A Weapon for Readers (2014) | Hacker News Reader

A Weapon for Readers (2014)

nybooks.com

46 pointsnkurz15 comments

This is one of the things I think medium.com does briliantly. Their side comments with highlighted context are a brilliant innovation.

I've started using the Point[1] extension for Chrome to highlight content on pages and comment on it. I mostly use it privately for pages that I would have otherwise have just bookmarked and put a comment in the bookmark name[2]. but it's also been useful for discussing web pages with my family that would otherwise have been done via facebook or email.

[1] http://www.getpoint.co/

[2] I'm a prolific bookmarker. I have over 15,907 bookmarks in 1,385 folders, (up ~5000 / ~500 from this time last year).

Mathematicians have been using this weapon for centuries. You cannot effectively read a mathematical text without having a pencil handy.

How to mark a book by Mortimer J. Adler explains the process in detail. http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~pinsky/mark_a_book.htm

It sounds pretty pretentious (and to some extent, it definitely is), but I've really enjoyed reading and re-reading some books with Vladimir Nabokov's lecture notes[0] guiding my own.

I'd love to get my hands on that copy of "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" with David Foster Wallace's annotations shown in the header image! Great book, great author.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Literature-Vladimir-Nabokov/d...

For a way to use this to collaboratively review a document, see Co-ment: http://www.co-ment.org/

Thanks so much for sharing this. Any thoughts on the role of Rap Genius as the online version of this? Truth told, I'm so repulsed by the brand that I haven't checked it out to see if anyone's using RG to annotate the news. Applying this kind of critical mark-up to the "news" is what interests me most.

"Better to read a poor book with alert resistance, than devour a good one in mindless adoration."

I have felt similarly. The mediocre, when analyzed deeply, can become more interesting than the interesting.

Tim Parks has been writing some really excellent, unpretentious, and deep pieces on the act of reading for the NYR blog. I had missed this one, thanks for submitting it.

so... read physical books and don't be afraid to write on it? does that sum up what the author is trying to say?

That summarizes the author's conclusion, not what he is trying to say.

I haven't even read the piece yet, but clearly the important thing would be their explanation of why they think doing so is a good idea.

|We have too much respect for the printed word, too little |awareness of the power words hold over us.

|Often I will find comments below an article (on occasion, alas, below my own articles) that are more intelligent, even better informed, than the article itself.

If an article's comment section is closed, I am much more suspect of the article. If the article has closed comments and doesn't have a corresponding reddit, hacker news, slashdot, etc post, I won't read past the headline. Comments are good at pointing out bias, contradictions and fallacies within an article and have broken the information power monopoly once enjoyed by the media elites.

Comments are also very good at inventing their own fallacies and contradictions. If every comment section was as well thought-out as HN (which still has issues), I would be surprised by closed comments. But that's not how the internet is.

|Comments are also very good at inventing their own fallacies and contradictions.

It doesn't matter how well thought out the comments are. That they exist provides counterpoint and devalues the original article. This is crucial because readers tend to overvalue written word "as gospel".

|If every comment section was as well thought-out as HN (which still has issues), I would be surprised by closed comments.

You are dismissing other opinions before they have even been written by assuming that quality comments only come from particular sources. This is very akin to an argument from authority fallacy. Even if a site was known to have "bad" comments, it doesn't mean ALL articles on that site will have bad comments. Links to articles are posted in a wide variety of other places attracting different readers and commenters.

I'm not dismissing opinions, just saying I understand that one could reasonably want to close a comment section for these reasons. There is more than one stance on the issue. I think the onus is on the reader, not the author, to be critical and form counterarguments. A noncritical reader will ignore good comments or the fallacies in bad comments just as easily as they will in the article itself. Adding comment noise is a very indirect method of encouraging critical thinking in readers.

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