman64/page/n60/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/ar108roman64/page/n60/mode/1up
• keiferski 3y ago
  I love reading as much as anyone, and probably finish on average, 100 books a year, but - I’ve gradually become skeptical of the idea that books are an ideal format for acquiring and retaining knowledge. I’ve written a few little comments about this in the past [1] but I’ve been meaning to explore the idea further. I originally began thinking this when I realized I could only remember a handful of details from books I had spent hours reading. The short version is this: there’s nothing inherent about the format of a book that makes it ideal for learning. It is mostly a historical consequence of the fact that scratching symbols onto stone or paper, then replicating that paper/stone is easier to develop than recording and playing back audio or video. Human beings spent thousands of years using languages that were purely spoken ones, and writing is a fairly recent thing historically speaking. If somehow it became possible to record and play back spoken language thousands of years ago, writing might have never become a widespread thing at all. Even today, speech is how the vast majority of the world uses language. Let’s not forget how influential the book form has been on thought, from the Bible to the Quran, etc. And so if you brush away the mystique and legacy of books and think about what an ideal learning format would be, I think it would be quite different from a book. Probably it would incorporate audiovisuals, spaced repetition, and some form of storytelling. All of this is about reading for information, not for pleasure. But I don’t primarily read fiction for information in the first place. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20940944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20940944, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319599, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38095507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38095507, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39521964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39521964
  • JacobiX 3y ago
    I agree with you, maybe books are not the ideal format for acquiring knowledge. I read a lot of fiction books, mainly classics for pleasure. And what I found unique is that only in books I have access to the interior monologue of the characters, their thoughts, and on some occasions, direct access to their "stream of consciousness". I love it, and I discovered that some characters (but in reality it's the authors) have a similar process of thought, and some others do not, and notice and sense things differently ...
• rolisz 3y ago
  This reminds me of finetuning LLMs vs using RAG: In RAG you "know" what the model knows and it's easy for it to give sources - you literally give it to the model in the prompt. In finetuning, the model learns something, but it might not be able to reproduce it perfectly later on. But it's models have been changed.
• spacebanana7 3y ago
  I often wonder how much free will I have in my political opinions. Are they simply a time weighted average of the media viewpoints I consume?
• ArcMex 3y ago
  Books, generally speaking, have changed my life for the better. I curate my reading list and only mindfully read what is beneficial to me. The more I practiced mindful reading, the better I got at many things (from work, finances, to friendship and marriage). I can attribute this to what seems pretty obvious - apply what you learn or think deeply about it to understand its meaning to you.
  • vocram 3y ago
    How do you pick what to read? Is it based purely on interests or areas you feel behind?
• tminima 3y ago
  I could never put it words like in the article, but I always thought this was true (not just to books, but to all the inputs). Many times in my life, I have remembered obscure stuff from a random movie or specific parts of a conversation that I had many years back. Similarly with books, I can't recall it completely, but the sense of it is something that easily pops up. Now I have started taking advantage of this using Anki. Whenever I read something having a particularly interesting or thought-provoking idea, I find a way to create flashcard(s) out of it. Now I am able to recall these things more often and many times they have guided me in my life or helping out friends.
• redbell 3y ago
  This is really an interesting article as well the blog itself, I admire it! One interesting finding that I never seen in any blog is the notes part (https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/ https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/) where the author shows the notes he collected from various sources with his comments. This one (https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/#2024-04-15T0822 https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/#2024-04-15T0822) from The Node.js Documentary, especially his comment, is outstanding: A big company is like a giant ship that has to start making its turn a mile before the actual turn itself. Whereas the community is comprised of thousands of small, distributed boats that can make (in contrast) hairpin turns.
• kieckerjan 3y ago
  A corollary of this idea that also the bad stuff that you read leaves a trace, and not necessarily a good trace. To continue the food metaphor: like junk food there is junk reading and while it may satisfy some need it is all informational empty calories and transfats. Which brings up a subject I pondered many times: to go on an information diet. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.
  • 7222aafdcf68cfe 3y ago
    In this context, I often refer to the essay by Rolf Dobelli, titled Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet. It can be found on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20130117104220/http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Part1_TEXT.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130117104220/http://dobelli.co...
