Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
andreasfragner.com
andreasfragner.com
As a voracious reader, I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight. I very rarely do either anymore.
I realize that what happens is sort of a Darwinian "survival of the fittest ideas" in my head, often subconsciously. Once I relaxed and decided, "If the stuff in this book is good enough, my brain will keep it FOR me" both my satisfaction AND utility of books increased dramatically.
(which is to say, it's not that I never write anything down. It's that if I do, it's not tied to the book, but to the "thing" or "topic" that I'm interested in, with a reference TO the book)
The good thing is that it’s not an either/or proposition. I often read a book straight-through then decide it will be useful enough to me in the future that there are elements I want to retain, in which case I’ll engage in a second cursory extraction process. Often I just don’t know in advance whether I will feel that way at the outset.
Insightful → process subconsciously;
Informative → summarize.
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Update: yes, it is not just a matter of texts. The annoying snipers that infest these boards should summarize as a general practice: this will help them with an exercise in thinking, expression, so that maybe one day they will also be able to formulate and present an argument. And stop abusing the freedom they should not be granted.
If it's informative, you have to read and take your conclusions. And if you later decide to use the information for different conclusions, you'll have to read it again.
It's little wonder that informative texts don't usually come in the form of books.
Something can be informative, but still longer than necessary. A lot of non-fiction books could do with 10-50 pages, but marketing wise they won't sell because people feel they don't get enough for their money. So the authors are prone to extend the contents to an amount of pages people are willing to pay for. Let's say 200.
Yes, but in the case under discussion you're not writing summaries for someone else's consumption— the summary is also your own notes. And in that case, even a heavily abbreviated summary can serve to bring to mine many, many details, including details omitted from the summary.
> If it's informative, you have to read and take your conclusions. And if you later decide to use the information for different conclusions, you'll have to read it again.
100%. I think improving recall is still at least somewhat valuable there, though.
For me this happened with distributed transactions and sagas in Building Microservices by Sam Newman. He went into detail on these techniques and pretty much the only thing I retained was that they existed and what problem they solved. I didn’t remembered the other 95%. But I ran into a need for them and instead of having no idea what to do I thought: “I should learn more about distributed transactions, sagas, or other alternatives.”
I guess it comes down to wanting a wide funnel of experiences to sort through or a narrow focus on whatever is going to help you achieve your objective. In reality, we probably need both but I sure wouldn’t trade some of the experiences and insights I’ve gained by having a wide funnel and not worrying about takeaways.
I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name, and the takeaway is that the first reading of a book should be a quick one (table of contents, skimming, dipping into pages). Only after a book is shown to have promise are we then to engage in deep reading which not only involves summarizing but also syntopical reading, which is to read other books around the same topic.
One thing that has really helped me is to scribble notes in the margins and to write a précis after every chapter, then a précis on the inside cover of the book to summarize all my chapter précis.
Finally all good books should be read twice or more. Good reading is rereading. This is a hard rule to follow because nobody has time to read the same book twice but the truth is you can’t understand a book deeply on first reading because you don’t have the lay of the land and the benefit of retrospection. A rereading helps you focus on details missed the first time around. To be honest though, very few books meet my bar of my willing to reread them.
Quote to save people from falling into the rabbit hole of her blog:
> Over the years and after much formal and informal study, I’ve learned a pretty foolproof method for studying philosophy: read everything four times. Here’s how it works:
> - First read: Read casually, as if you’re reading a novel or a newspaper or magazine article. Your goal here is simply to observe, not to engage (yet).
> - Second read: This time, read to understand. Take notes. Ask yourself, “what does the author really mean here?” Summarize things in your own words. Try to break down the arguments being presented into bullet points, identifying the premises and the conclusions. When you read a term you are unfamiliar with or want to understand better, google it or look it up in the SEP.
> - Third read: Read again, and this time engage with the text. Go back to your notes, where you identified the arguments being presented. Think of arguments in favor of what the author is saying and arguments against. Think of counterexamples.
> - Fourth read: Now read for one last time. Read casually, the way you did in the first read. Notice how your understanding of the text is now so much richer and deeper than it was on the first read.
> If you study this way, you’ll walk away with an incredibly solid understanding of philosophy and an intellectual foundation that will serve you well for the rest of your life.
