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Comment by VincentEvans | Hacker News Reader

For some time I’ve been consuming a lot of material on certain subjects I am interested in. Daily commentary, regular blogs, every interview a few people that I follow give, various background info related, etc. I’ve been doing it for over a year, often more than 3-4 hours per day. I’ve become quite informed, sure. But I have to admit that I don’t recall the contents of the information that I consumed all that well. Certainly not well enough to debate someone on the topic.

Perhaps this is a limitation of my own brain physiology, or deficiencies in the approach I’ve taken to consuming the information, and others would have faired better in my place. But this experience has made me seriously doubt the effectiveness of such consumption if the goal is to learn, as the OP advocates.

Thankfully that wasn’t necessarily a goal for me personally, I was just satisfying my interest in the subject I care deeply about.

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You might surprise yourself. The familiarity with a subject and its lingo can do wonders for complete understanding. A deliberate and focused study session on your subject will put a lot of pieces together. Sometimes all you need to know is what questions to ask.

Yes your physiology is limited and you need to augment your functionality with some kind of remembering machine. Like a notebook, or like some kind of app on your phone. Or a spreadsheet. Or a SQLite DB. Basically I think if you take notes on important details and then have some system for organizing and looking them up, that might be very helpful. Like I found a part of a book that explains how to do logical synthesis and I bookmarked it, so I can keep going back to reread it every now and then in order to do stuff.

> Like I found a part of a book that explains how to do logical synthesis and I bookmarked it, so I can keep going back to reread it every now and then in order to do stuff.

What’s the book?

I’ve never developed a good system for note-taking while I read, apart from marking up books and making marginal notes, which can be somewhat helpful. But I never developed the discipline of turning those into useful notes. My memory, which has never been good, has naturally gotten worse as I’ve gotten older and more sleep-deprived, so I now feel like most of my reading is retained for about twenty minutes after I’ve read something.

I think it's called "Mathematical Methods for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems". It's this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Methods-Artificial-Intel...

I found my copy at Goodwill.

This exactly. There's an old-school method called Zettelkasten, which you can apply to modern computing systems like Org Roam or similar "databases" if you so choose.

Thanks for pointing out zettelkasten. I have to memorise a bunch of facts for an exam and this seems like a good system.

Check out https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/3982438802/ref=dp_ob_neva_mob.... It goes into depth on how to practically setup the system. Absolutely fascinating & life changing book. The title doesn’t quite convey the genius contained.

Thank you for the book recommendation!

> Certainly not well enough to debate someone on the topic.

This part in particular is tricky, because debate is a specialized skill of its own, and most people who you might see publicly debate others on a given topic aren't (necessarily) experts in the topic, they're experts in debating it.

Story time: one example of how that forms is being a person with strongly held minority beliefs. I have had good friends who were the lone very conservative person among a university left-leaning crowd, or on the other side an avowed Maoist communist among again, just normal vaguely left-of-centre folks. Both of those people got into an argument every single day defending their basic outlooks on life; sometimes 10 arguments in a day. They built up a repertoire of points and phrases, heard the same objections and accusations over and over, and developed strategies over time to handle each of these.

In reality they each became experts at debating novices more than true debate experts, but you can see how their type of knowledge, and how it lived in their brains was totally different from reading a lot of books about the topics they knew about, and different from just developing expertise in those topics.

One thing that struck me in conversations with these people over time is that they sometimes came to not even really believe a fallback phrase they had developed and would use often, because they came to learn enough nuance to know how it was a flawed take, but they knew it would stop a drive-by-arguer in their tracks. It could make the driver-by realize they didn't know all the details and second-guess themselves, even when the actual details sometimes weren't so bad for them. But at that point, they've lost the debate, and the expert moves on.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on debate in such a thorough fashion. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and my conclusions fall along the same lines as yours, but its definitely interesting to hear someone confirm your own thinking. I agree, ability to skillfully and convincingly argue your point of view is not purely dictated by the depth of ones knowledge of the subject, though in my impression is that when the debater possesses such knowledge it often shows, especially if you are a somewhat informed onlooker.

A tangential point that comes to mind, is that I found that it takes quite a bit of knowledge in the first place to even discover and separate people to follow that bring informed thoughts and original conclusions on the subject from the artful bullshitters. And its frequently the latter that are more prominent at the first glance and it takes time to realize who you are dealing with.

The speed of learning and time spent reviewing all help. I review my highlights on a daily basis.

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