Incremental Reading (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Incremental Reading (2023)

help.supermemo.org

25 pointsnequo10 comments

Obligatory mention for Mortimer Adler's book "How to read a Book".

It's been extremely helpful in clarifying how I think about consuming the written work. (Yes, full ack, I procrastinated for years on it because my brain kept screaming "cyclical dependency!". Get over that, it's worth it)

Bonus points: It's not tied to any tooling.

This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book? Looks like something that might help me! Thanks!

That assumes that you want to memorize everything that you read. I disagree with the premise. I don't want to memorize everything I read, as a matter of fact, I am happy forgetting most of it.

I don't think incremental reading is about memorizing word per word of an article, but about increasing your understanding through one article at a time and then retaining it through time.

All knowledge and skills depends on memory.

That's what spaced repetition promised. In reality, it's a lot harder to figure out how to use, and often people only remember low-value knowledge and facts instead.

I also don't believe it's about memorizing word for word but the way most of these incremental reading apps are designed rely on cloze deletions to create the "flashcards" and so it is in a sense training your ability to recall word for word.

I can see incremental reading being good for researchers who might benefit from widely and incrementally reading an enormous number of papers over time. But in general, I think you get more improvements in knowledge and skills by going deep into one resource as opposed to going broad. Not to say you can't do both though.

Spaced repetition seemingly falls into the same problem, it's easy to fall in the trap of making more and more cards without questioning whether or not you'd be better off doing other tasks to solidify your learnings.

Maybe there's a reason people sometimes publish their thoughts in the form of an essay rather then as a collection of Anki flash cards.

Even then, I don't strive to deeply understand everything that I read. I explore, try to be curious and open minded, and then pick my battles.

The article had only minor updates in 2023. It looks like the last major update was in either 2016 or 2013, depending on how you want to count it; one of these would probably be more appropriate for the date tag.

The concept dates back to at least 2009, when the page was created with an import of pre-existing documentation.

Yeah, I'm never too sure how to date such websites, so I just go with the latest update.

Thanks for the heads up. I got excited that there might be something new to see. But I'll read the article with less expectation now, as a review and update, rather than anticipating some big innovation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com