
How You Know - _pius
http://paulgraham.com/know.html
======
nilkn
There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your
mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise
your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may
even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection
and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world.

I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly
vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed
based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or
decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten.

~~~
arjunnarayan
This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned.
Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still
have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old
model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and
that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of
that, since it forces you to revisit a lot of source material and recompute.

~~~
scobar
"The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your
life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple
times."

For me, this quote was the most powerful. I strongly and immediately agreed,
yet I hadn't consciously considered the idea before. I now ask myself the
question, "Which ones were the important books?" Some seem obvious, but I may
have a deeply rooted worldview established a long time ago that needs to be
reevaluated. I may have read books that added support to that worldview, and
have since forgotten from where that support came.

I'm not very well read yet, but I have a question for those of you who are.
What are some methods you utilize to remember which books are the important
ones?

Edit: The comment at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753656)
contains a great idea. I agree that taking notes and writing a journal can be
great solutions, but I don't often read the notes and entries I've written. A
personal wiki that is searchable and contains references seems very
interesting.

~~~
sillysaurus3
What types of books are important to you?

~~~
scobar
>What's "important"? (That may seem like a misguided question, but it's not.)

I'm not certain if this question was meant for me directly. If it was
rhetorical, I apologize for misunderstanding and answering.

I prefer not to define "important" in this context to avoid excluding any
definitions subjective to those who may respond to my question. That way, I
may learn both what makes a book important to someone and tips on remembering
which were important.

Edit: Now that I know the question was intended for me, I'll provide a little
more depth to my answer.

The first thought I had when considering what makes a book important is how
strongly it resonated within me, and the intensity of my emotions when
reflecting upon what I've learned or how my perspective changed shortly after
reading it. I know those stronger emotions may derive from a bias I had at one
point in my life, and may no longer have.

Therefore, I can't help but think my definition is wrong because it's relative
to the period in my life which I read the book. So some books that were
important before may not be now. That's why I was curious to learn others'
definitions of "important" books, and how to identify them for rereading.

------
pitchups
An associated problem caused by a change in the mental model due to reading is
the "Curse of knowledge" principle - which essentially states that
"....better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about
problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties."

Once you have read something and your mental model of the world is adjusted to
include the new information, you have a difficult time understanding why
others don't see what you see. This is compounded by the fact - as highlighted
by pg in the essay - that you also forget how and when your mental model
changes.

This is one reason why not every expert is a good teacher - as they fail to
see the world from the point of view of students.

But it is also relevant and useful to remember this in the world of startups.
Established large companies routinely get disrupted by novice startups - often
because the experts at the large company fail to see problems the way novices
do. It is impossible to become an expert at something while continuing to view
the world from the eyes of a beginner.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge)

~~~
awolf
>better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems
from the perspective of lesser-informed parties

Reading this made me think of poker. Calibrating to the skill level of lesser
players is often very difficult for intermediate and lower-advanced players.
Being able to synthesize the less sophisticated thought technologies beginners
are using is surprisingly difficult. Failure to adjust often leads better
players to play incorrectly against newbies. Anyone who has experienced the
frustration of beating medium/high stakes cash games only to lose in home
games with your friends for 1/1000th the stakes will know what I mean.

------
sinak
If you haven't seen it, S01E03 of Black Mirror, _The Entire History of You_ ,
deals exactly with what PG describes at the end of this post: technology that
lets you review and relive your past. It's very much worth watching, and was
recently added to Netflix's library:

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/)

[http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&trkid=33258...](http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&trkid=3325852)

~~~
berberous
I just watched the whole series, and I wanted to go ahead and recommend that
everyone watch more than that single episode (although I think it's one of the
strongest). It's only 6 episodes total (each season has 3 episodes).

I think this audience would especially like the series:

'Black Mirror is a British television anthology series created by Charlie
Brooker that shows the dark side of life and technology. Brooker noted, "each
episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality.
But they're all about the way we live now – and the way we might be living in
10 minutes time if we're clumsy."'

~~~
adcuz
There's a new episode being broadcast tomorrow evening in the UK.

------
agentultra
> Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of.

Hence the important art of keeping a journal. You can keep a transaction log
of changes. The act of replaying the journal allows you to identify patterns
in your thought processes and identify cognitive dissonances. The very act of
reading should induce a reactive compulsion to write.

As Burroughs taught in his later creative writing courses -- in order to
become a better writer one must first learn to read (I'm paraphrasing here).

Part of becoming a better thinker is learning how to think. In order to do
that one must catch one's self in the act.

~~~
chubot
I'm definitely a fan of taking notes on things you've read (among other
things, the effort to write notes makes you choose what you read more
carefully). And I agree that it will help you remember the sources for various
ideas.

But I think a journal is the wrong model (i.e. time ordered entries, either
electronic or paper). I have used a paper notebook in the past, but I would
rarely go back and look at things, and it's not searchable, and paper is not
editable.

For the last 10+ years, I've used a Wiki. Hyperlinks are huge. They really do
model the associations your brain already makes. I have wiki pages that are 10
years old and that still grow new associations. I think it takes a big load
off your brain to have all that stuff written down, and searchable with ease.
(I had to write my own Wiki to get it fast enough though.)

~~~
Raphmedia
I've heard a few people tell they use a Wiki. Do you host it on your own
server? Is is a public wiki, or a private one? I'm very curious.

~~~
chubot
It's a private Wiki, which started out as a Python CGI on shared hosting, but
is now a WSGI app on a Linode.

I started it 10 years ago, and side benefit was that writing a Wiki is a good
project to learn about web programming. The first version was of course
riddled with XSS and escaping problems :-/

I think writing a Wiki is still a good exercise now. I'm not a front end
person per se, but every programmer should know something about the web. I'm
always a little taken aback when I meet some back end guy who doesn't know how
HTTP or the browser works.