- ruled paper is easier to write on
- you won't run out of space (just add sheets)
- you can rewrite summaries as you revisit books decades later and retuck the new summary
- you can quickly scan the papers to archive a digital copy
- you can remove your notes to lend the book (or not)
- you can transfer your notes to a new edition trivially
- you can be more candid in what you write, knowing it's trivially discarded without giving up the book
- all the notes are in one place and you don't have to thumb through the book looking for where you wrote an idea that you half-remember
- you have space to draw diagrams if appropriate
- you can find something on the internet that importantly relates, print off a page or two, and adjunct your notes
- you can do extensive internet research and build a whole matching folder of contents on your laptop, but you can print a page of Title/URL's to adjunct your notes as a backup (and for anyone who borrows the book+notes)
(edit: formatting)
The levels of waste produced in the modern era are unimaginably higher than then, as well, so our responsibilities are completely different.
Post-its work. For me I use a mechanical pencil.
A book you won't write in is a book that owns you, rather than you owning the book. A book is designed to convey information on the page, writing in your book only adds to and fulfills it's purpose.
I mean, suppose you have a 100 books. You're not reading more than 2 or 3 of them at once, if that; and it's not like you're doing anything with the rest other than keeping them on a shelf.
Now, Once you either have a family, or have friends with similar interests, or with kinds of similar interests etc - those 98 (or 100) books become something you lend, or even give away. And when you get older, you will pass on your entire library, at some point, or sell it off, or bequeath it etc. At any of these points, you want the book to be free of your personal jots and notes, and as close to pristine condition as possible, for the other readers.
Write your notes in a notebook, or on your PC or laptop (or whatever). They'll also be searchable and easily editable.
While I generally have a communitarian orientation, I predict that as I approach this point, other end-of-life matters will occupy my headspace to a greater degree than any psychic rumblings about the odd marginalia in my dusty collection.
As an aside (because for the mere mortals among us it doesn’t apply) occasionally some historical inferences are made based on the reader’s margin notations.
https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/post-it-or-not-post-it
http://libraries.ucsd.edu/preservation/postits.html
It's not clear from these articles how soon damage becomes apparent; I haven't noticed any yet in books which had Post-Its. It may not matter if you don't intend your books to have archival value.
I've tried Book Darts for marking pages, and they can also be used like paper clips to hold notes. I write short notes in pencil, but try to avoid dark leads which make marks hard to erase.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110128174227/http://libraries....
I have at least a few Post-it notes in every book. Some sitting there for thirty years or more. Never experienced any problem. Always used the real Post-it from 3M.
I do keep a notebook where I write about random stuff and a lot of thinking about what I’m reading goes in there.
Fully agreed!
> This is a hard rule to follow because nobody has time to read the same book twice
Disagreed. I read fiction and I tend to re-read a lot, sometimes three or four times. I read for pleasure, so I have the time. Reading is "me" time, and I spend it however I want.
It's only hard to re-read if you have some silly goal like "I must read N books this month". I find such goals worthless.
I'm on board. I have a great deal of fun hunting books and sitting down with the good ones I find. I don't care how many I go through or how many pages. Reading good stuff is a matter of quality of life for me. "A life without books is unlivable" Erasmus
That's the same book mentioned in the footnotes of the article.
"How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Mortimer J. Adler, Charles van Doren"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567610.How_to_Read_a_Boo...
I'm testing out a summarization/rephrase feature backed by LLMs that you can try in the demo. In HN fashion I'm trying to build this openly and gather feedback to see what works. I'd like to push this further in the active direction the article mentions with something like a Socratic dialogue mode where you're nudged to re-explain and examine ideas.
If anyone uses this thing/has feedback, let me know. Source is available too [2].
I wonder if one could couple it with OCR so that you could point a phone at a page and drop into an emdash experience on the text that you've got a physical copy of. Or, you know, point it at your kindle so that your notes aren't locked into their ecosystem.
I'm building a backend that would support that kind of thing in a peer to peer kind of way (indexes content by piecewise hash so that you can recognize content you or your peers have annotations for and reattach those annotations despite differences in pagination, etc). If I ever get it into a demo-worthy state, I may reach out to see if we can make them work together.
Your content addressable system sounds very interesting, let me know when you have a demo.
[1]: https://ishmael.app
Perhaps for the first you just didn't have any more snippets that were closer?
Are the related snippets taken from a selection of snippets you created, or from the full text of other books?
A nice workflow might be to select a passage I'm reading in a book, and then see related passages from other books. But that requires I have DRM-free ebooks, and that these have already been chunked and indexed.
You're right that it would be nice to see things in situ as you're reading, but it would seem that most e-reading experiences are locked down. I appreciate the feedback!
i like it a lot!
Is this for technical, self-help or startup/entreprenurship books? Sure, maybe this works.