    • kieckerjan 3y ago
      Actually Dobelli was the one who got me thinking about this. I tend to agree with him, although eschewing all news is a bit too extreme to my taste. I tried scaling back my intake by switching from a daily paper to a weekly paper, but one has to have tremendous discipline to avoid the news of the day on the internet. Especially if the internet is your job, like it is for me.
      • 7222aafdcf68cfe 3y ago
        I 100% concur, it's not easy. I block / filter most of the news sites I might wander to mindlessly with uBlock, and even filter out DOM elements that have certain keywords. I also found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events to be a good alternative for daily news without the nonsense.
        • DavidPiper 3y ago
          Chiming in as someone who's been doing this. Haven't watched a TV news program since 2020. The only thing in 4 years that I "missed" (which it turns out actually means "was delayed in finding out about to a degree that other people actively comment on it") was the recent escalations in the middle-east. And even that I was only about 24 hours behind. You really miss nothing, particularly with the amount of passive news we ingest via social media. (I also have a fairly minimal social media diet.)
• mipsi 3y ago
  There is some irony hidden in the remark that his wife sent him the inspiring quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, that compares books to meals having eaten.
• _zamorano_ 3y ago
  Nowadays, I'm re-reading books that left a mark on me. It's not uncommon to discover that some clever ideas I thought I came up with have been, in fact, read in a book. Humbling. The thing is, you cannot get to that point by following productivity hacks. It's true that most divulgation books can we summarized in 2 pages. But the way good authors present the same idea again and again, through different examples and viewpoints is what remains in your brain.
• eviks 3y ago
  This is just a convenient excuse, just like this > Education is something you have even if you don't remember anything Though the professor's test is just as poor quality as the whole blog's conversation where intellectual exercise is compared to remembering breakfasts
• ChaitanyaSai 3y ago
  There's an even more profound truth here. You are what you experience, even if you don't always remember each one. You are a constellation of experiences. Consciousness is the consensus mechanism that stitches them together to make you. This can sound like spiritual woo-woo but that's the distillation of a pretty good scientific model. More here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5 https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...
• palad1n 3y ago
  What if we become who we are in the dreams we forget?
• matthewfelgate 3y ago
  We are just weights of an LLM.
• lynx23 3y ago
  I often notice that reading a book will sometimes change my active vocabulary in subtle ways. Influx of NIH-thoughts is very very valuable.
• cranium 3y ago
  I'd argue the reverse is also true: you can remember books perfectly and not integrate their teachings. Depending on where you are in life, a book can model, confront, polish, and/or destroy (no always a net negative) your core principles – either passively or intentionally, by taking notes and rereading.
• picadores 3y ago
  And you read what you find in great aggregators: https://bookmarks.reviews/ https://bookmarks.reviews/ https://www.nybooks.com/ https://www.nybooks.com/ https://www.perlentaucher.de https://www.perlentaucher.de
• roodrax 3y ago
  the emerson quote just hits so hard and true
• throwawaylolx 3y ago
  Not really buying it. I mostly liked the same type of books all my life. I read a lot out of my comfort zone and I never particularly enjoyed it, nor do I think they impacted me much. I read what I am, not the other way. Maybe others are more influenceable.
  • retwertett 3y ago
    *open-minded
• ptrm 3y ago
  you are what you read, you are what you eat... it goes on and on :)
• vijucat 3y ago
  This is why I don't read. Try writing a poem. Mine were so obviously regurgitations of past material consumed that I realized that to output anything original, I had to develop an individuality by starving the creative neurons, so to speak. Of course, this is only restricted to fields where one would like to produce novel output. You're free to read academic papers, etc; But if you want to write original sci-fi, start by not reading sci-fi.
  • rramadass 3y ago
    No, You have quite the wrong idea! Novelty is not born in a vacuum devoid of input. It comes from internalizing/assimilating a whole lot of concepts/ideas only after which can you manifest new things from it. In Martial Arts (also applicable to other fields) there is a saying; In the beginning the student knows nothing and hence can move freely but not effectively; as he starts learning he is confused/all-mixed-up and cannot move freely nor effectively; but finally when he masters the movement, he has internalized it and hence can move freely and effectively. In philosophy too a "Master of Wisdom" is said to revert to "the original child-like state" (but with the knowledge of the world in hand).
