Reading habits that changed my life
blog.usejournal.com
blog.usejournal.com
Now this is not necessarily the optimal strategy for sure, but for one reason or another my personality is better fit for this style. I read very few books but then "debate" it in my head, try to connect things to other things, life experiences, news, other books. Is it true what the author says? Have I read somewhere else that an implicit assumption the author is making has been discredited recently? What could be the motivation? Could I argue equally convincingly for the opposite view? What are the implications for other things I care about or was wondering about perhaps long ago?
For a long time I was very ashamed of how few books I read, compared to what is expected from an educated person, but I'm okay with it now. Same with movies. I watch a movie and I think about it for days. Just watching them for relaxation doesn't work for me, following who is who and what's going on drains me more than relaxes. Especially when there's no "payoff" and the plot can only be described with "and then they" sentences.
Your process certainly help with retention. It engage learning strategies such as active recall and generation.
Myself, I don't try to answer questions that much, but rather I like to organize information into a bunch of interconnected facts like people, events, claims, and look them up.
For example, I discovered that a professor confused which Ruska brothers invented electron microscopy. He also made claims that I struggle to find citation for with a cursory google search.
Then I goes a step further. I input the information into a spaced repetition system. In this way, a book or an article or a youtube video gradually disappear into knowledge and become part of my long term memory about things.
Intensive or incremental reading is extremely slow for sure(I probably spent 8x times as long on my notes than reading), but knowledge creation is superior.
I have implicit retention of many things, but I often forgot the sources, I cannot list my favorite books on the spot, but if we discuss a topic I'd have flashes of relevant memories come back.
It's like I'd grapple with a book, dream about it, get confused, shaken, startled, questioning, then I integrate it back into normal life. Especially deeper books, like I had with The Selfish Gene which dispelled so many myths I had and confirmed things I thought to be correct.
You have to go through the Baader Meinhof effect of seeing that thing everywhere. With each book I view the world from an entirely new point of view, that each seem all encompassing (how ads manipulate you, how social status and prestige works, how the finance world works and cheats, how employers manipulate, how sexual behavior works, how quantum physics works or evolution or mental games we play etc), to get the smug feeling that this current book explains it all. After going through this with 5 books, you realize that no one story explains it all, but then what to do, read about narratives, move to nihilism, then realize the boundaries of rationality and faith, believing that "good" may be in one sense illusory but worth striving for. Then you read up on more traditional views on this etc.
Trying to "retain" is a bit like measuring the quality of your friendships based on how many life facts you've memorized about them. It's surely correlated, but also misses the point. The time you spent together and the experiences you had together are valuable in themselves.
This is pretty normal. For example, students who learned physics often forgot to apply what they already know to situations that differ slightly.
If you want to bring that knowledge to the surface more often, you're going to need to add cues.
For some reason the latter style has been difficult for me outside of exam prep. So when people say college is just a prestige scam, the exams are bollocks and pointless, I always remember how it at least got me to sit on my ass and crunch through the material in a focused way. Pretending is not enough. Learn it out of passion and enjoyment but solidify it with the boring exam-style stragtey is best. The latter without the former is rote memorization that many college students mistakenly equate with simply "studying" and it leads to the issue of not being able to use it outside a course context or quiz type scenarios.
Someone mentions the Ruska bothers, you remember something about thr microscope, so you go look it up to refresh your memory.
You'll always be looking up reference, but your understanding will be deeper.
As Nabokov put it: "Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader." And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.
I think trying to read countless of books really misses the point about reading. Reading is not about accumulating knowledge, which we constantly forget, it's to train the 'mental instruments' of reading. And for that one needs to study something deeply the same way some pianists dedicate themselves to one piece of music. If it's complex enough all that's relevant is in there.
I always had trouble explaining to my friends why I enjoy, while browsing a bookstore, picking up books I already own, looking for a parapgraph I know I enjoy and reading it. It's a bit like looking for clips of your favorite movies on YouTube.
And in terms of popular non-fiction books, like Harari or so, they are best thought of as textual Rorschach tests. He throws up topics and connectioms, activates certain parts of your mind and you can now fly from there. Even if you know a lot of background, many such books can be great thought stimulants.
This, I think, is the only meaningful way to read something (at least when it comes to non-fiction).
In general I find supposedly impressive claims of speed, retention, number of books read to be infantile and completely besides the point.
I also incidentally can't imagine how somebody can actually read at 150 pages/hour. If you're going that fast the book you're reading is not challenging enough. To me that's a sign that you're stuck in your intellectual comfort zone.