And IMO there is too much bloated JS on the web now. I think people forgot how
to make a simple web app with a form and plain buttons. There are too many
fast-moving frameworks, so just doing it "raw" (or to WSGI) is a good learning
exercise.

------
ctchocula
I really enjoyed Paul's compilation analogy. It reminds me of a quote by
Robertson Davies. "A truly great book should be read in youth, again in
maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by
morning light, at noon and by moonlight."

It also reminds me of that MIT paper that gives advice on how to do research.
The part it talks about why it is that when your colleague gives you a paper
to read and says it's particularly poignant, but when you read it it doesn't
seem like anything special. Maybe it's because your colleague had the
dependencies in his state of mind that you did not have in yours, so it didn't
seem as memorable to you as to him when the code compiled.

~~~
temuze
Yeah, his analogy extends to art pretty well. Let's say we use Tolstoy's
definition of art, that art is about communicating a feeling to others via a
medium.

There are times in our lives where our state of mind makes us more likely to
be moved by a piece of art.

It's why you should revisit your favorite books from your youth - you'll often
find the same words mean completely different things later on.

------
sirsar
Most people equate the term "memory" with what is more accurately termed
_episodic memory_ \- little movies in your head. Most people can't remember
when "Christmas" was first defined for them, but they can rattle off many
things about it - the date, the religious meaning, the corporate meaning, etc.
This is _semantic memory_ , and together they form your conscious _explicit
memory_ or _declarative memory_ (there are differences between the two that
are not relevant here). The brain often throws away the episode but keeps the
concept, and that is what Paul is talking about here.

But there's more to it than that. Your unconscious _implicit memory_ includes
things you can't even articulate. That's the difference between the date of
Christmas and how to ride a bike: the latter is nondeclarative. Learning a
different way to ride a bike, or approach programming, is even more difficult
than recomputing semantic memory.

You can (and should) read a new books and gain new episodes to base your facts
and opinions on. Read diverse material with abandon. But when learning
something nondeclarative, like a weight-lifting technique, it can be well
worth seeking out an expert and learning it right the first time. With
nondeclarative memory, what you don't know _can_ hurt you.

For more on the science and classification of memory, the Wikipedia page is as
good a starting place as any.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory)

------
Alex3917
Why not take notes? Whenever I read a book I want to remember, I just pencil a
dash in the margin next to any key fact, insight, or quote. Then after I'm
done with a few chapters I retype these sections into a mindmap. It probably
only adds 10 - 20% extra time, but you're getting 1000% more value.

In general what matters isn't how much you read, but how much you retain and
what sorts of connections with past and future insight and information. It's
important to have the full experience of having realizations and making
connections while you're reading, which is why I just make a dash in the
margins as opposed to taking actual notes in real time, but I feel like by not
circling back later you're cheating yourself out of the true value of
learning.

Especially since you have no idea if the books you're reading are even true or
not until you vet the facts with primary sources.

~~~
Qwertious
The problem with taking notes is that you'd have to do so for literally every
book or article or video you ever watched, and then you'd have to refer to it
every time you remembered any facts from them.

------
snowwrestler
This comment will run the risk of sounding condescending, but I believe it's
true so I'm going to post it anyway.

Thought processes like the ones captured in pg's post are fostered by
education in critical analysis--the sort of analysis that one learns in the
humanities. Art, literature, philosophy, history, etc. are the products of
human thought, and learning to critique them is in part an exploration of how
humans think. Not the physics or neurology, but how influences can shape each
person's mental model.

Part of this is exploring the influences that affected the mental model of the
person writing or creating the art. Another is exploring the mental model(s)
that the artist or writer sought to create. (This is what we experience when
we "get into" a book.)

So, if you're looking for a reason that CS or engineering students should take
humanities courses, I think one is illustrated in this post: it teaches you
how to read books consciously. It gives you a framework for exploring how the
thoughts of others (and therefore yours as well) are influenced and shaped by
the information that is consumed during a lifetime.

------
igonvalue
> And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it
> would amount to much more than a page.

This was reassuring to hear from someone else, because I've had this exact
feeling about books I read, films I've watched, conversations I've had, work
projects I've completed, etc. This is true even in cases when I was completely
engaged in, for example, reading the book, and the book left a positive
impression on me.

I've always felt guilty about this, especially when I see others who don't
seem to have the same problem when they talk about the books they've read,
etc. I've also found that recall can be greatly improved by repeatedly talking
about the specific topic with multiple people.

The strange thing is that I have an excellent memory for certain things -
information about people and relationships. In light of our evolutionary
history as a social species, perhaps this is not so surprising after all.

~~~
philwelch
I've found that when I reexpose myself to the same subject or book or
whatever, I recall or relearn the information a lot more easily than I did the
first time. A lot of times it was just in cold storage the whole time.

------
coderholic
I remember reading something very similar to this (but can't remember where,
ha), where it said the important thing about reading is how if affects your
general thinking rather than the individual pieces of information that you're
likely to remember (or not).

I spent several years reading a ton of different books on economics and I can
recall very few facts from those books, but it did and has completely altered
my world view of many things.

pg's analogy of a program where you've lost the source code doesn't feel quite
right, because you can't make modifications to the program without the code.
Some sort of machine learning model seems more appropriate, where you've lost
the original training data but can still update the model later with fresh
data (a new book), and end up with a better/different model, but then lose
that training data again.

~~~
eoi
I think a machine learning model provides a nice version of Graham's "The same
book would get compiled differently at different points in your life."

Using an artificial neural net analogy instead of a compilation analogy: "The
same book would optimize your neural net towards a different local minimum at
different points in your life."