• OisinMoran 3y ago
  Surprised nobody has linked PG's short piece on the same topic: https://paulgraham.com/know.html https://paulgraham.com/know.html
• coffeeblack 3y ago
  Just like any other LLM.
• AvAn12 3y ago
  This gets to some of the difference between human intelligence and LLM training. The machine remembers everything verbatim (plus a vector representation). Most people have faulty memory but somehow make a deeper encoding of the impact a book or life experience had. Agree there is some analogy between vector encoding vs the mind’s representation — but it’s a loose analogy. LLMs and search etc are useful tools for sure - but definitely don’t have anything like human level deeper (yet faulty) intelligence. Sorry if I’m stating the obvious… cheers
  • segmondy 3y ago
    The machine doesn't remember everything verbatim.
• VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  I think that Emerson quote is just one big cope. The books you read make you as much as you want them to make you. You get out of them what you put into them. If you're consuming books but not able to recall much from them, then you're not putting enough into them. I especially don't like the Emerson quote because of how consumerist it is in its sentiment. It's a self-soothing license to passively consume and relieve oneself from any obligations to work to derive deeper substance from what they consume.
• xianshou 3y ago
  Reframing inevitably in the direction of AI, this also expresses the difference between, for instance, pretraining and retrieval in LLMs. People expect large models to memorize the dataset and are frustrated when it doesn't, even more so when it does but only partially and not thoroughly enough to rely on. But pretraining data : large models as books : people, building a world-sense that is refined and augmented through fine-tuning (for people, specialized training) and retrieval (for people Google searches, Stack Overflow, etc). People complain about the extent to which we anthropomorphize GPT-class models, but I gain just as much from backporting the analogies that work for LLMs to my own experience.
• FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Nietzsche said something similar, I believe he advocated picking 100 books and just reading them deeply, thus curating by not reading every junk book that came along. But can't find the quote where he said that, or his list. Does anybody have a link to Nietzsche's reading list? It seems it is hard to find things on the internet lately.
• 8bitme 3y ago
  > the goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking. I would apply this to fiction books too. Some people consider reading fiction books a waste of time. But fiction books too can expand your mind by exploring ideas that may not be possible in non-fiction books or exploring the same ideas but in a way that non-fiction books cannot achieve easily or at all.
  • scop 3y ago
    I exclusively read nonfiction until I had a traumatic event happen to me. After that, I read fiction nonstop for several years. Fiction was the only thing that could help me process it. (Note: not escape the trauma, but help me process it. Nonfiction was too clean, black-and-white, etc. Too simple. Fiction presented a world of uncertainty and doubt that I could live through and thus reflect upon the traumas I had undergone.)
  • Balgair 3y ago
    " In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you." -Mortimer J Adler I think this quote applies too.
  • habosa 3y ago
    Do people really consider reading fiction a waste of time? I’d love to meet someone who says reading Mark Twain or Toni Morrison or Vladimir Nabokov is a waste of time. Actually … I don’t think I’d like to meet that person. There are definitely some forms of fiction that are less enlightening than others, but even the “lowest” forms are generally time better spent than scrolling the internet or watching random TV channels.
  • Hates_ 3y ago
    The way I've heard it phrased is "Non-fiction teaches us about the world, fiction teaches us about ourselves."
  • tmnvix 3y ago
    As a kid, when I asked an uncle why he was always reading, he said "we read to know we are not alone". I don't know if he was quoting someone else, but I took it to mean that there are things that we think privately and don't share in any other medium but fiction. Not in conversation, film, etc. We've all had that moment when reading fiction where we instantly recognise something and think to ourselves, 'huh, so I'm not the only one!' For this reason, I think that fiction is an invaluable aspect of human communication.
• pipes 3y ago
  Having kids has made me realise that how your parents treated you and how your siblings treated you probably plays a bigger role than anything else (maybe apart from genetics, I'm amazed at how much my kids personalities have differed from birth)
• gumboshoes 3y ago
  I like to point out our first language is usually the best example. We remember where or when we learned very few of the thousands of first-language words we know. Yet, there they are, waiting to be recalled. Sometimes this is called "white knowledge," after white noise, meaning it's there, hidden, indiscernible, until you strain your senses to retrieve it.
