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The Dangerous Effects of Reading
- G650 12y agogolden
- lucio 12y agoGreat post. A must read, to stop compulsive reading
- VLM 12y agoMinor correction, "The dangerous effects of reading fluff". Much like you are what you eat, you'll become what you read...
- bryanlarsen 12y agoThat's a completely different thesis. Reading fluff has few or none of the side effects described in the post. You don't learn anything, you don't practice separating filtering crap from gold, you don't look cool. It doesn't (actively) change the way you think. Of course there are lots of good reasons why you shouldn't read an excessive amount of fluff, but this article is about why "good" reading and consumption is bad for you. (if not accompanied by a healthy amount of putting theory into practice).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mtbcoder 12y agoThe title of the article is a bit unfortunate. The context is about "information overload" from over-consumption and not that the act of reading is itself harmful.
- ThinkingGuy 12y agoHe seems to be saying a lot of the same things as the author of the book and website "The Information Diet." http://www.informationdiet.com/ http://www.informationdiet.com/
- mikekchar 12y agoThe only thing I want to quibble with is capturing your ideas. You don't need to do that. If you let your mind go, you will have another idea in a minute. If you start making lists of ideas, then you are just consuming your own input. I have a kind of rule of 3. I can do 3 things well. Spending time with my family is one. Spending time at my job is another. I've only got one other thing left that I can do well. If I split it up into a million different ideas, then I really won't do any well at all. Must purge my github account of cruft...
- hammerandtongs 12y agoI actually find writing ideas down helps me clear out the cobwebs. It allows me to move something that's consuming a piece of working memory and or subconscious processing into a concrete form that my mind can let go of. I can come back later and decide whether to do anything with the idea or not. As a bonus very often the process of writing it down revealed a bunch of the complexity or awkwardness of the idea.
- jotm 12y agoThat's not the case for me - sometimes, I get awesome ideas that I simply forget and never remember. Writing them down is great. Though I rarely browse through that list of ideas - a couple times a week, maybe, or when I need new ideas for content :-)
- gglitch 12y agoI now use a small notebook, just 80 pages and pocket-sized. All entries are timestamped. When I reach the end and start a new one, I review the last one and my first entry is a list of things from the last that I still find interesting.
- normloman 12y agoJust out of curiosity - what is the time stamp for? I also keep noteboks. I have a rough idea of what months / years they span. I've never needed to know the exact date or time I had an idea. Are you trying to find out which part of the day gives you the most ideas?
- partition 12y agoArthur Schopenhauer wrote extensively on this and I feel he said it best. [Excessive reading] robs the mind of all elasticity; it is like keeping a spring under a continuous, heavy weight. If a man does not want to think, the safest way is to take up a book directly he has a spare moment. - "Thinking for Oneself" Contains a great quote by Pope Duncaid 3: "Forever reading, never to be read." Link: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter6.html https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...
- hammerandtongs 12y agoThis was an excellent read, thanks for the link. A great deal of nuance in the essay about doing vs thinking vs reading/consuming.
- spenuke 12y agoLewis Carroll also wrote an excellent essay using digestion as a metaphor for reading. http://harpers.org/sponsor/balvenie/lewis-carroll.1.html http://harpers.org/sponsor/balvenie/lewis-carroll.1.html
- ominous 12y agoSeems to be down for now. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3403936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3403936
- eliben 12y agoI think this is especially important for programmers. While learning a new technology (or programming in general), many get trapped in an endless consumption cycle - there are enough books and blogs to fill many lifetimes of reading for any semi-popular topic. It's extremely important to balance consumption with a healthy amount of creation (practice). Otherwise it's really hard to gain real knowledge.
- thenomad 12y agoYeah, that's a problem in a lot of fields, not just programming. Just from my own experience, writers, marketers, filmmakers (and all the sub-disciplines within filmmaking), poker players, and entrepreneurs all suffer the same challenge these days. It's all too easy to get caught in the read -> feel you don't know enough to start yet -> read more -> never actually finish anything trap.
- tomjen3 12y agoThat is definitely me. The problem is how little reading do I need? What if the next article is really important?
- thenomad 12y agoMy advice, if you want it: try and make the thing you want to make. If you get absolutely stuck, read more to find the solution. Otherwise, finish that thing, then think about what could have gone better with that thing. Research ways to do those things better. Make the next thing. Repeat. (Not theory - this is how I'm approaching learning a fairly major new discipline to me right now. It seems to be working OK.)
- Kronopath 12y agoThe way I get around this, at least with programming, is I read just enough so that I can start putting something together, and then I start on a small and silly project. If I run into any obstacles in building the thing, then I go back to my resources and read a bit more until I can get around that obstacle. It works pretty well.
- niche 12y ago"Time in bathroom reading on phone" When going to the bathroom, just go to the bathroom