------
pacalleri
While I was reading came to my mind the Borges's short story "Funes the
memorious". It's about someone who can't forget any detail. He remembers
absolutely all the things and the infinite instances of them through the time.
At some point of the story Borges conjectures: "I suspect, nevertheless, that
he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget the difference, to
generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were
nothing but details, almost contiguous details."

~~~
themodelplumber
Great passage. As a digital artist who works with fractals, that really
resonates with me. Visual fractal detail quite often converges to visual noise
(and looks remarkably like a noise function as expressed on e.g. a TV set). I
usually need to remove or de-emphasize that noise in order to clarify the
direction and abstract intent of the work.

One of my favorite films that works along these lines is the 1998 Japanese
film "After Life," in which a small party of workers attempt to recreate
others' memories with very basic film studio equipment. I absolutely treasure
the loss of detail in the various recreation scenes, and the way it suggests
that there is actually a satisficing point at which we might realize, "yes,
I'm actually reliving that memory right now." So I agree with Mr. Graham's
conclusion that technology can bring this about.

On an unrelated note, PG's essays always bring to mind the Meyers-Briggs INTJ
type. Essays about the annoyance of accumulating "stuff", a focus on abstract
/ intuitive learning styles, and clever writing which quickly establishes a
theoretical framework which is then thrown against the world's (audience's)
experience, rather than starting from first principles hoping to eventually
reveal a framework as others might do. His seems to me very much a "systems
thinker" approach.

~~~
applecore
I've noticed that whenever truly original thinkers encounter a problem,
they'll quickly establish a workable model—even if it's known to be flawed or
wrong—just so they can begin testing it “against the world's experience.”

(I had no idea this style of thinking was associated with INTJ types.)

------
WalterBright
I have an interesting take on this. Most of the books I've read, I have a copy
of. A while back, I endeavored to cut, scan and OCR them all into my computer.
One idea was then I could do a full-text search, limited to what I've already
read rather than what google thinks is relevant.

So far, I've found it very handy to find something if I at least remember
which book it was in. But I need a program that can extract the OCR'd text
from .pdf files - anyone know of a simple one?

(I can do it manually, one at a time, by bringing it up in a pdf reader, but
that's too tedious and slow.)

~~~
sixdimensional
This is a great idea. Full-text search for "my knowledgebase", books I've
read, thing's I've written, etc. is an area with potential that still seems
unfulfilled.

Some ideas: \- Apache PDFBox
[https://pdfbox.apache.org/](https://pdfbox.apache.org/) \- command line:
[https://pdfbox.apache.org/commandline/#extractText](https://pdfbox.apache.org/commandline/#extractText)
\- XPDF has a command line tool you can use in Windows -
[http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/](http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/) \- pdftotext \-
If you're going for accuracy, Tesseract is one of the most accurate
[https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-
ocr/](https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) \- Apache Tika is often used
the way you suggest: [http://tika.apache.org/](http://tika.apache.org/)

------
normloman
I will never understand why this guy's essays are so revered. I'm expecting
some profound conclusion, but the only message of the essay is "reading and
experience form mental models." Well, duh! Whats worse, he doesn't support his
claims with evidence, besides a single anecdote.

Am I missing something here?

~~~
Dragonai
Well, Paul's essays aren't all meant to be mind-shatteringly revolutionary. He
simply likes to share his thoughts and advice on a wide range of subjects that
have helped shape who he is and what he knows, and the general public respects
both him and his essays because a.) he's got the credibility to back them up,
and b.) because it shows in his work and in his writing.

I personally think this essay is some pretty nice food for thought.

~~~
normloman
I have a problem with sharing every thought that pops in your head. If you
don't have something new to contribute to the discussion, why add to the
noise?

As for "food for thought," have you really never thought about how reading and
experience shape your beliefs? I thought this was pretty basic stuff. Maybe
I'm wrong.

------
scoofy
What i found shocking here, is how casually pg talks about what i believe is
the fundamental point of philosophy. That is the mapping of our minds
inductive model of the world, and our deductive one.

>Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget
the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world
persists.

Here, he is pointing out the the relevant information you perceive, your
empirical data, is only retained insofar as it effects your deductive model of
the world, that is, the model we use to determine truth and falsity. The rest
of the data is generally trivial. This is a very sensible insight in my mind,
and kudos to him. The dance between empirical data and deductive truth is one
of the most difficult things for me to get my head around. This as a model for
data retention is something i'd not thought of.

>Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index
and even edit them. So although not knowing how you know things may seem part
of being human, it may not be.

Here, i find this problematic. In Soros's terms, the mind is reflexive. Thus,
in reviewing the data, we are experiencing new data. If we edit our thoughts,
do we not remember editing them? I don't see away to take away the reflexive
nature of self examination, that in creating changes, we create new data about
the changes.

------
japhyr
One of the most significant books I ever read was _A Walk Across America_ by
Peter Jenkins. He graduated college in the 70's, wasn't sure what to do, and
decide to walk from New York to the Pacific ocean. This book covered the first
half of the walk; he wrote it while taking a break in Louisiana along the way.

That book was hugely influential to me. I graduated college and spent two
years teaching. The summer after my second year of teaching, I had no
obligations to anyone else for the first time in my life. I remembered Peter
Jenkins' story, and decided to bicycle across the US. I knew I wanted to
travel under my own power as he had done, but I wanted to go a little faster
than he did. Bicycling was perfect for me. I ended up doing two cross-country
trips over successive summers, and then I spent a year living on my bicycle,
circumnavigating North America.

I reread _A Walk Across America_ some years after doing my own trips. I was
amazed at how bad I thought the book was. pg observes that

 _The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your
life._

This is absolutely true. Now that I'm in my 40's, I'm going to go back and
reread the most influential books of my 20's. I might even have to change my
HN username after doing so, but I hope not.

~~~
d23
May I ask what in your perspective on the book changed? What made you think it
was so great the first time and so bad the second?

------
debacle
I don't like the flavor of this post. It feels very much like navel-gazing
and, if it wasn't for the domain name, it likely would have been lost to
/newest.

