Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for others, but for me this headline and idea is exactly and perfectly wrong, so I suppose I just want to reach those for whom this generates unnecessary "guilt" or something like that.

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)

View on HN

> I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight.

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.

I now find myself googling for other peoples notes on a book if I want to extract more. I read through those notes and rewrite with a pen in a journal and start to pull apart the dense notes further and connect to my own experience and life

Yup, but conversely, I try to avoid reviews and comments on books (and movies etc) as much as reasonably possible beforehand.

That makes sense. I always do it in post and its to find notes not reviews. Generally if someone writes notes they viewed the book favorably so there is some bias. But i usually viewed it that way too if im searching

I generally disagree with any assertion on what’s more important on such a wide array of variation, for who and when. Sure, it could be important for some things and irrelevant for others things at the same time.

Yup. Thats another thing I've noticed. When I think of the phrase "a man never steps into the same river twice," I feel that way A LOT when it comes to reading good books. That was maybe the biggest reason I stopped highlighting in them, I want to come to it fresh.

It strictly depends on the category of the book:

Insightful → process subconsciously;

Informative → summarize.

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 can't really summarize. Summarizing is the act of throwing most of the information away.

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.

>If it's informative, you can't really summarize.

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.

> If it's informative, you can't really summarize. Summarizing is the act of throwing most of the information away.

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.

Not gonna lie, it strongly feels like the latter is a job for them newfangled AI thingies :)

The summary isn’t for you to read it later, it’s for you to write.

In my opinion it's just another symptom of the trend in tech circles for ever-increasing self-documentation. Thing is, it doesn't matter how hard you try to shove your life up its own ass, you're going to be just as dead as me at the end of it. And I'll have read more cool stuff.

This made me chuckle. Too true. I would only argue that thinking/journalling deeply about fewer ideas is an equally good use of your time as tasting a greater breadth of ideas more shallowly.

Comes down to personal preference at the end of the day. Would you rather know a lot about a bit or a bit about a lot. I’m definitely in the latter category.

lol, you just summarized what I was thinking...

It's a classic begging the question fallacy. Summary is absolutely a way to maximize certain outcomes of reading, but not all outcomes! Which outcomes to value is a question we can all reflect on.

Another way of thinking of it is that you are indexing. Perhaps you will come across something in the future which makes you recall that thing you read. This might give new significance to what you read and gives you a reference you can fall back on as needed.

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.”

This is exactly how I look at it as well. Our culture seems obsessed with “takeaways” when a lot of the time I might not discover the takeaway for some time, until I happen to encounter some other experience that made reading that previous book completely worth it.

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.

Reminded me of this essay: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/notes-against-note-taking...

It depends on the books I am reading. I get the most out of philosophy and learning books when I actively engage with the text with responses in kind. But when I am reading mind candy? No, I don’t write back.

What if you actually want to learn how to use and apply something, not just recall some information about it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com