News portal reading is kinda similar to newspaper reading. Teens don't read "boring" political articles today nor in the 80s. They read their niche stuff, but they did have hobby magazines on electronics, fantasy or fashion or music even back then.
It could be that you yourself and your peers read more simply as a function of getting older and more mature.
I can't read the article, because I don't have a Medium account.
In any case, I'm guessing that SRS/Anki isn't mentioned. Personally, I've had incredible success with retention by adding my notes from a book to Anki and keeping current with the cards. I'll also add the Wikipedia page and other general information about it.
I would almost argue that reading for information (as opposed to aesthetic enjoyment) is a hugely inefficient waste of time if you don't use a SRS system to retain what you've learned. I've probably read hundreds or thousands of books in my lifetime, but I can really only remember the minute details of the ones I've added to Anki.
This brings to mind an old Schopenhauer quote:
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.
You don't need an account. Just open a private browsing window - at least this works for me.
I use Anki (and the classic version of "SuperMemo") a lot, too. However, I mostly use it for learning languages (vocabulary), or for more complex material in case a test/exam is coming up (to avoid "cramming").
However, I see two problems with such SRS systems, now that I've been using them for over 10 years:
1) I can often not recall the knowledge in real life, simply because I study _both_ the question and answer side of the card - in other words, if I'm asked the question in a rather different way, I might not recall that I know that fact at all. The most extreme example of this was that certain flashcards broke after a while, e.g. showing a gray (instead of a white) background in the question card, for some reason. Whenever that gray card comes up I know the answer immediately, without even having fully read the question (which I forget over time). So in the end, what my brain remembers is: <question card with a medium-length sentence and gray background> comes up -> answer = "propensity". (I'm learning English as a foreign language).
2) A lot of knowledge in books that I read (let's take the "Pragmatic programmer" as an example) is not suited for flash card system learning. It's knowledge of the form "if this happens, do that", e.g. "if you are about to write a new method in your source code, think of how you would test that method first, to improve the method's quality". Sure, I could create a flash card that has the question: "what should you do when you write a new method?", but it's pointless. These kinds of things require deliberate practice for the specific situations, when you are in the IDE, not in the SRS software. It's methodological knowledge where, in the end, it doesn't matter if you could answer the question when someone asked you about it on the street, but it matters that you remember when you're in the actual situation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319745
I think the solution is to get more creative with the cards. Use them as cues for situations, add images, etc. The notecard format is just the way Anki is designed, but SRS doesn’t necessarily need to be limited to a strict text card format.
1. Creates an anki card with basic word -> definition or image
2. Creates an anki card with writing exercise for the word
3. Creates an anki card with pronunciation exercise for the word (fetches audio file on fly)
4. Creates an anki card featuring a dynamic cloze exercise (fetches 250 example sentences for the word, stores it in a database, serves a random one each time an anki card requests it, a custom-made card (in Anki) hides the word in the sentence, provides the ability to request a new sentence or reveal a letter as a hint)
And adds these cards to a specified deck. It's proved very useful so far.
Anyway you have some really great ideas. Mind if I have a look at your solution?
But it also emphasises putting each idea on its own note, paraphrasing into your own words rather than merely copying, and thinking deeply about other notes and topics you already have that the new note might relate to. And that has to help with remembering them.
I think a lot of the issues you mentioned are hinged on formulation which is a really hard skill and requires a lot of practice. Unfortunately I think anki is terrible for it because unlike SM it’s not that convenient (nor intended) for you to edit cards for applicability on each go.
I read mostly non-fiction. What most people would call business books. I read paper (not digital) and like to highlight. I don't retain a lot of details per se. That said, much of it isn't necessarily new. Often key points are reinforcement of concepts I'm already familiar with.
That said, I do want to start doing ten key points summaries. I see ten as being enough but not too much. To force myself into a box that's chunkable. I'll resign myself to the fact that eleven and beyond just weren't good enough.
This is what checklists and reference sheets are for. After learning how to do something, file away a reference somewhere and put the existence of that reference in your SRS. When you come back to that activity after a long break, you then have a physical artifact to help jog your memory.
I’m getting so sick of this trend of requiring (or at least heavily pushing) an account just to read some content. My latest frustration was the Microsoft community forums taking that turn. No, I don’t want to “engage”—I just need to find the solution to some damn problem. Now I can add Medium to that list.
You highlight text, add notes, and every day you see these highlights and notes over time— all in your inbox or on the app.
I also take notes in a notebook for each chapter. Then write out a summary of the book. Periodically, I'll read through my notes for books. Or I'll watch a summary video on YouTube.
