Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

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I hear you, but that way lie dragons.

Ultimately, you will be the only person capable of deciding whether a particular thing was worth your time or not, and you can only decide that in hindsight, having experienced it. The finest accumulation of the greatest reviews of a work will not make up for the fact that you might glean some valuable tidbit from it that nobody else noticed.

You also have to accept that you simply aren't going to ever be able to know everything about everything that you'd like to; you will have to make choices, pick and choose. Accepting that, would you then rather memorize a pile of summaries and tidbits and factoids, or would you rather take the time to read and consider a complete discourse on a subject?

For example: I'm sitting here thinking about my argument and wondering if I'm really just full of shit, but then I suddenly remembered a bit of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", where Feynman talks about some of his experiences in Brazil, and how the teaching at the time resulted in students that had memorized everything but understood very little.

And it strikes me that this relatively recent addiction to summaries is very similar to that kind of Brazilian education.

You also have to accept that you simply aren't going to ever be able to know everything about everything that you'd like to; you will have to make choices, pick and choose.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. You seem to be arguing against something nobody (certainly not me) said.

We all know that only by actually reading something will you know if it was worth the effort. The problem is that, for any non-trivial subject, there is more material available, and more material being generated, than anyone can cover in endless lifetimes.

Some form of curation is needed just to even know what exists, let alone to know what's worth reading.

Accepting that, would you then rather memorize a pile of summaries and tidbits and factoids, or would you rather take the time to read and consider a complete discourse on a subject?

Where does this false choice come from? I do not want to memorize a pile of summaries, and it's in fact impossible to consume a complete discourse on a (non-trivial) subject. Those are not the only options.

What I want are some heuristics to help guide me on what to read. Summaries are one tool; recommendations are another. HN discussion threads yet one more. Few people would pretend that any of these substitute for reading the source material.

I'll grant that there are people who consume summaries as a ploy to feign erudition, but honestly I don't think that's the motivation on HN when people ask for a tl;dr.

In fact, if someone were to try to read everything and not use summaries, etc. as a guide they would end up with very little understanding because, odds are, they would be consuming a fair amount of shoddy material to the exclusion of better content.

An interesting comparison. Largely accurate, I think, but I do want to make a counter-point:

reading a summary != memorization

The problem with students who only memorize is that they are incapable of creation. They can answer a set of questions, but not use what they know to respond to something new. A summary, in the best cases (far from always achieved, of course), is all that is needed to get a thinking brain from zero to the conclusions the full text would bring you to. Any gaps can be logically deduced and filled through mental effort, ideally more quickly than it could be told. Especially if one already has experience in the area.

Memorization, meanwhile, creates gaps, and provides no tools to fill them.

I'm not sure about the counter-point. I'm trying to think of the cases where I might agree, and about the only one I can think of is the summaries of papers in scientific journals, where the reader is already pretty familiar with that specific subject. (And I'm really undecided about even that.)

I think context -- all of the nuances and subtleties and justifications and reasonings surrounding a statement -- is pretty important, and without that context, you still end up with gaps. They're just, maybe, slightly different gaps than you get from memorization.

I tried to spring a trap on some unsuspecting HN'r downthread to make this point. If you just take the bullet points -- say, "2. Challenge yourself" -- by themselves, then you miss out on the point that repeatedly doing the same challenging activity doesn't get the desired result. And if you get that point by reading some of the comments here, then you might miss out on why it's important to take on different challenges, and therefore what kind of challenges would be most beneficial. And, if you skim the article, you might miss out on the author's justifications for these suggestions in the first place, which would leave you stumped if someone asked you why novelty mattered.

It's true that you could go back and fill in these gaps, or possibly even derive answers to them on your own, but if you're going to expect to do that, why not just read the thing in its entirety to begin with?

> I think context -- all of the nuances and subtleties and justifications and reasonings surrounding a statement -- is pretty important, and without that context, you still end up with gaps. They're just, maybe, slightly different gaps than you get from memorization.

And indeed the larger problem is that sometimes summaries take on a life of their own, independent of the context which grounded them.

For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/hdf4k/code_inde...

Why only scientific journals, and not scientific blog posts? Or anything of a technical nature, really? The only major differences there are degrees of implied legitimacy based on the source. And once you've reached "anything technical", is art technical? Opinion with supporting arguments? An enormous amount of HN news falls into that category.

For this one in particular, I'm pretty familiar with the recommendations - reading the article was generally a waste of time, though I admit it was well made. The main useful chunk to me was the news of supporting studies, the link to multimodal techniques, and the list itself, as I've read everything else a dozen other places. As can be said, likely, for many other people who have actually researched intelligence-improving techniques.

I'll wrap up with an anecdote, as that's all that this line of debate can really sustain: for this article, the list really did tell me the most important parts. I would have found the other info eventually, and I have no urgent need for it, so not finding it here by skipping the article wouldn't have significantly changed anything for me.

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