I read a lot for fun though. Most of my reading is like this. The books I read are not about "answering questions" and I don't need to "optimize" my reading in any way, either to summarize them or to "process" as many books I can in a year. It's not a contest. It's about the joy of reading.
For me it's important that I am paying attention as I read. I used to rarely re-read books, and have started re-reading my favorite ones, and it's often surprising to me how many interesting ideas I missed, or maybe just forgot about. I enjoy talking to friends about books too and I find that helps me explore the ideas more deeply. I've recently started trying writing up my takeaways for books I've enjoyed, partially as something to send friends to talk about with or try convince them to read the book too so we can talk about it.
I think the caveat here is that it's totally valid to not do any of these things if you are enjoying whatever process you have. I just appreciate being exposed to this idea because it's increased my enjoyment of my own reading.
1. For fun 2. For information 3. For understanding
If reading for fun, do what suits you… there’s really no wrong way. Like food, whatever suits your tastes is best.
If reading for information (eg on tactics in some battle or HR practices in some form when you are already broadly acquainted with tactics and HR) then there are tips for extracting essential points that apply to most everyone.
Likewise when reading for understanding (eg having no conception about how war works and trying to grok it).
Some books can be read in each way, other books only in one or two. In any case, making broad claims about “how to read better” without appealing to one of these modes usually sparks disagreement.
I recommend getting drinks with friends and telling them all about the interesting stuff you read.
If I wanted to read summaries I would just read from Coles notes or Sparknotes, but both are essentially me just skimming headlines, and not getting to the juicy bits of the materials.
If you don't care to write that summary down... well that's kind of a separate thing.
Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that's it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took thousands of words to say it.
Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov", by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who kill their father.
Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's impossible to tell because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't see how they found time to become a major world power.
I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me."
Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:
* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.
* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.
-- Dave BarryBut reducing a book down to a single thesis minimizes the takeaway value of the book, surely?
Take a book like Gödel Escher Bach. Sure, that book has a thesis. But the value of having read that book is not captured in ‘strange loops are all it takes to create beauty, complexity and consciousness’ - all the different ideas that underpin that thesis are what makes it valuable. That book lives as a set of new connections and pathways between ideas in my brain. And I read it over 20 years ago.
These kind of productivity tips always confuse me when they lack context of what the person writing is trying to do.
Like: Anki flashcards and spaced repetition. I see a lot of people advocating for them. I have never understood why because, in my personal experience, retaining lots of disconnected facts has never really been something I've needed to solve for. I do sort of see how it could work for rapid language learning (though I still think immersion, reading and writing are better than randomized vocabulary memorization, if you can take the time to do it that way), and I think I understand it in the context of fields like medicine where there's just a lot of facts you need to acquire, but people will advocate it for everything, and I just don't get it.
When I read a book, the process of reading it adds to the sum of my knowledge; I absorb the ideas, combine them with my own, and come to a new understanding of a topic. At that point, the book has accomplished its goal, for me.
But I acknowledge that's just how I read. I'm not an academic who might be later on finding myself needing to recall where I read something so I can cite it (although I find in general I can remember where I read certain things)... is that the use case here? What's the goal with building up an externalized knowledgeable?
- The normal human dummy in crash tests define "normal" to be like a man, so women tend to have more injuries in car crashes.
- Women are more at risk for cardiac failure because their heart attacks go undiagnosed. Women experience different symptoms of heart attack than men, and most doctors have been trained using research done on males. For example, men feel it in their chest and left arm whereas women experience pain in their stomach.
The process of writing it or summarizing helps me remember these things so I don't need to look them up as often. But going through my notes again I saw I forgot some things! I don't know when I'll use them when I'm writing them, but I have referenced them conversations before.
At in regards to Anki usage, the “disconnected facts” seem to be something that only students (high school/college) or people new to Anki do. These people are very much using Anki for a short term goal like passing a test or class. For that use case, “disconnected facts” works just fine.
The people who use Anki (long term) outside of school and outside of 2nd language learning usually have much more connected webs of cards. While the individual cards are usually atomic, they might have a dozen or more cards all attacking a concept from different angles. Also in this usecase it seems just the act of formulating the questions is the biggest part of the learning. The reviewing part is almost secondary.
Personally I find that knowledge that’s internalized and used does not decay. And devoting effort to refreshing the DRAM for knowledge I’m not using seems like it fails the YAGNI test. Let my brain’s cache eviction algorithm do its thing. If I learned something once I figure I can probably learn it again.
Surely using it is a repetition of it, essentially?