It combines spaced repetition and article in one medium. It is too early for me to really judge its success but i like the idea.
The method works very well, but creating the cards takes time.
There's ample evidence that such kinds of speeds are not generally possible with every kind of book. See e.g. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-reading-re...
I did take speed reading courses myself. Sure, it helps you speed-read, skimming over sections that seem unfamiliar, and detect when you need to slow down, because the subject matter becomes too unfamiliar/new. I've also had the impression that retention improves a bit after the couple of training days - at least that's what the workshop instructor makes you believe (it's their job to sell success and good feelings so that you recommend the course to your peers).
In the end, I highly doubt that anyone who claims to have such high speeds is sincere. The simple fact is that marking text with a highlighter, making notes (with a pen) and thinking about the content (do you?) takes time. If you accounted for that and took the average, you'd get lower numbers. And that is fine.
I can't read books fast because I don't read enough. Not books anyway, comments on the internet on the other hand, far too many. But I skim / skip / don't retain most of them.
This post was not meant at all as a silly braggy post about speed reading, not that speed reading is anything to brag about in the first place. Why I say these things changed my life is because, it doesn't matter whether I read 100 books or half a book. What matters is if I learnt just one single principle from it which I actually use. Some of the things mentioned in the post such as taking notes and writing a summary at the end truly helped with that.
Reading books and trying to remember the maximum information seems rather pointless unless you're specifically studying for an exam or something. Your brain already optimises and retains the most relevant/interesting information for you. We don't have limitless memory and we need to forget things in order to learn new ones. Reading 3 books per month and retaining 90% seems both highly unlikely and pointless in the long term.
You might also find spaced repetition cool: https://ncase.me/remember/
I am not aware of any evidence this is true. Can you point me to any evidence to that effect?
> According to Herman Goldstine, the mathematician John von Neumann was able to recall from memory every book he had ever read.
'for a brief period' is key here.
Also from the same wikipedia article:
> Each year at the World Memory Championships, the world's best memorizers compete for prizes. None of the world's best competitive memorizers has a photographic memory, and no one with claimed eidetic or photographic memory has ever won the championship.
...
> According to Herman Goldstine, the mathematician John von Neumann was able to recall from memory every book he had ever read.
That's just what some guy said.
> There are many examples of people with prodigious natural gifts for memory and more who trained it.
For example?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_poss...
> A number of people claim to have eidetic memory, but science has never found a single verifiable case of photographic memory.
You can test this theory by reading three similar books in a row on an unfamiliar subject. You’ll remember more of the third book than the first.
That's not a very useful scenario when talking about reading X books a month and retaining Y percent. If you don't control for how much of the information is new, then the % retention is pretty arbitrary. You can read the same book 3 times and I'm sure you'll get better retention on the third repetition.
I'd assume based on personal experience that higher retention rates occur in subjects the reader is already familiar with. If you're reading into a subject you're not familiar with and rely on "your brain" to optimize what's most relevant for that subject I'd bet you'd come out looking like the stereotypical "know it all" in any related conversation.
In that case only a fraction of the information in the book can really be learned. Yes, you can read a book you already know very well and retain 95% of the information, but then what's the point of even citing any numbers?
> If you're reading into a subject you're not familiar with and rely on "your brain" to optimize what's most relevant for that subject I'd bet you'd come out looking like the stereotypical "know it all" in any related conversation.
Only if you think you retain 90% of what you read.
It doesn’t invalidate people that read at 2x normal speed, it just depends on the kind of book you’re reading. I’m able to listen to some books at 2.5x but it’s always the same kind of book: non fiction, business related, those books that in the end you think it could be a blog post rather than a 500 pages book.
Don't get me started on those books... They're essentially a result of a market failure - since the readers are not willing to pay for blog posts, but will buy books, the writers are incentivised to dress up their blog posts as books... This is enromously wasteful, as millions of people are wasting their time reading the filler necessary to reach an acceptable book size (typically a minimum of 150 pages).
That is just not the case. The brain does not work that perfect way. It tends to remember new info about stuff you already know a lot about.
That is whole reason for reading for retention is to hack the brain so that it remembers what I want to remember.
The evolution did not optimized my brain to remember all the things I want to remember, whether from reading or listening. So I gotta hack it.
The evolution did not made us perfect.
One of my all time favorite podcasts is about it: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91569...
I’m sure science has progressed but I listened to this many years ago.
You might dig it.
But halfway through there was a story I remembered. Not just a little; every detail of every character and scene. Emotionally and intellectually.
No idea why one story stood out, while the rest left my brain completely. Wish I could do that on command.
