A new system for reading

by restreitinho • 13 years ago

23 42 13 years ago

claudius4• 13 years ago

> Respect the attic.

I always found this about the single most obvious faux-pas of Sherlock Holmes – if you give your brain enough time to properly organise the data, it does have (nearly) infinite storage. Choosing carefully what to read and what to ignore only leads to less information, in turn making it more difficult to build links between different ‘information islands’ and hence retaining said information more easily.

> Basically, if I don’t instantly fall in love with an article/book/blog, I stop reading and move on.

I don’t know the definition of ‘fall in love’ here, but this sounds rather dangerous as well, as it makes it more difficult to learn actually new things and supports living in one’s own little bubble of information.

> Getting informed is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And life’s too short for bad information.

But how to decide whether a given datum is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ information before consuming said datum and linking it up with the rest of your memory? Maybe it looks utterly senseless at the time you first read it, but it might well be missing piece linking two large and so far separate areas together.

restreitinho16• 13 years ago

Well the first one only works if you balance it with some variety. My point isn't to stop reading different stuff, but consciously choose what you want to read.

Yeah, "fall in love" isn't that concrete, I know. But again, it works for me if I manage to rotate the types of content I consume.

About the last topic, I give you that. But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.

Anyway thanks for taking to time to deconstruct some of the ideas I wrote. I think this topic has too few people writing and thinking about it.

claudius4• 13 years ago

> My point isn't to stop reading different stuff, but consciously choose what you want to read.

Thanks – the first point is the important one, the latter ideally should be a no-brainer. :)[0]

> But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.

Of course, the heuristics that icebraining mentioned come into play here, in a validity to the extent that it is generally safe to assume little to no information on trash TV.

However, heuristics are still heuristics and there are – in my experience – always sufficiently many borderline cases where heuristics will fail and the love-it-or-leave-it attitude makes you stick to one particular newspaper[1], leading you to become uninformed about the arguments of the ‘other side’.

[0] If someone could make a rule please about the relative position of emoticons and punctuation…

[1] Granted, the internet alleviated that issue somewhat, but just the choosing of news Google delivers to you based on your past reading might act somewhat like that, recreating the bubble that was formerly built by newspapers.

nazgulnarsil2• 13 years ago

Sounds like making excuses for ADD. Only paying attention to things that seem interesting is an obvious failure mode. You will wind up only paying attention to things that have been optimized for attention grabbing.

restreitinho16• 13 years ago

I will not exclude the first sentence as a justification. Being as honest as I can get here. :)

But can you give me an example of the opposite? Say, an article or book which did not grab you at first but you found quite interesting. (being the keyword "interesting", a subjective concept to each and everyone of us, of course - myself included)

icebraining2• 13 years ago

That applies to any decision; you rarely or never have complete information. The solution is to apply heuristics to make a preliminary judgment. For example, by coming to HN instead of any other source of articles you're implicitly deciding that being linked from here means there's a greater probability of the article being good (for any definition of good you prefer).

restreitinho16• 13 years ago

Hence the filter bubble issue. When are we really open-minded if we always choose to what our minds are open for? I for instance can't deal with Zite's logic, trust me I've tried.

claudius4• 13 years ago

> For example, by coming to HN instead of any other source of articles you're implicitly deciding that being linked from here means there's a greater probability of the article being good (for any definition of good you prefer).

Actually, I spent most of the time I spent here on /newest, where this is guaranteed to a smaller degree[0], offering a relatively diverse random subset of whatever someone wrote on the internet.

[0] Maybe apart from ‘X married Y but held hands with Z!!!!’.

Vivtek• 13 years ago

Yeah, that always bugged me about Holmes. He specifically restricted his fields of knowledge to things that could help him solve cases - so how did he know this in advance? He had encyclopedic knowledge of the muds of England, for example, but Watson was shocked to find he had never heard of the Copernican system of cosmology. So it's damn fortunate he was never engaged to investigate anything involving an astronomer, right?

chewxy• 13 years ago

That was just A Study in Scarlet. Which a lot of scholars think Holmes was more-or-less trolling Watson. In the Valley of Fear Holmes remarked that all knowledge was useful to him

source: I distinctly recalled using this as an argument against my dad when he told me to focus :P

restreitinho16• 13 years ago

I think that's what makes the character so intriguing. 90% impossible arguments of why he does the things he does but still you don't fail to be amazed.

mseebach• 13 years ago

> I don’t know the definition of ‘fall in love’ here, but this sounds rather dangerous as well, as it makes it more difficult to learn actually new things and supports living in one’s own little bubble of information.