• keybored 3y ago
  I don’t buy it at all. Effective learning[1] is about effortful recall. Things that you just read have a transient learning effect. But the common way of cramming is done through this transient means because it is a simple strategy for unstructured/otherwise busy students and it works until the exam (but not much after). And you are… maybe in the sense that it always remains in your unconscious. But what use is that? Memory and learning is about being able to pull things out of the subconscious (unconcious?). Look at any serious craft or activity where people have to learn things. They learn by doing. Doing things as realistically as possible is better. And doing-learning also transfers to talk/read-learning (discussing how to do something). Meanwhile talk/read-learning does not transfer to doing-learning as much. Frankly our culture overrates book-learning. By a long shot. This might not seem the case because now frequent long-form reading can be regarded as a practically monastic activity, what with all the stupid alternatives we have at our disposal. But book reading and learning hardly ever directly translates to practical learning. This attitude (of Emerson’s) sounds like Behavioralism. That you’re whatever input you have processed. I find Chomsky’s Nativism and Rationalism to be more compelling. Consider a socialist who reads 500 liberal think tank pieces. He’s more likely to either be as socialist by the end or more (double-down effect). > I have to constantly remind myself of this. Especially in an environment that prioritizes optimizing and maximizing personal productivity, where it seems if you can’t measure (let alone remember) the impact of a book in your life then it wasn’t worth reading. This for sure is a problem if you have set some goal of reading one book every week. But that goal is borne out of that exact same Optimization Mindset. Most people don’t fret over how many Good Words pass by their eyes in a year. [1] the book Make it Stick
  • dcow 3y ago
    I can usually tell which programmers read man pages (generally RTFM) and which don’t. And I still `man ln` more frequently than I’d like to admit to make sure I get the argument order correct. > Consider a socialist who reads 500 liberal think tank pieces. He’s more likely to either be as socialist by the end or more (double-down effect). Rhetorically assuming this is truth, he’s also a socialist who has a better grasp on the liberal perspective. He’s a different socialist than his comrade who’s never bothered to explore liberal writing.
• mountainb 3y ago
  One thing here that I disagree with is that there is a major difference between things that you know cold and things that you need to refer to external memory to refresh your recollection. Studying something closely and repetitiously enough to know it by heart makes the knowledge more useful. It also provides you with a sort of navigational buoy or pylon that acts as a referent for other important pieces of knowledge. Mass media (electronic media in particular) tends to encourage the user to seek many shallow impressions that do not always leave deep and permanent marks. So, any single impression doesn't leave a big mark or define your character. But deeper study into a single topic or work does have a profound effect on who you are.
• ChildOfChaos 3y ago
  This is great. A few years ago I read a book a month and too this day my thinking is still guided a lot by a lot of those books, but I stopped doing it because it was taking so much time in the amount of notes I was taking and I just don't have the time anymore. But i've started to get back into it, realising that I don't need to take notes, because I rarely referred to them anyway and jus listening to audiobooks is engaging my mind in these topics in ways I might be able to fully grasp at the time and the idea that I need to leave with a notebook full of ideas after the end of a book just isn't true.
• ChildOfChaos 3y ago
  The advancement in AI and LLMs with decent context windows is a usecase I am excited about for all of this. Because I can read a book without taking such a huge amount of notes, which makes it easier to stay with those ideas and quicker to read and then I can load a PDF of the book into an LLM and chat with it about the concepts in the book, use it to produce notes, or discuss ideas that were in it and ask it to cross reference it. It also makes it easier for me to come back to it several months later, I find that this can be better than my notes, as if i remember something from a book that is now relevant, can be loaded into an AI and ask it about that specific part and the quotes that are relevant.
• sharpshadow 3y ago
  Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams goes into this subject and describes how one processes all experiences during sleep through dreams. Everything gets connected and stored away. Repeated every night. The knowledge you have gets connected with the new information you receive. The more knowledge you have the more valuable new information gets. At some point there is simply very little new information about a topic and the topic bores you.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• trsh 3y ago
  This is a great way to frame a shift in perspective around what we consume, but just to add some nuance to this: not only should we be thoughtful about the content we consume in a similar way that we are thoughtful about the food we consume, but we should also be self compassionate. Sometimes we want to eat those Chicken 'n' Waffles, just like sometimes we go on a trashy TV show binge! It's just a small thing that serves as a comforting release, and we shouldn't let the guilt overcome us!