Normally the way I do this is that I actively look for people who would appreciate the book and then pass it on (I know the book and I know the person => I can try to evaluate if they'd like it).
My current trick is to use a product called Readwise. I highlight stuff I want to remember in Kindle, and it syncs with my Kindle and everyday emails me a random set of my highlights. It's a paid product but I pay for it and recommend it to everyone I know who reads. Was game changing for me.
They also have a full json dump that I periodically put into my notes git repo for grepping.
I've been thinking about writing a simple script to transform my highlights into Anki [2] cards to achieve the same thing but without sharing my reading habits and highlights with a private company.
Maybe I'll get started tonight...
https://blog.readwise.io/remember-more-of-what-you-read-with...
It creates an Anki deck with one card per highlight. The "hint" side of each card shows the book title and the 5 most important words/phrases from the clipping (as determined by Rake [1]). It could also be pretty easily modified to do cloze deletion (fill in the blank) using the "most important" words as the "blanks" on the hint card.
My thinking was that this would help sort of jog your memory of the highlight without just showing the whole thing immediately.
I made a deck of several hundred cards and it seems to work great. Would love if someone tried it out too.
However, soon my misconception about how memory works made itself very clear.
Even though I made hundreds of cards regarding a book, when we started talking about it, I quickly realized that all of that information that I so meticulously added to Anki and studied was not available to me.
It was because I needed my retrieval cues, the questions I've used to create Anki cards, and I couldn't access the information I had in my brain without them.
“You’re at a conference and you start talking to someone about [The Great Depression.] What are some key points to remember?”
Then have an outline or key points on the reverse card. This works better than simply filling in the blank Cloze cards.
Basically, every piece of information or memory has a trigger. The trick is to make this trigger relevant to the scenarios in which you want to use the information, rather than just other words in the Anki card.
You can also make multiple cards/cues for the same information.
If we go with the example you mentioned as a card: “You’re at a conference and you start talking to someone about [The Great Depression.] What are some key points to remember?” there are a few issues
tl;dr by being complex but still a single card SRS isn’t actually going to strengthen the memory very well and you’ll be stuck with short intervals on a card that will take at least 10 seconds each rep. It will still work but it’ll take up much more time than it should. (The link explains it much better)
But it’s not a bad idea. If you answer the card and write out an answer, memorizing pieces of that answer in accordance with minimum information principle will leave better memory effect. While you might have 20 subcards, over time these will get much more accurate intervals from being atomic and actually take less times in rep than your massed question.
I'm fairly sure that the feeling was typing notes didn't have as strong an affect on retention, the notes needed to be physically written.
Maybe I should find a way to stick with my notes again, especially for more academic books.
Once upon a time, when I used to travel, I tend to finish a single book of decent size/page. Now that I read more at home, I use tiny post-its and stick them across pages and let a small portion of it stick out of the book's page. I find it useful for me to quickly go through afterwards or when done as some sort of revision.
For a more intense/focused reading, I combine the above with notes. Recently (a year since), I moved to a text-based life (kinda org-mode) and I have a folder just for books where I write key points and write out what I read.
I don't mind skipping, and/or speed reading at times when the content is similar or not-so-interesting. Many a book shares similar sentiments, phrases, and key points which you can just do a fly-by kinda reading.
Btw, with the current COVID-19 circumstances, I might have completed my target to read 50 odd books this year. I have increased myself to 100, which I believe won't make it. I might actually be re-reading a lot more of the old ones.
- Woody Allen
What it does summarized in a sentence: allows processing of thousands of passive materialS in parallel to convert them effectively to active recall item.
It’s a pretty bold claim but it’s not so fancy and complicated as it seems.
First half of the power of incremental reading is systems for processing materially efficiently (more things in less time). If I import an article into SuperMemo, SuperMemo has good tools for breaking it down (incrementally) and processing it manageably. While there’s a bit of a learning curve to being efficient, given an hour with a textbook chapter I could convert and retain the core content better than a note taker or an anki card maker. One of the things I like the most about it is that it makes processing manageable. It doesn’t make it easy but I never have to worry about needing to do too much at once. It’s all incremental and stress less (after you get over the figure out how to use it phrase).
The second thing it does well is allow you to learn effectively (the right things with your time). It has a priority system and a queueing algorithm that allows you to focus on highest yield material. It also has a system for allowing you to learn things in an order. That might seem trivial but if I’m reading a Wikipedia page and want to go back when I’ve learned something else, that’s a huge pain to manage traditionally. SuperMemo makes that fairly easy so you’re always able to make sure to learn background info as scaffolding before harder things.