I always figured spaced repetition was a tool or help with knowledge you didn't have opportunity to apply otherwise
Gist of it being, like you say, to not only summarise but to process into ones own knowledge base. And yes, this book is targeted at academics with the purpose of setting them up for producing papers, books, or other artefacts from that knowledge base.
There is such a thing as an autobiographical novel, but that is not nonfiction.
Because novels are, by definition, works of fiction.
The closest thing to a ‘nonfiction novel’ is probably the historical novel, which is a fictionalized historical account… but I’m not sure why such a thing would particularly be suited to this summarization methodology.
Same with Camus' The Stranger, or Sartre's Nausea.
Your mind is a living collection of your own ideas, and a history of their significance to your prior life. Not a dead library of pointers to other dead libraries.
Books are great. But you shoudn't outsource your brain. The learning happens when you think for yourself. Reading is good. Thinking about what you've read is even better. But don't stop with the summary! Go further. Apply it to your context. Try it, it's fun.
What I mean is I f someone is already remixing, they’re already writing about what they read and probably don’t need advices from articles like this because they already read differently from what the author imagined.
On the other hand, the article encourages people to write about what they read outside a formal academic context, and most people don’t have that habit.
To put it another way, writers don’t need rationale to write. But writers are not the target audience.
I'd say it's yours. In that frame, there are lots of ideas.
Lets assume there are 10 000 known ideas. Then there's 10^8 combinations of two ideas, and 10^12 combinations of three ideas. That's a lot of ideas, even for the internet! I bet not all of them are named. And different people are going to frame ideas differently.
I also believe trying to form your ideas in reference to existing knowledge is a great way to learn existing knowledge.
Recently I started creating my own topic index with pointers to which books I found certain insights in. I know I could generate such a thing automatically with tagging, but I enjoy manually curating my index.
If you really found the book useful, go write a summary after that conversation. It will be a much stronger summary and also way easier to write.
I get how there's so many choices nowadays and it's overwhelming but 95% of the repo you'll see just uses langchain. For the backend, llama cpp is your best bet minus the constant updates that break the quantized models. If you look for TheBloke on huggingface/reddit, you'll find all the best models. Look for the "ggml" ones which means its supported by llama cpp. But like I mentioned before, llama cpp has been doing so many model breaking changes so using TheBloke's models is your best bet because s/he updates really frequently. I personally prefer wizard-vicuna 13B, the uncensored one is pretty damn amazing.
In [5]: output = llm("Q: Name the planets in the solar system? A: ", max_tokens=32, stop=["Q:", "\n"], echo=True)
llama_print_timings: load time = 209.23 ms llama_print_timings: sample time = 11.39 ms / 32 runs ( 0.36 ms per token) llama_print_timings: prompt eval time = 209.16 ms / 15 tokens ( 13.94 ms per token) llama_print_timings: eval time = 1806.98 ms / 31 runs ( 58.29 ms per token) llama_print_timings: total time = 3033.91 ms
In [6]: print(output) {'id': '', 'object': 'text_completion', 'created': 1684604167, 'model': './models/Wizard-Vicuna-13B-Uncensored.ggml.q5_1.bin', 'choices': [{'text': 'Q: Name the planets in the solar system? A: 1. Mercury, 2. Venus, 3. Earth, 4. Mars, 5. Jupiter, 6. Saturn', 'index': 0, 'logprobs': None, 'finish_reason': 'length'}], 'usage': {'prompt_tokens': 15, 'completion_tokens': 32, 'total_tokens': 47}}
It's a shame, because Obsidian is kinda neat software (although I'm not the note taking type myself).
But I lean towards reading for comprehension. I have a wiki which includes all the books I've read. The good ones get their own wiki pages with the main things I learned, and other notes.
A key point is that I don't take notes while I read. I only do it LATER -- because if you can't remember what to write down for a few days, then you probably won't retain it, and it may not be worth retaining.
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As a specific example, when thinking about this -- I wonder if anybody has read "The Signal vs. The Noise" by Nate Silver? I remember reading it because a friend had a copy.
Many years later, off the top of my head, I can't remember a single thing in that book. Question for other readers: can you remember a single thing from it?
I think maybe it's because I kinda knew most of the stuff in that book? I will refer to my notes.
On the other hand, I've been re-reading Antifragile by Taleb, which I first read in 2012 I believe, and it struck me how many things I absorbed unconsciously from that book, which I didn't ascribe to it.