Where is the knowledge here? That we don't have immediate recollection of
retained information? Knowledge is based on a beginning and ending context.

~~~
larrys
Which makes me think of a saying. One that I remember. "Sophia Loren without a
nose is not Sophia Loren". Here's another one "if my grandmother had balls
she'd be my grandfather".

The point is PG wrote it so just like if anyone of note wrote it it would be
more of interest than the same thought from anyone else.

After all these are analog thoughts and subjective this isn't science.

~~~
debacle
When a renowned writer writes something weak, it doesn't give credence to the
piece, it takes credence from the writer.

~~~
npizzolato
I'm also surprised people actually find the contents of this blog post
insightful, but I suspect it has far more to do with who wrote the article.

I mean, is it not obvious that you can take away new ideas from reading a book
multiple times at different stages of your life? As a simplified example,
movies with twist endings hinge on exactly that fact -- armed with new
information, events you have already experienced take on new meaning. More
"important" things will have more significance, but it's the same idea.

Is it not obvious that your own world views are the result of your own
experiences and others who you have contact with, even if you cannot precisely
remember everything that would lead to that world view?

~~~
vehementi
No, those things aren't obvious FYI.

And if your summary was "boy, new ideas from different stages" you kind of
missed it.

------
arh68
It's not that you _forget_ the content, it's that you forget _how to phrase
it_ concisely. If the author needed 70, or 200 pages to explain a concept, and
you can at some point raise your hand and claim 'I get the point', it's not
reasonable to expect a 12-word summary. _What do I remember?_ Hard to put into
words. Likewise, it's not reasonable to expect a perfect memory, reciting
paragraph after paragraph of the original text.

If you really _can_ summarize a book in a sentence or two, wouldn't the author
have done that already?

Maybe it's time for me to reread Cryptonomicon. There are parts of that book I
have absolutely no memory of, flipping through it, yet other parts I remember
all too often (bicycle sprockets, comets of pee, bisecting alligators, van eck
phreaking).

(also... > _seige warfare_ ?)

~~~
csallen
_> If you really can summarize a book in a sentence or two, wouldn't the
author have done that already?_

Not only is this possible to do, but it's often done. The problem is that it's
not necessarily useful or sufficient to hear a mere summary of something.

For example, let's say I tell you that "Idea X is important." That's a simple
idea, right? It only too me four words to express it. But do you believe me?
Probably not, because I haven't spent any time or effort convincing you that
idea X is important. And do you understand what idea X is? Probably not,
because I haven't spent any time or effort explaining that. Etc.

Even if you can summarize it, you probably need to write the entire book for
people to get the background information necessary for them to find your
summary useful, otherwise it will go in one ear and out the other.

~~~
d23
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this has absolutely nothing to do with what
PG was referencing in the article. I'm guessing he could at least give some
_broad_ overview of the book he's referencing. The issue seems to be that it
seems so small in comparison to the book itself.

~~~
csallen
Well, exactly. The book as a whole accomplishes much more than a brief summary
of it does, which is why it feels bad to lose all of that additional
information.

I disagree with the parent that you still remember the content but can't
summarize it concisely. I believe the opposite: you forget the specifics but
retain the ability to summarize them.

------
david927
This essay reminds me of a NY Times essay:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.html)

Interestingly, if shown a series of hundreds of images, we wouldn't remember
many in the list. But if we're shown alternates (was it a goldfish or a
watch?), we would instantly recognize the item.

We didn't forget, we just couldn't access the memory on demand. The conclusion
is the same: it's there, influencing us and adding to our lives, even if it
doesn't feel like it sometimes.

------
karmacondon
I've been thinking about this very issue recently, and coincidentally started
working on software two days ago to help manage the problem of remembering
things that I've read. Obtaining information in 2015 is remarkably easy.
Retaining it is damn near impossible, at least for me. I read books and
bookmark links from hn and reddit on a daily basis, consuming constantly. But
I find that I recall very little of it. I don't know if Stephan Hawking was
right about black holes destroying information, but my bookmarks folder comes
pretty close. Links go in and then are never seen or heard from again. I take
copious book notes and type them up, only for them to be consigned to the void
of my hard drive file system. I've tried evernote and anki and several other
tools, but it's always a one way ticket. My trouble isn't remembering what
I've read, but remembering to remember. No matter how I've tried, I can't
change my daily work flow to set aside time to review the notes and
information that I've already collected, rendering it useless.

If I had a magic device that recorded all of my experiences, it wouldn't do me
much good because I'm too busy collecting new experiences to be remembered. It
would be great to be able to search for details and trivia, but I wouldn't
have time to peruse the archive to refresh myself about things that I had
forgotten completely. Much in the way that google lets us search for and
recall anything, except the things we don't remember the name of.

I'm going in the direction of reminding myself about things that I previously
read or bookmarked, especially as they tie in to what I'm currently reading. I
think one part of the solution is to display existing bookmarks and typed up
book notes to myself in a near random fashion. It's not the most sophisticated
solution, but at least they won't be lost and I'll have a chance of
reconnecting with something and establishing more anchors in my memory. I
think a plugin that relates past content to the current page might be a good
idea, ie for this page I could see any previous bookmarks that involve memory
and retention. And generally reminding myself to review things I've already
learned, even if they don't seem relevant at the moment.

I don't have any great ideas yet, but I've been coding like heck for the past
few days to try to take small steps toward a solution. I've been on a quest to
make my brain work better, and this essay has definitely given me some ideas
and helped to push me along.

~~~
jasim
> It's not the most sophisticated solution, but at least they won't be lost
> and I'll have a chance of reconnecting with something and establishing more
> anchors in my memory.

Go for it; simplicity works. I've pushed a few of my favourite passages to a
simple web page which I can flip through randomly
([http://www.jasimabasheer.com/amateur_reading/serendipity.htm...](http://www.jasimabasheer.com/amateur_reading/serendipity.html)).
As a bonus I can also link to it when relevant discussions come up.

