Read to forget
mo42.bearblog.dev
mo42.bearblog.dev
I cannot remember all the naughty movies I have seen even though they made me ......
Your example is an excellent one though because it shows a corollary to the way that quote was intended in this conversation.
How it was meant: "It's OK to not remember everything you've read verbatim, because the important parts mixed into who you are/were."
Your corollary: "We must be careful about what we consume because it will be mixed into who you are."
“Now that we’ve studied the classic American authors, like Emerson, let’s learn about the next generation. Their leading light was cantor_S_drug, who brilliantly updated a classic author with modern sensibilities. Just look at those double ellipses — truly a poetic legend.”
Exactly.
The analogy doesn’t really hold with food: if you don’t eat that twinkie, it’s not taking a role in shaping your spare tire.
On taking notes/highlighting I agree with the author. A general behavior I observe in colleagues or co-workers is that they highlight half of a paper, but they never do anything with that highlights. This is something I never understand. If you never use that piece of information anywhere, why bother even spending ink on it?
They might be using this exercise to help them focus and absorb what's important on their first pass of reading -- they might not expect anyone to ever use their highlights.
People will have been taught different techniques, and adapted their own.
I never got into highlighters. We were taught to keep our books unmarked, for the next year to reuse them, or for resale value.
In grad school, I was told paper-reading techniques closer to what you describe.
(Skim abstract, decide whether to keep reading, skim results/conclusions, decide whether to keep reading, look at citations, cynical joke about citation politics, decide whether to keep reading, then some order of skimming introduction and related work and other parts that I don't recall because I didn't follow that guidance, and then eventually you might give the whole thing a close read.)
I take pretty aggressive notes in Obsidian for each paper [1], which carries the benefit of being able to MediaWiki-tag definitions as I find them and build up a dictionary of terms I can reference.
I've never really seen the point of highlighting, it takes zero comprehension of the material to rub a marker over a page. I try my best to summarize each paragraph into a bullet. I figure that if I can summarize stuff accurately, I at least have some understanding of the material, and again this builds up a repository of notes I can read later (though I rarely do because I usually have a decent enough memory of the source material afterward).
Some day I will start sharing my archive of paper summaries for the world to not-actually-read, though I can't right now because they're kind of intermingled with personal notes that will take some time in order to decorrelate.
[1] I have actually been experimenting with Logseq lately, and I use Codex to synchronize back to Obsidian for the time being.
In a sense the highlighting is just a way to localize my thoughts to a particular passage of the text, and the colours (or even highlighting at all) are secondary.
There's some considerable duplication of effort (notes in Zotero, then I type up notes in Obsidian, then also extract out some of those ideas into their own files). But, much like the recent posts about "outsourcing thinking" and GP noting that people sometimes do nothing with their highlights, I find that the work is useful for understanding and remembering.
Out of interest, why have you been considering Logseq?
Primarily because it's FOSS; I love Obsidian (I even pay for it) but I have to consider the possibility that they'll be bullshit and start charging for stuff or start restricting things arbitrarily. If Logseq becomes bullshit then I (or someone else) can fork it and maintain/grow it. It's also written in ClojureScript, so legally I have to kind of like it :).
I've also kind of grown to like the way that the "unit" of Logseq is the "block" instead of the "page". Pages are more about aggregation than "units" of information, and as a result of this I find that the graph view is actually useful, instead of just something pretty in Obsidian.
There are some things I really don't like about Logseq (the lack of proper Vim keystrokes being a big one for me), but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people try software for five minutes, make zero effort to understand what the application is actually trying to do, give up, and declare the software as "bad". I felt like that's what happened with Gnome Shell, for example.
I will likely eventually go back to Obsidian, but I figured that I should give Logseq a fair shake, and it's different enough from Obsidian that I felt it's only fair to spend a few weeks properly learning it.
The bullets don’t bother me, since I outline a lot already, but there are other annoyances, like the poor performance, and an inability to split the screen.
I am still using it for a bit just to give it the fairest shake, but honestly I am kind of counting the days before I am back to Obsidian.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/September-2025/Tryi...
I had to learn this lesson a long while ago when I realized many sites I casually browsed were injecting and repeating many dark thoughts that weren't truly reflective of reality. I've been way more careful of my daily intake and the groups I associate with ever since.