For example I remember talking about "hormesis" during COVID, i.e. small errors and stress. And also I took up some light weightlifting because I thought it was a good complement to bike riding. i.e. having 2 different kinds of exercise
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edit: Just went to back to my notes on Silver's book (finished January 2014). Surprisingly I was extremely positive on the book -- I said the writing was engaging, it's well-sourced, very good set of topics (weather prediction, earthquakes, terrorists, poker, basketball, financial markets), and novel insights
Though the funny thing is that I didn't say what the actual insights were. The only one was the importance of knowing when you don't know, which I also got from Taleb
So maybe I should go back to that book and see if I still think it's good, and if there were insights I didn't get elsewhere
It's funny perhaps that my perception of the book has been clouded by Silver's reputation. I think he has been criticized for "predicting the present" and of "horse race coverage", and I think that's true now. But back when I read the book, I probably had a much more positive impression of him!! Very interesting
However, it's much harder to see the value in doing anything like the article is suggesting for literature. Is there really much to gain from writing a summary of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, or of a book of poetry? Is that even the right way to engage with the material?
But I would just call it engaging with the ideas after you read. So talking with a friend about a book is just as good, and even better.
And writing a comment on a forum can be just as good, as it's an active thing too. I sometimes write comments and then link them from my wiki.
I've had a GoodReads account in the past, but somehow it seems a bit shallow and artificial ... almost a bit like homework. It's better if the topics naturally come up, but if they don't, I still find writing notes to myself to enhance the reading experience.
I mean you may spend 1 week or 8 weeks reading a book. I don't see why spending 5 to 30 minutes writing notes a few days after can be viewed as bad.
I totally agree with the author in that those 5 or 30 minutes is way better spent writing about what you read, rather than 5 or 30 minutes reading something new that you may or may not retain.
And again I'm focusing on reading non-fiction for retention, not literature. (For better or worse, I read WAY more non-fiction than literature)
I even setup a Siri Shortcut to pull out all of my Kindle highlights to stick in there: https://twitter.com/JordanMorgan10/status/130370253693587046...
Also, I just like reading. My goal isn’t to have some kind of personal knowledge base to prove how much I’ve comprehended to myself.
The reason many people accumulate wealth is to spend it, not to stare at it insecurely. It goes without saying that knowing more things expands the number of things you can do.
Yes and the reason many people accumulate wealth is to stare at it insecurely. What’s your point?
Despite my best intentions, though, I've not started to turn my highlights into flashcards, or started a daily review habit.
To GP: AIUI the workflow in Reader is meant to be (i) add to library, (ii) read and highlight, (iii) review highlights and create flashcards, (iv) review flashcards.
The odds of finding good books goes down if one reads fewer books. Taking suggestions from others is not a good substitute for finding one's own "good ones".
If I find that a book I'm reading is not good for me, I start skipping, first a few parapgraphs, then a few pages, then a whole chapter and so on, to see if it gets better. And I'm even prepared to stop reading it altogether if it doesn't get any better. That gives me more time to find and read better books.
This piece on completing the learning loop through summaries resonates with me so strongly, I just hit print.
Sadly, I didn't read Pirsig until a close friend recommended it to me. It's taken me years to grok. I find this summary to be among the best summaries ever written:
http://www.butler-bowdon.com/robert-m-pirsig---zen-and-the-a...
Learning is about recalling information. The more you practice recalling a fact, the more the memory "sticks".[1]
Writing summaries is an effective way to both 1) identify the most important information, and 2) practice recalling it.
I think this is the core of what people are arguing with.
I think people assume that if they fill their heads with facts, they'll end up like Tyler Cowan (or pick any other amazing-recall public intellectual). It's more likely that you end up like Will Hunting - ready access to facts but with no particular insight of your own.
Summaries are useful for 2 years time to ease you back in I would say.
I learned so much in Karpathy’s NN course I feel I need to summarize to avoid forgetting much of what I learned even though I did the exercises. I might then re-embed (ha) the knowledge by playing more with the nets to get more tacit experience.
If you can stick to a rigorous reading and writing program, yes, that will give you the most rewards. But even reading 20 minutes of lightweight fiction before bed every night is much better than nothing.
For non-fiction the best thing I do is underline the parts that I find more helpful.
Great source of interesting reads, too. So some potential prosocial utility there, too.
Taking copious notes and summaries isn't necessarily the first step. You need to know if it is good! Don't want to write down bad notes and think they are good when you forget and come back too.
Does anyone have tips for successfully building reflection into one's life? In the mean time I'll reflect on it.
Here is a sample one that I use to get out of work mindset: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r65gi7tk4str2h7/After%20Work%20Med...
I do this regularly and it works great.
But also, try quizzing yourself about what you’ve read the day before. I bet the retention is slim.