------
foobarqux
Schopenhauer said it first and better:

"However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are
merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As
soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other
hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of
the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to
take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below
forever, because they bear what should have bourne them." \-- Schopenhauer

------
davemel37
I am in middle of reading a fascinating book that discusses how the brain,
processes, interprets, and retains information as it passes from your Sensory
Information Storage to your short term memory to your long term memory, as
well as how you retrieve information from your long term memory. (The
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis)

The book was written as a guide to CIA Analysts to understand the limitations
their own filters and mental models place on new information they process.

One important point that I find applies to this essay is that the way we
retrieve information is through schema that associate various memories with
each other. Creativity is about mapping new pathways through your memory or
applying other patterns and schema on top of existing memories.

So, reading a book a second time, or even "forgetting" what you read, can not
only give you new patterns and schema to apply to your other mental models and
memories and stimulate creativity.

I highly recommend everyone read The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis... or
if you want the abridged version you can read my brief recap.
[http://www.davidmelamed.com/2014/12/05/internet-marketers-
ci...](http://www.davidmelamed.com/2014/12/05/internet-marketers-cia-hedge-
funds-business/?hvid=2UkF6u)

------
snide
This goes both ways.

Sometimes I avoid rereading books for the same reason. There was a Summer
where Catcher in the Rye felt very important. I'd hate to reread it under my
new, adult perspective. I'd prefer to let it linger in nostalgia.

~~~
hudathun
I had the same same thing with the much less erudite Stranger in a Strange
Land. Re-read it 20 years later and was disappointed. On the positive side, I
should consider how much I've moved forward in that time :) or sideways :-S

~~~
snide
The nice thing about Heinlein is he has a book for all stages. As I've gotten
older I really prefer his "Time Enough for Love" novel, which is about looking
back on a long life.

------
bcbrown
A few years ago I started an annual tradition, where around the new year I'll
re-read the Pragmatic Programmer. This year will be the third year, and I
expect I'll continue to gain new insights from future rereadings.

~~~
Kluny
How long does it take you to get through it? I struggle with reading non-
fiction books, and gave up at around 100 pages in last time I tried it. Sucks,
cause I've heard that it's one of the more readable books go, in terms of
programming manuals.

~~~
bcbrown
Under a week. I've coincidentally also had off from Christmas-New Years the
past three years, though, so I have plenty of free time. I also read a lot of
nonfiction, and read a couple of technical textbooks every year.

------
sytelus
This is great essay. Few points:

1\. The more correct analogy would be _training data_ and _machine learned
model_ rather than source code and compiled binary.

2\. Lot of people move from book to book, always reading some book at any
point in time. This provides great dopamine hit to brain and keeps boredome
away. However one need to _reflect_ on what they read to gain any significant
"take always". The act of reflecting enforces recall which in turn induces
analysis and memory storage. I try to create a book review to formalize my
reflection process after I complete a book.

3\. These days I also get digital (usually pdf) copies of most books I'm
reading. This allows me to use tools like GoodReader to highlight striking
statements and make notes of my opinions as I read along. You can sure just
use pencil and margin of book :). This habit has rewarded me greatly because
it makes me take a pause and think about what I read. I can come back to book
anytime and refresh it 10X faster. It's also fun to know what my opinion used
to be on some of the things years ago.

------
levlandau
This makes a lot of sense. However, a machine learning model + data analogy
feels more satisfactory (and accurate?) to me. We throw away the data but our
model as well as its parameters are retained. The model as well as the
parameters get refined with experience and it's possible that the model is
recursively made up of multiple models and that combination is governed by
parameters which are also governed by experience. Realizing this has always
been fascinating to me and it makes it clear that exposing the brain to more
data in pretty deliberate ways can yield profound results. The "smarter" you
are the less data you need. If you are not so smart/knowledgeable you need
more data. The data you need is also specifically of the question-answer form
i.e. examples of what it is you are trying to learn. Anyways before i go down
the rabbit hole, I think these metaphors are extremely helpful for the purpose
of self analysis and improvement.

------
larrys
"The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your
life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple
times. "

I also find that this rings true with movies as well.

------
sbensu
I experienced this phenomenon starkly when I started a book, and felt it was
filled with obvious remarks and little novelty. It took me 50 pages to realize
I had already read it.

~~~
lmkg
This is the primary downside of reading without a bookmark. Any book I've read
on public transportation, I would guess on average each page gets read about
twice (with some chapter intros reaching double-digits). It's hard to figure
out if it's really something you've read before, or if it's just a very
logical continuation of what you read yesterday.

I also feel obligated to one-up you. One time in high school English class,
the teacher put a sample student essay up on the projector and picked it apart
in front of the class. It took me half an hour to realize that I had written
the essay in question, and by that point I had concluded that I did not
completely agree with it. I learned something that day about writing.

~~~
andyjdavis
>Any book I've read on public transportation

I suspect this is also a key part of your inability to determine whether or
not you have read a given page before. You are reading in an environment that
does not lend itself to creating notable memories. This is purely personal
conjecture but I suspect that if you went and read somewhere more interesting
your memory of what you are reading would magically improve.

Books I read while at home or similar tend to disappear into some sort of
memory hole. Meanwhile books I have read while visiting other countries tend
to be easier to recall, both in terms of the book's contents and the
circumstances I was in when reading it.

------
larrys
"What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?"

Well for one things it gives you pleasure. You could also say "what's the
point of listening to music" or "what's the point of watching comedy". Other
than pleasure, as a generality, you might read because it makes you feel good
to do so.

I find that a key to good mental health (that works for me) is not to question
what harmless things make you feel good and why. If I did that it would make
me unhappy. Just go with the good feeling.