  • soylentcola 3y ago
    Even "comfort food" (or the equivalent) can expand and exercise your thought. I read a ton of what even I consider "fluff". Science fiction, fantasy, mystery, adventure, horror. Novels that get unceremoniously lumped under "genre fare". But even if the primary motivation is entertainment, I can honestly say that from a young age, reading lots of anything exposed me to new ideas, ways of thinking, and perspectives. Even something as simple as spelling and vocabulary seem to come a lot easier, if only due to having seen so many words written out over time. I remember being a kid and never really having issues with spelling or knowing most words because I'd at least run across them already. That's not to say reading more "serious" material is useless. It just isn't an either/or question.
• hirvi74 3y ago
  I read a lot of being a good programmer, but I am far from one, so perhaps this is only true in some circumstances. ;)
• aj_g 3y ago
  I've saved a link to more or less every thought-provoking article I've read since the last 12 years (first in Evernote, and now Obsidian). I have two notes, one "links", the other "article notes", that's just a bare minimum note-taking system for stuff I read on the web. Both notes are huge, and undoubtedly contain many tidbits of advice, perception shifting ideas, or "subjectivity merges" (https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/books-are-subjectivity-merging-devices https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/books-are-subjectivity-me...). One of my project ideas now that has been building in my mind is, 12 years on, to go back and re-read and re-evaluate many of these links, and do a short write-up on how I've been influence by this article or any explicit choices that I've made in my life that could likely be attributed to it. I think this would be fascinating from a psychological/neurological POV but also a really cool chance to reflect on how I've changed/grown as a person.
• yu3zhou4 3y ago
  I got a hunch that a free will is related to both self-control and self-awareness
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  This goes both ways: the understanding of what you read is constructed from the worldview you contextualize it with. This is how we are able to use ambiguous language, also known as "Context-Sensitive Grammar". We provide our own backstory (context) that provides a Just-In-Time unambiguous definition of each ambiguous word or phrase. There is a lot of excitement around LLMs, because they are capable of doing something with Context-Sensitive Grammar. Unfortunately, that something is not equivalent to the arbitrary disambiguation that we do using context. The core feature of an LLM (with respect to natural language processing) is that it never defines anything. Instead, an LLM blindly provides whatever text it deems "most likely to happen next", all without ever associating any text to any meaning. We wrap this process in "training", which hopefully guides common interactions in the direction we want, but that is never a guarantee.
• disqard 3y ago
  Paraphrasing McLuhan: "We become what we behold"
• HSO 3y ago
  But how had I come to believe in this idea in the first place? A combination of my own experience and other things I'd read. None of which I could at that moment remember! And eventually I'd forget that Hilbert had confirmed it too. But my increased belief in the importance of this idea would remain something I'd learned from this book, even after I'd forgotten I'd learned it. Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why. The place to look for what I learned from Villehardouin's chronicle is not what I remember from it, but my mental models of the crusades, Venice, medieval culture, siege warfare, and so on. Which doesn't mean I couldn't have read more attentively, but at least the harvest of reading is not so miserably small as it might seem. This is one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect. But it was a Surprise to me and presumably would be to anyone else who felt uneasy about (apparently) forgetting so much they'd read. Realizing it does more than make you feel a little better about forgetting, though. There are specific implications. 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. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times. I always used to feel some misgivings about rereading books. I unconsciously lumped reading together with work like carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you did it wrong the first time. Whereas now the phrase "already read" seems almost ill-formed. [1] P. Graham. How you know. Dec 2014. https://www.paulgraham.com/know.html https://www.paulgraham.com/know.html
  • dev_0 3y ago
    [dead]
• vlucas 3y ago
  Garbage In, Garbage Out. It really is that simple.
• alberto_ol 2y ago
  With regard to the Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote, it is likely that he never said or wrote those words. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/20/books/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/20/books/