A new system for reading
restreitinho.com
restreitinho.com
I always found this about the single most obvious faux-pas of Sherlock Holmes – if you give your brain enough time to properly organise the data, it does have (nearly) infinite storage. Choosing carefully what to read and what to ignore only leads to less information, in turn making it more difficult to build links between different ‘information islands’ and hence retaining said information more easily.
> Basically, if I don’t instantly fall in love with an article/book/blog, I stop reading and move on.
I don’t know the definition of ‘fall in love’ here, but this sounds rather dangerous as well, as it makes it more difficult to learn actually new things and supports living in one’s own little bubble of information.
> Getting informed is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And life’s too short for bad information.
But how to decide whether a given datum is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ information before consuming said datum and linking it up with the rest of your memory? Maybe it looks utterly senseless at the time you first read it, but it might well be missing piece linking two large and so far separate areas together.
Yeah, "fall in love" isn't that concrete, I know. But again, it works for me if I manage to rotate the types of content I consume.
About the last topic, I give you that. But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.
Anyway thanks for taking to time to deconstruct some of the ideas I wrote. I think this topic has too few people writing and thinking about it.
Thanks – the first point is the important one, the latter ideally should be a no-brainer. :)[0]
> But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.
Of course, the heuristics that icebraining mentioned come into play here, in a validity to the extent that it is generally safe to assume little to no information on trash TV.
However, heuristics are still heuristics and there are – in my experience – always sufficiently many borderline cases where heuristics will fail and the love-it-or-leave-it attitude makes you stick to one particular newspaper[1], leading you to become uninformed about the arguments of the ‘other side’.
[0] If someone could make a rule please about the relative position of emoticons and punctuation…
[1] Granted, the internet alleviated that issue somewhat, but just the choosing of news Google delivers to you based on your past reading might act somewhat like that, recreating the bubble that was formerly built by newspapers.
About emoticons and punctuation, I deal with that on a daily basis too. Ugh.
But can you give me an example of the opposite? Say, an article or book which did not grab you at first but you found quite interesting. (being the keyword "interesting", a subjective concept to each and everyone of us, of course - myself included)
Faust II, though you might not want to learn German just to read it – written 20 years after Faust I, with the knowledge accumulated during the lifetime of one of the world’s greatest authors poured into it; while definitely not attention-grabbing in any way and taking some time to get into, the hours I spent reading it were certainly one of the best spent hours so far.
That applies to any decision; you rarely or never have complete information. The solution is to apply heuristics to make a preliminary judgment. For example, by coming to HN instead of any other source of articles you're implicitly deciding that being linked from here means there's a greater probability of the article being good (for any definition of good you prefer).
Actually, I spent most of the time I spent here on /newest, where this is guaranteed to a smaller degree[0], offering a relatively diverse random subset of whatever someone wrote on the internet.
[0] Maybe apart from ‘X married Y but held hands with Z!!!!’.
We're all heavily filtering what we consume, it's effectively impossible to do otherwise.
source: I distinctly recalled using this as an argument against my dad when he told me to focus :P
On the face of it yes, on the other hand, there's a ton of crap out there, and the fact that someone wrote a book about something is on it's own a poor indicator for wether it's going to teach you something meaningful. Reading some of it seems to be a better indicator.
Also, abandoning a book doesn't mean abandoning the subject. Sometimes you need a different author and angle and sometimes a more basic primer on the subject before tackling the main work.
By this definition, you could end up filling your life with airport thrillers. War and Peace has barely introduced a character by page 30, let alone got you hooked.
By requiring the author to do all the work, you're merely consuming culture. Becoming a culture-producer requires you to invest yourself in it, to think about it and respond to it. You cannot do that based on the first 30 pages alone. If you do, Dan Brown is probably the best author you'll ever read.
And if you don't click, maybe there's no point in meeting up again. But you have to question whether it's you or them. What are you looking for in a partner? Someone deep and meaningful with whom you can spend a lifetime, or a superficial one-night stand that you forget after a few days.
Imagine you're friends hook you up on a blind date with someone described as "charismatic, supermodel looks, professorial brains". And you turn up, thinking "OK, Blind Date you have 30 minutes to impress me, or I'm outta here." That's what it's like picking up Tolstoy or Hugo and saying "if I'm not hooked after 30 pages, I'm just going to quit reading".
You need to bring something to the reading. Just as you expect Tolstoy to be interesting, so he expects you to be rather knowledgable about 19th Century European history, Christian philosophy, farming practices amongst serfs in Tsarist Russia. You can still fall in love with War and Peace without that knowledge (as I did), but it will take more effort from you and thus might take more than 30 pages.
And Tolstoy expects you to make, and to want to make, the effort to think about what he's writing. Dan Brown expects you to be time-pressed or naive - either unable or unwilling to challenge even his most basic assertions about history. So he writes for his audience, as Tolstoy writes for his. Tolstoy's motivations were closer to evangelism and pushing a political agenda. Dan Brown's are more about becoming rich.
And if all you are thinking while reading the book is "what am I getting from this?" then you're never going to enjoy it as you otherwise might. I read Crime and Punishment because I picked up quickly as I left the house for the airport. Stuck on a plane with nothing else to do, I slogged through the opening section, trying to cope with weird names and an alien culture. But that book, caused me to get into lots of other Russian literature, become Christian, and ultimately inspired some of the conversations that lead me to marrying my wife. I doubt anyone can say that about a Stig Larsson or James Patterson pageturner.
Still regarding choices: Dan Brown sure can hook us in the first 30 pages, but we are the ones who choose if we want to read Dan Brown in the first place. It's yet another layer of discussion to add to this.
PS: I'm glad this subject isn't dead and dry and sparks such discussion. Wasn't expecting this at all.
But if I judged the book after just 30 pages, I probably would have said that it was dry and boring with too many characters, and too little happening.
So, no sarcasm, I agree with you about the first 30 pages :)
And, in five-page book form! https://leanpub.com/learn-python
I can't help but liking an essay that starts like that.