One thing that I'm sad about is that I don't get the same pleasure that I used
to from browsing books at Barnes and Noble. With the internet there is to much
to read already. I don't find the same utility that I used to from books that
are essentially a single perspective (at least the ones that I used to buy,
non-fiction).

~~~
gdulli
He wasn't actually questioning the value of reading. That question was only a
rhetorical device that led into his main point. It was put there as a straw
man to start the process of disproving that there's no value to reading if you
don't remember details. And that it's unnecessary to lament not remembering
details.

------
kiyoto
This theory explains why many smart people also read a lot. Not necessarily
books or even any body of text, but reading as a generic behavior to find
meanings in various objects and events in life (Books, I feel, is just one of
the easiest things to read). Because they read a lot, they have broader and
deeper mental models, which they use to model new/different things/events
well.

Also, in my experience, what sets the smartest people apart from "just" smart
people is their ability to retain the how: not only do they have broad and
deep models, but they also know how these models are built and can adapt them
quickly as they acquire new information.

Most people need to run a disassembler of their compiled thoughts, and after a
certain point in life, their binaries are so bloated that they can't decompile
them at all.

------
ejstembler
Having read Carl Sagan's Cosmos in my youth, I always feel guilty re-reading a
book:

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my
lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries
of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

~~~
anigbrowl
Don't feel guilty, Sagan's quantitative approach is a teribly shallow view of
reading. If you feel you want to read something again it's because you expect
to get something out of it - perhaps to refresh your memory, perhaps to pay
more attention to the subtext of the work, perhaps to study the author's
literary or rhetorical techniques. You wouldn't assume that you had learned
everything about a complex musical composition or painting from single
listening or viewing, why assume you've learned everything worth knowing from
a single reading of a book?

The only reading I ever feel guilty about is my aversion to leaving a book
unfinished. I'm pretty good at picking what to read, but about once every year
or two I encounter some real stinker that is a literal waste of my time, and I
feel a bit annoyed with myself for plowing through to the end even though I
have long ceased to expect any literary or intellectual payoff.

~~~
jeffbush
I think it was Thomas Hobbes who said "If I had read as many books as other
men, I should have been as ignorant as they are."

------
weinzierl

        Reading and experience train your model of the world. 
        And even if you forget the experience or what you read, 
        its effect on your model of the world persists. Your 
        mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source 
        of. It works, but you don't know why.
    

I often feel like that, but much more in regard to people than to books and
experiences. It's strange, how much others have formed me, but how little I do
remember about them. How little I remember about my parents, but how big a
part of my compiled program they are.

Of all the time I spend with my daughter, of all the activities we do, she
probably will not remember much in a few years, but at least I can hope it
will have an effect of her model of the world that persists.

------
cliffcrosland
When I was a freshman in college, I was in a humanities class that focused on
the intersection between humans and machines. We had an assignment to build
and test out a "prosthesis", i.e. a technology that extends human capability,
in Second Life.

I created a simple wristwatch accessory that was scripted to upload a copy of
all of your chatbox text to an external service. Later, you could log in to
this external service and search through a history of all of the conversations
your character ever overheard.

Real-world versions of this technology appear inevitable as digital storage
costs trend to zero. A rudimentary digital copy of the physical world is being
created in services like Google Maps. The Google self-driving car records a 3D
copy of its surroundings with accuracy at the centimeter level. Dropcam
uploads video and audio data from within your home to cloud storage.

A world with fully recorded life experiences seems creepy at first blush, but
I believe we'll discover a mechanism for trust that will allow everyone to
safely record a digital copy of their lives that is inaccessible to third
parties. Perhaps in the future we'll each own an open-source private cloud
container of CPU and storage resources. Instead of processing your data on
external servers, third-party services might provide code that runs in your
own container under tight network permission restrictions. Such a system might
be able to maintain the benefits of continuous software deployment while
allowing consumers to keep their data under their control.

------
sbensu
The problems is figuring out which books provide those useful mental models. I
found that fiction usually doesn't but a list with recommendations in the
comments would be great.

~~~
agentultra
A good article on the importance of fiction from a scientifically validated
point of view: [http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/04/28/why-fiction-
good...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/04/28/why-fiction-good-for-you-
how-fiction-changes-your-world/nubDy1P3viDj2PuwGwb3KO/story.html)

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury L'Etranger - Albert Camus Frankenstein - Mary
Shelley Metamorphosis - Ovid Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood The Picadilly
Papers - Charles Dickens Permutation City - Greg Egan

Fiction allows us to experience the most intimate thoughts of people we've
never met in a way we cannot emulate in reality. We can visit places we've
never been to and experience situations we'd try our best to avoid. We sit for
hours hallucinating vividly reading these stories as we download these
characters, concepts, and ideas into our meat. And if the story resonated with
us we walk away a different person: new connections in our synapses,
reinforced signals in existing ones. Stories are one of the most powerful
tools we have at our disposal; perhaps even more so than mathematics or
computation.

~~~
sbensu
I agree that good fiction book can be an eye opener. I'll give the ones from
you list I haven't read a try. By non-fiction I didn't only mean science but
also historic novels and biographies. I find they come with connections and
lessons that no human could have come up with.

~~~
agentultra
Try the Penguin Classics hardcovers. Frankenstein for example[0] includes an
amazing abridged version based on the original manuscript and later revised
editions as well as a very engaging historical account of the author's life,
times, and influences when she wrote it. These are also important things to
understand about a story as well and can give deeper insights into its inner
structure.

[0][http://www.penguin.com/book/frankenstein-by-mary-
shelley/978...](http://www.penguin.com/book/frankenstein-by-mary-
shelley/9780141393391)

------
hrjet
This raises two interesting questions to me:

1\. Are technological advances required for re-living experiences? Wouldn't
(some forms of) meditation achieve similar results? Personally, I have found
myself remembering many past events, a few days into the start of meditation.

2\. When we re-read books, we often choose to re-read those that we liked. But
could there be some benefit in re-reading books that we _didn 't_ like (and
surpasses a minimum threshold of quality).