I highly recommend people try it even though starting with it is pretty hard. If you’re interested you can either email me (email is in my profile) or join the SuperMemo discord servers also linked there.
[1] https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/help/read
I use SuperMemo via parallels on my hackintosh. I know a lot of other people also using parallels on Mac.
On Linux, a kind soul got SuperMemo working via wine: https://www.supermemopedia.com/wiki/SuperMemo_for_Windows_un... (though were I still on Linux I’d probably stick to VMware because of a few features that don’t work)
What I often do when I am "reading" for knowledge can probably be simplified down to "I read fairly quickly", but there's no nuance in that statement to talk about what I'm doing when I'm reading and how I move so quickly.
I am often doing some combination of:
- scanning (moving quickly across sight-words, finding relevant points of entry into the subject matter)
- absorbing (slower process of gathering words surrounding the entry point to gain better local context)
- backtracking (taking local context and fixing it into a broader context)
- full-on processing (often this looks like deep reading, but it is more like deep thinking; I take in fewer words from the page, but connect them to concepts I already understand)
This is not a linear process, at least for myself.
This is different from when I read for pleasure. My pleasure reading can only really be described as "scanning" I think. Authors who craft their paragraphs so carefully would probably be horrified by how I enjoy their works of art, but I appreciate their works in my own way, and I find that this reading for pleasure is probably the fastest reading I do. I could easily consume a book of fiction in a day or two, and I always enjoy re-reading.
Another reading skills facet: my reading out loud is pretty clumsy (or it at least feels that way). I read often to my children, and it feels pretty slow and clunky. I enjoy doing it, but it's not the same type of "reading". Different skill, different goals. It's something I'm working on.
Why does everything have to be a chore?
How much you enjoying though can't be measured so many don't count it as real.
Initial discomfort is okay, we cannot just always follow the path of least resistance. Especially in these times when literally billions and billions of marketing dollars are spent on keeping you off-track, assisted by the brightest scientific minds, squeezing every last percentage out of making you a miserable mess.
Somewhere along the line lots of people decided that if they aren't running everyone else is running past them.
The runners then posted endless blog posts about how they are faster runners and run for longer and it became it's old vicious circle.
I opted out, Yesterday I spent two hours sat watching a working harbour (with the odd walk to get a coffee) - the boats coming and going, the change on the surface of the water as clouds floated past, the gulls swooping around and it was amazing - after that I spent a couple of hours riding around aimlessly on a motorcycle visiting villages I'd only seen as a name on a map before and running across interesting old buildings/memorials (socially distancing) and then headed home as the sun set.
It was the closest I've felt to at peace in the last six months, nowhere to go, nothing that needed to be done.
You don't have to be on a treadmill all your life, running without a destination is just running.
This basically got me through college.
With some of the less interesting stuff, my eyes would glide across the page without my brain being engaged at all. So I'd restart, and 10 minutes later I'd find I had read the same page 5 times and retained nothing.
Probably this happened because I impatiently wanted to get to the end ASAP, so I would try to rush the process, ironically slowing it down.
But knowing that I was going to be writing notes was enough to make my brain engage. I'm impatient, but I'm also too proud to write down something that I know isn't right, even in my own notes. Also, I guess it feels good to produce some kind of concrete work output.
Example: Right now, I'm trying to learn a lot about quantum mechanics, so I read two books and learned about the standard model, Schrödinger equation, the three generations of matter, relativity etc. I try to determine how they all fit together. I don't draw memory maps, but I basically try to calculate one in my head (probably should just draw them). Then I stick all of those concepts + new vocabulary into anki and review them daily. After a month or two, I pick up another few books and get deeper ("micro" view). When I get bored, I stop and move on to a new subject.
I have done this with microbiology, physics, some time periods of history, computer science, etc. You just need to read a lot. I do not think speed reading matters but skipping over parts of books that are not relevant will certainly save you time.
My problem with this is that when I encounter something that I think I already know I tend to skim it, making it hard to pick up additional knowledge that I might have missed.
Why read those part at all if they are not meant to be remembered?
The real trick is figuring out what’s worth reading twice.
There’s no value in reading fast or shallowly. Bill gates does not remember 90 percent of what he reads, urban legend.
It discusses how to take notes in books, review them quickly, retain information, choose books and so on.
Like all great business books, it has a wrong and misleading title. It has nothing to do with apps.
Oh, ok. Have a good day.
For all who complain about the paywall: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox
Yes you are right, and no, it's not nice to the author / medium / whatever.