On the face of it yes, on the other hand, there's a ton of crap out there, and the fact that someone wrote a book about something is on it's own a poor indicator for wether it's going to teach you something meaningful. Reading some of it seems to be a better indicator.

Also, abandoning a book doesn't mean abandoning the subject. Sometimes you need a different author and angle and sometimes a more basic primer on the subject before tackling the main work.

blowski5• 13 years ago

> 30 pages is enough.

By this definition, you could end up filling your life with airport thrillers. War and Peace has barely introduced a character by page 30, let alone got you hooked.

restreitinho16• 13 years ago

Valid. But if the writer doesn't care about the reader to the point of wanting to make the idea stick by page 30, I choose not to continue reading. Of course this isn't a writer's problem per se, but there's just too many books and too little time to read everything. It's my way of having a filtering pattern without losing my mind.

blowski5• 13 years ago

It's a problem with 21st Century "instant gratification" culture. Like so much of life, many of the most rewarding books require effort to enjoy them, and get anything from them.

By requiring the author to do all the work, you're merely consuming culture. Becoming a culture-producer requires you to invest yourself in it, to think about it and respond to it. You cannot do that based on the first 30 pages alone. If you do, Dan Brown is probably the best author you'll ever read.

1123581321• 13 years ago

I hope I am not seeing something in the essay that isn't there, but I don't think the 'hook' must be solely intra-textual a la new criticism/close reading. Part of the appeal of War and Peace or Brothers Karamazov is that it's a great book and an adventure to read. A mind prepared this way for an epic should be hooked on the world-building establishment in the early pages. It's still possible to decide it's not the right time to read a classic since the reader might not have the historical context or a large enough vocabulary or few enough distractions to get through dry but rewarding texts. The difference between classics and informational writing is that the classics should be put aside for later since there is no summary or conclusion that provides the useful takeaways, and the material is timeless.

blowski5• 13 years ago

I do totally agree. The characters are some of the most beautiful ever written, and I spent days and days in a hammock unable to tear myself away from it.

But if I judged the book after just 30 pages, I probably would have said that it was dry and boring with too many characters, and too little happening.

restreitinho16• 13 years ago

Ok. VERY good point! Hadn't though of that. Thanks!

jole2• 13 years ago

It makes sense for me. Btw, I was always wondering how it is possible that there are no books on teaching how to code under 100 pages.

restreitinho16• 13 years ago

Sarcasm? :)

jole2• 13 years ago

No no, not at all. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Sometimes I get frustrated, when f.e. I want to get concepts of a new programming language, and learn it fast. I can't understand that f.e. it's so hard to find a good book/guide in under 100 pages. But ok, that's for the technical books.

So, no sarcasm, I agree with you about the first 30 pages :)

solarflair• 13 years ago

Most introductory programming books lay down the basic principles of programming, describe the specific language the particular book covers, and give you enough of a sense of how you can apply the knowledge to real-world applications that you should be able to decide within 100 pages whether it's for you.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

> If the bird is the word, three must be the number.

I can't help but liking an essay that starts like that.

restreitinho16• 13 years ago

Ahahah thanks. :)

laichzeit0• 13 years ago

First 30 pages seems a bit too constricted depending on the book size. I like to flip through the whole book while randomly reading a few pages here and there to get a "feel" for it.

restreitinho16• 13 years ago

Yeah I had a great input about skipping that number and focusing on, say, 30% of the total book. 30 pages in a 1000 pages book is nothing. I also find that process of skimming the following pages to get a feel of it quite effective. That's how I "went through" Tim Ferriss's "4-hour workweek", which quite frankly is not a book for me. Not sure if there are fans here, no harm intended.

A new system for reading

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