------
lifeisstillgood
I strongly advise pg to go find a DVD of Black Mirror a horribly under-rated
TV series from the excellent Charlie Brooker - the one on replaying ones
memories suggests just reading will be a lot less troublesome !

I do suspect we will be less likely to record our lives for later playback
than have them analysed at or near the time for feedback on how to improve.
Twitch TV is (I am told) full of streams of top rated people playing WoW and
commenting on their actions (so others can learn, or be entertained). It's
probable that there are shows now or soon that have players commentating on
other players streams, and a fairly short leap from that to commenting on
videos of me training my dog, or performing reps or basically anything in the
life coach / therapy repertoire.

Audio and visual analysis already allows therapists to zoom in on the
important parts of observed patients (certainly in sleep therapy) and will
only get better.

Whilst the unexamined life is not worth living, there is no reason you have to
be the only examiner. We shall all have our own life long therapists.

~~~
smeyer
>go find a DVD of Black Mirror

It also recently made it to Netflix. I've been hearing about it all over among
my friends the last few days as they've been watching it there (and watched
the first couple of episodes myself.)

------
ojbyrne
I hate this: "What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little
from them?"

Because reading is enjoyable?

~~~
worklogin
Did you read the article? There are multiple reasons for reading, and though
many of them feed into enjoyment, it's not always the end.

~~~
ojbyrne
I did read it, and found it trite and obvious. My problems with it were
essentially summarized by the particular sentence I quoted.

~~~
kissickas
I found it obvious, which pg admits, until this quote: "The same book would
get compiled differently at different points in your life."

A nice analogy, as others have pointed out, and that is the thirteen-word
summary I'll remember from this essay. Not bad, considering most thousand-page
books will be compressed down to a page of take-away memories.

------
d0m
> Intriguingly, this implication isn't limited to books.

We can see it clearly with the functional paradigm renaissance right now. The
same arguments already existed 40 years ago, but _something_ changed recently
where the perception of some people toward functional paradigm completely
changed.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
Probably because we hit a threshold where dealing with mutability started to
get unmanageable.

Another area of interest is "microservices", for the same reason.

------
shubhamjain
I started reading books about an year ago - read about 16 this year and I am
not sure if it just a phony hunch or a real thing but I feel reading has
helped me a lot in programming.

I am able to grasp things pretty quickly, I am able to link two different
things to get ideas to solve problems, and also, I have grown more confident
in approaching challenging problems.

Albeit, with anecdotal evidence, I believe, taking interest in wide variety of
fields may not give immediate benefits but it helps you in ways you don't
imagine. The very fact about which I used to worry - not focusing on
specialising and hoping from one thing to another, is what I think has helped
me grow my skills in programming, in general.

------
zenogais
I think this is part of a larger point. Books aren't just collections of
facts. Deleuze and Guattari perhaps said it best in the introduction to "A
Thousand Plateaus" \- "A book itself is a little machine..."

They then go on to say: "We will never ask what a book means, as signified or
signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what
it functions with..." Books are machines you plug into your understanding of
the world and they either have an effect on you or they have no effect at all.
What and how a book plugs into your understanding and works on it is more
important than the content of the book itself under this view.

------
a3_nm
> "when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering the childhood trauma that
> prevented him from singing"

Does anyone know what this is referring to? Searching for "stephen fry singing
trauma" doesn't return anything useful except pg's essay.

~~~
Tycho
he seems to mention it in his autobiography

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Fry-Chronicles-An-
Autobiography/pr...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Fry-Chronicles-An-
Autobiography/product-reviews/B005GL492I?pageNumber=5)

(search for "singing")

~~~
a3_nm
Interesting, thanks. Somehow it seems that Google didn't index up to that
page.

------
rluedeman
This is a really interesting perspective on cognition, and it all kind of
makes sense if you consider the brain to be a black box pattern recognition
machine with various built-in biases.

New data is always added to the model, but not in an entirely rational
fashion. The updated model is likely to slightly overfit new data ("compiled
at the time they happen"), and particularly salient bits and pieces of old
data (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases))
are disproportionately weighted.

------
sinamdar
'Reliving experiences' is part of the Exposure Therapy that is used to treat
PTSD. I remember watching on NOVA or some science program how virtual reality
was being used to treat veterans suffering from PTSD. By reliving a dangerous
situation in the VR world, they are able to 'recompile' the program in a safer
context than it actually happened.

EDIT: Found the link
[http://www.nami.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Top_Story/Using_V...](http://www.nami.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Top_Story/Using_Virtual_Reality_to_Treat_PTSD.htm)

------
gxs
I've read other takes on this interesting subject as well. They too, convinced
me reading is worthwhile despite our memory limitations.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.html?pagewanted=all)

[http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-curse-of-
read...](http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-curse-of-reading-and-
forgetting)

------
personlurking
I recently met some people who swore that photoreading was legit and that
because of it they'd read about 10 thick books per week. Not knowing what it
was, I looked it up and immediately didn't believe the premise. There's
something to be said for speed reading (at a rate slightly faster than normal)
but photoreading just seems ridiculous. Not only can no real content/meaning
be gained from doing it, but no mental models can be formed. I'd love to be
proven wrong, though...

~~~
marvy
I once read a about a small scale study on some super-duper speed reading
method. By small scale I think there were like two participants. One was a an
expert in the method. The other was the guy doing the study. There were 3 main
findings. 1\. Yes, you will "read" much faster. 2\. If you take a standard
reading comprehension test on what you've read, you will score much lower. 3\.
If you don't take such a test, you will be under the mistaken impression that
you absorbed more than you did from the book.

[http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2000001...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20000011599.pdf)

------
proveanegative
>Reading and experience train your model of the world.

This sounds convincing but then an argument against reading fiction follows
since fiction trains your model of the world with fake data.

