
The Land and Expand Strategy for Reading - r4um
https://commoncog.com/blog/the-land-and-expand-strategy-for-reading/
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wenc
This is actually a good strategy.

I first came across a similar technique expounded in a book by Chaim Potok,
"The Chosen" (good book, I really enjoyed it).

One of the protagonists, Danny Saunders, was the son of a rabbi and _a genius_
who was trying to become a psychologist, so he started reading Freud in its
original form. He found the texts impenetrable even after months of trying.

Then he had an insight: in the study of the Torah (his forte, being a rabbi's
son), folks typically studied with the help of commentaries by rabbis over the
generations who have disputed and explained the texts in different ways.
Commentaries provide context and a jumping off point into the text. So Danny
Saunders took the same approach to studying Freud -- instead of reading Freud,
he studied commentaries on Freud and read what has already been said about
him. This helped him understand the original work better.

Many of us do the same instinctively: we read the Wikipedia article on a
subject to get a lay of the land before jumping into a subject matter. Context
is valuable in pedagogy, which is why it's often helpful to have an instructor
for reading hard books -- otherwise anyone would be able to read any book in
their language and "get it" \-- which is not true. I read English just fine,
but I don't think I'm able to understand Finnegan's Wake without any help.

p.s. We often hear advice that we should study texts in their original form
without commentary, so that we can approach the subject with an unbiased lens
and interpret it for ourselves. But my take is our lens is always biased, and
worse still, in subject areas we are unfamiliar with, our biases are
uninformed. I think a much more productive approach is to read with commentary
but to read critically -- to question and to explore alternative interpretive
options. Without this kind of approach, most important works are just too
difficult and we'd probably just not try.

~~~
dmreedy
I agree that there's always going to be bias. I'd go one step further, even,
with your comment about most important works being too difficult. Instead, I'd
posit that most important works have a bias in and of themselves. An implicit
framework of thinking that needs to at least be partially understood before
the work can be understood. The original intended audience of the work,
separated by however much time and culture and expertise, is at an advantage
here, because in theory they already shared some of that framework with the
author. But the further separated you are from the culture that created a
work, the harder it's going to be to engage with it in any meaningful way; you
just don't speak the same language.

So commentary and criticism and analysis and so on can serve as a useful
_bridge_ into the way of thinking that you'd need to really grok the primary
source. It's probably impossible to get there completely, there will always be
a bit of a gap. But the more secondary material you read, from as many
perspectives as you can find (I do think this is very important, in addition
to the critical thinking mentioned in the parent; even a very critical
thinker, in a strange land, can be deceived into believing there is consensus
on a matter when presented only with a single side), the better chance you
have at being able to focus the center of the thing, with all the various
lenses you've been given.

At least, the center of it relative to your _own_ set of biases!

~~~
wenc
Great point about distance in culture, time and expertise.

I've always been interested in reading the Great Books, and some say the only
investment you need is a library card, but it's not that simple. If all it
truly takes to read the Great Books is just reading them, a lot more people
would be doing it. But they're not. Having taken a sequence of courses on
Western civilization, I realized there's _a lot more_ to reading the Great
Books than just reading them -- most of the time is spent in footnotes,
commentary, research (to understand context) and of course, arguing with the
text. Otherwise all you're doing is streaming words into your head.

It's all in English, but it's also like a totally different language.

And you're on point about critical thinkers being deceived when they don't
have the full context -- Sherlock Holmes says to never theorize without data,
which is all well and good, but sometimes your data can be incomplete in ways
you cannot detect and you end up developing a perfectly coherent model of the
world that is fatally wrong. This is often a problem when you theorize within
a single work. Having more context from different sources doesn't fully solve
this problem but it does mitigate it.

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kazagistar
So the fact that I start with the title and HN comments before reading the
article is good?

~~~
wenc
Sure. That's what I often do instinctively to quickly understand context.

Articles are usually written with an expository focus rather than a didactic
one. Sometimes an article is so abstract that I don't get it until I read
comments on how people are applying it. (it all depends on the quality of
comments of course. No comment on the quality of HN comments) Comments also
give you a sense of the sociological context of something -- articles can
sometimes make something sound grand and theoretical, but sometimes you
discover in the comments that the author had much humbler motivations and was
just trying to scratch an itch. Or that a piece of tech with a glossy front
page actually has all these gaps because the author is a one-man shop who is
working on it part-time.

Social context really matters. In grad school, I realized there was a
difference between what you read in a journal publication and what the author
will tell you after 2 drinks at the bar. You can read influential and highly-
cited journal papers about Algorithm Zeepordisdf which sounds really
impressive, until you meet the author at a conference and they tell you no one
really uses it because of this and that weakness. It's important to be able to
read between the lines and to read around a subject than to just read the
source.

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gfo
The strategy here resembles how Malcolm Gladwell writes. Start the topic with
a story to get you hooked, then expand on the actual subject.

Though Gladwell sort of surrounds the topic with the stories rather than doing
a front-load as this strategy suggests. Still, I do feel like I remember a lot
more about Gladwell's books compared to others.

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viburnum
If you’re really interested in a subject it can very rewarding to move between
primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources are usually clearer and if
they explain why the ideas matter or what’s motivating, I find that
tremendously helpful. Primary sources are often surprising and weirder than I
would have expected.

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a_c
> If you want to learn about topic X , land on the stories around X, and then
> expand into X itself.

How do I know what story/books surround X without reading X first? More, how
do I know what books surround X without reading those books first?

~~~
smogcutter
The history podcaster Mike Duncan gave a good example. On one of his shows he
explained that when he’s researching a new topic, he’ll start by searching
“[topic] historiography”. This gets you a history of the scholarship around a
topic, rather than the history itself. What do experts think about different
approaches and primary sources? How have those approaches changed? What are
the major theories and strains of thought? Then the initial meta-historical
reading points you towards actual sources and gives you a context to
understand them in.

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twic
Do i understand correctly that this guy's strategy for reading a book is to
_read another book first_?

~~~
asdfman123
I think the main benefit from this method is just reading easy books
(biographies, etc) before reading dense, hard books so the dense books will
make more sense.

~~~
JackFr
Not so much easy, as books with a non-pedagogical narrative. Motivating
anecdotes connected by a story of some kind, put the topic in a context that
can make it more approachable.

~~~
asdfman123
Yeah, this is how the best science books are written IMHO.

"First we tried to figure out the properties of matter, then this whole 'atom'
thing started making sense, then we figured out about subatomic particles,
then we realized that subatomic particles actually act pretty weird -- so
that's quantum mechanics."

If you were to just start at quantum mechanics, you'd wonder why the heck
everything is so weird and overly complicated.