In 2016 I used to browse free webinar. In 2021 youtube self-help videos. Now-a-days only focused on history books as already learned everything needed for self-help.
And most often we focus on what we don't know. In my exp I wasted most time rereading stuffs I already knew.
Writing while reading is a way of focusing on what either resonates with me or confounds me.
Little notes in the margin can also be a fun plot device, used to great effect in one of the Harry Potter books, (I think?) The Chamber of Secrets.
Writing down things makes it much easier to move forward to the next project of the day.
Probably various a bit from person to person.
Your attitude makes sense when reading for pleasure, such as HN posts unrelated to your work.
I think even more so than non-fiction, this is really true of literature that gets labelled "difficult". I find a lot of people bounce of more dense/experimental texts, especially poetry, because they want to understand every aspect of the text. That's especially true when there's external pressures as well, like with school-children reading Shakespeare.
In my experience, being more loose about the need to understand every part of a text deeply frees people up to actually enjoy things a lot more.
Agreeing with the article, you don't need to remember the justification nearly as much as you do the bare facts. Except: in the future, remembering some of the anecdotes helps you remember why you believe what you (now) believe in the first place. It also helps you convince other people of the rightness of the ideas.
> We can only read a text once
Is clearly false. OP is expressing a choice, not a truth.
Yes, it’s the OP’s choice, it’s their information diet. You COULD read the good stuff over and over, but you risk falling behind the flood. This is their approach to keeping up. It makes me a little sad, sure, but as a practical solution I get it.
I certainly don’t use this approach to literature. I’ve reread my favorite books a few times over the years (Cat’s Cradle, White Noise), but I’m sure that’s not the kind of thing OP is talking about.
Go play Outer Wilds if you want to experience what I mean. It's the only game I've played that's affected me so strongly in this way.
"No man ever steps in the same river twice"
You deliberately pulled it out of context, didn't you?
Most individual facts will evaporate, but it’s likely if I need them in the future I will rember where to look.
> I remember co-workers highlighting large chunks of text, sometimes 40%.
Only quibble, is nobody underlines things they plan on remembering.
It’s a tool for focusing the mind.
In rare, very rare occasions I have benefited as well from being able to review a book in record time since the points my brain works from are all underlined and page corners bent.
That might be one out of a thousand books.
Mostly, creating a physical act, to accompany the mental act, of identifying key points, is the point.
I don’t just underline, but mark things with stars, exclamation points, happy faces, etc. in the margins. Institutionalizes paying attention, lets my hands move so my body doesn’t think I am supposed to be taking a nap, and creates regular but very micro-pauses where I process the words I am decorating.
> Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved. The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
https://www.antiquitatem.com/en/origin-of-writing-memory-pla...
At a deeper level, though, there’s truth that we have limited time here; we can’t read everything.
I place a post-it note over each paragraph with a few words, motivation: xyz, challenge:xyz, SOTA, approach xyz.
I read to forget because my words are much easier to skim than someone else’s.
Reading/studying is only really about learning what knowledge exists so you can find it and employ it later in the service of building something.
Trying to memorize many specific details or formulas or algorithms at the expense of a broader knowledge map is suboptimal.
But for science, medicine etc this may not be the case.
"How in 1977 can any great book help me to live better, I who am a creature of anxiety, involved against my will in all twentieth-century injustices and cruelties? How can Kafka relieve me of guilt, he who knew as a Jew even before the Nazis murdered his sisters, since powerlessness is a crime that invites exploitation, that "not the murderer but the victim is considered guilty"? How can Proust, who died to the world in order to live again through his great book retracing the past-how can he relieve me of my dread of death, when I can no longer accept the next world, the world of imagination, promised to me by his last-minute discovery of art in the volume Time Recaptured? But these are rhetorical questions whose emptiness I do not wish to conceal.
Because no book has enabled anyone to live better. The influence of any book on my consciousness is necessarily intermittent, a flash, a hope, an illusion, a picture. No more than any other external agent can a book effect a transformation that lasts.
What a great literary work does do for me is to clear my mind, to rearrange the order of my thinking, to show me, in the immortal words of Porgy and Bess, that "it ain't necessarily so." The real power of a literary work consists in presenting us with alternatives. If the work is emotionally effective enough, it can be an antidote to our usual mental confinement. It is the vision of another mind, another way of thinking, not a lasting way out."
It's a pleasure to go back and read the cool things I've totally forgotten about.