[HN Gopher] Building a Better Book Club: A Strategy for Efficien...
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Building a Better Book Club: A Strategy for Efficiently Ingesting
Nonfiction
Author : ingve
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-05-21 17:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spin.atomicobject.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (spin.atomicobject.com)
| ftxbro wrote:
| they are saying to skim
| tstrimple wrote:
| One of the reasons I have trouble consuming non-fiction is the
| absurd amount of repetition which I can only presume is used to
| boost the word count. I understand that repetition is an
| important component to getting content to stick in some
| instances, but it drives me absolutely crazy in non-fiction
| writing. I get it. Please move on to your next point. Skimming
| these sorts of books will give me 80% of the content with 20%
| of the effort. And yeah, you know exactly where I pulled those
| numbers from.
| ftxbro wrote:
| not sure if this was wordy to be ironic
| ftxbro wrote:
| > Skimming these sorts of books will give me 80% of the
| content with 20% of the effort. And yeah, you know exactly
| where I pulled those numbers from.
|
| was it from pareto's butt
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I generally have the notion that the repetition is precisely
| because people skim. You have to repeat your main point
| multiple times or else skimmers will simply miss it and then
| blame the author for being hard to understand!
| mjfl wrote:
| Chuckling to myself thinking about someone obsessively optimizing
| the speed at which they read books with titles like "In It To Win
| It!", "The Pro Inside You!", "You can do ANYTHING!" "10 Chapters
| to SUPERCHARGE Your Career."
|
| Real nonfiction books are better not to skim. Pick better books.
| finnh wrote:
| "The You YOU Are: A spiritual biography of YOU"
|
| - Dr Ricken Lazlo Hale, PhD
| davisoneee wrote:
| I hope a browser add-on comes along that just replaces all these
| blog posts with "Just use ChatGPT, lol".
|
| What do you mean by efficiency here...just getting an utterly
| shallow understanding of some random topic, trusting that someone
| else, be that human or GPT, has understood it?
|
| Part of the benefit of the slowness of reading is that it gives
| you time to actually mull over the topic, so you can build it
| into your own mental framework. The repetition, with slightly
| different wording, helps anchor the idea in your mind and
| provides spaced repetition to help you remember.
|
| Other people's summaries are poor because _they don't have your
| experiences_, so the things that they found relevant might mean
| nothing to you, and the things they find shallow and skipped
| might be exactly what you need. Even if the highlight is useful,
| without the context, it's hard to actually make sure it sticks in
| your brain in order for it to be functional.
|
| Lists might feel useful because the information is
| condensed...but how much of it do you _actually_ remember?
| Efficiency is being able to _use_ the information. Just getting
| through the material may be _fast_, but that's (in my view)
| antithetical to efficiency--it leads to shallow understanding and
| likely poor memory.
|
| We all like to think 'I just need the 1 line summary'...in
| reality we're not special. You need to put the effort in.
| enkid wrote:
| That's the thing about apps like Blinkist - if the book can be
| condensed to fifteen minutes, it's not worth reading. If it
| can't, then I want to read (or listen to) the whole thing, not
| a summary.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'll be the first to agree that a lot of books in topics like
| business strategy are too long. But IMO the ideal length is
| probably more like 100 pages than a magazine article much
| less a 1,000 word blog post or a listicle. Context, examples,
| background, etc. all add to a basic idea in a way that makes
| it easier to remember and understand.
| Jianghong94 wrote:
| What's the difference between this methodology and others already
| proposed out there other than this incorporates LLM
| summarization? See, the slowest part of learning is when your
| brain deeply engrain the concepts into your subconsciousness, and
| there're few ways to do this other than repetition and
| practicing. Read 10 best books again and again is way better than
| skim-read them
| LVB wrote:
| In 5th grade, way back in the 80s, my school had a mini-course in
| skimming that we took for a few weeks. They taught various
| techniques and the tests were pretty cool: here's 30 pages of
| text, you have 10 minutes to skim, and now here's a multiple-
| choice test about the material. Super practical skill and I see
| nothing like it in my own kids' curriculum. The big lesson was
| there being more than one way to consume text via reading.
| w1nst0nsm1th wrote:
| Self-help books are to literature what candy corn is to
| vegetables.
|
| Bill Maher.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQOAtztz8fc
| muhaaa wrote:
| 6.2. Write a summary, use Anki droid to learn key ideas.
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(page generated 2023-05-22 23:00 UTC)