~~~
chrdlu
Hmm this is a very interesting point, but we would have to dive a bit deeper
and acknowledge there are many different types of fiction.

I would argue that certain types of fiction may actually be beneficiary such
as To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye (vs something like 50 Shades of
Gray). Those sorts of fictional settings allow the writer to present the
experiences and specific feelings/situations to readers. Even though, say Lord
of the Rings, isn't exactly relevant to our present day world, the morals and
spiritual emotions involved reflect humanity (what makes a human?)

I guess your comment has some parallels in art: why should we draw abstract
things when we can recreate what we see? Isn't recreating what we see more
important/better art than something that would never end up existing?

While it's not a perfect analogy, I believe reading and looking at the
creative arts ultimately benefits your model of the world through bettering
your model of humanity.

~~~
walterbell
Fiction could be viewed as "fake data" or "possible data".

The scientific method depends on the generation of testable hypotheses.

How do we generate hypotheses?

------
brd
I am a firm believer in actively curating a mental model. At work I could be
accused of over-communicating and I demand the same from those around me. I do
so because my goal is to help refine the mental model of myself and all my
coworkers so that everyone has a better intuitive understanding of the
system/process/organization we're working with.

By this process I've been able to internalize much of a massively complex
system (SAP) in a relatively short period of time.

------
irln
> Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to
> index and even edit them.

Like most things this may have unintended consequences. I think our ability to
forget is an important "feature" of cognition. What would happen if we were
unable to forget even petty squabbles between friends, loved ones, supposed
enemies? How far could this escalate? Our ability to forget and put things
behind us may be the reason we're still around.

~~~
whattimeisitnow
I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure it's quite important. Autistics I
believe have lost some of this filtering (forgetting).. non-autistics like
probably you and I capture our environment photographically but ditch the
things our brain thinks is unimportant

------
oh_dear
I'm just really happy to hear that I'm not alone in my anxieties about needing
to re-read books and my inability to remember everything written in a book!

------
ontoillogical
> e.g. when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering the childhood trauma that
> prevented him from singing

That sounds fascinating, does anyone have a reference for this?

------
karolisd
Knowledge is an interesting subject. When I read, I don't remember the exact
order of words. Especially in the age of Google, we have a choice of what to
burden our memory with and what to leave to Google. Are names and dates
important? What's important is to have models of how things work in your mind.
It is through the process of reading that we develop and refine these models.

~~~
DenisM
Approximate dates are important to find connections with other contemporary
events, and more broadly to put things into the context of the prevailing
culture at the time.

------
arasmussen
I don't like the use of the word "compiled". It's more like a program that
modifies it's source at runtime. This reminds me of how JavaScript used to be
simply interpreted but now with V8 (and friends) the hottest paths are
optimized at runtime so that the result is more performant than any
compilation because you have more information than you do statically.

~~~
Qwertious
You're describing JIT.

------
lutorm
I experience this phenomenon powerfully reading scientific articles. You read
a bunch of articles when you are trying to wrap your head around some topic,
but if you then go back and read them again after you've worked on it for a
while, you'll find all kinds of things that now are very meaningful while they
previously didn't seem important to you.

------
drawkbox
The idea of compilation without the source is a great way to put it. A
beginners mind is a good way to look at things and learn. With a beginners
mindset when needed, maybe temporarily you can recompile portions to take down
the filters and walls in your current binaries, with that mindset maybe you
can update and refresh from the basics.

------
rmason
I also think that its equally important to reread books that gave you great
insight. A few years later with more experience and knowledge you derive more
from it.

On first read you have a few key points and years later sometimes those end up
knitted together forming a greater insight that eluded you previously.

------
OoTheNigerian
I think this is the phenomenon that forms the basis for Gladwell's BLINK.

It took me a while to learn that almost everything I have heard or seen has
already been stored. The problem of memory is in retrieval.

This also applies to creative work. When you have seen quite a lot of things,
it ends up influencing stuff you could swear was original.

------
Empact
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten;
even so, they have made me.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

------
jordanbrown
"Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget
the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world
persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It
works, but you don't know why." \-- love this

------
zeeshanm
I think one of the points from this essay can be made that "content" discovery
is going to be a hot problem to crack if it is not already has been. Because
good discovery mechanism leads to more user engagement that ultimately results
in creating products with lasting impact.

------
yarek
Fascinating. A corollary would be: be careful what you read and be critical of
what you read. There is danger of manipulation, particularly by others. The
plus is that you could manipulate yourself, change personal perceptions and
mode of thinking.

------
ghobs91
This helps alleviate the fear of potentially "wasting time" if a startup or
project we're working on doesn't take off. Either way, the things learned
while undertaking the endeavor will affect our mindset, usually for the
better.

------
sopooneo
Regarding the retention from books, it's often the case that I could fill a
dozen pages with correct answers to questions that I only know from having
read a particular book, even if I could only fill one page with unprompted
recollections.

------
calebm
There's a quote which I (ironically) can't remember about how a mind is made
up of the books it has read in much the same way as a lion is made of of the
animals it consumes. Or to put it another way, "you are what you eat."

------
robg
Not for nothing, the laying of new memories in the brain is exactly context
sensitive. The hippocampus is actively weighting new information based on what
we already know. And emotion hacks the hippocampal patterns that much more.

------
finid
It takes a deeper understanding of the mind and how it works to grasps these
things.

When you learn about the four aspects of the mind and how each plays a role in
your outlook, then you have the key to this "mystery".

------
rezaur
" The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your
life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple
times." \-- I loved this statement most.

------
BeoShaffer
See also, the psycological litterature on source amnesia
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_amnesia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_amnesia)

------
adam419
The funny thing is I had just posted on hear to ask about how others help
improve their reading retention, since I've been feeling bad about forgetting
thing after I read them.

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tvvocold
Anybody know how to rss his feed? i try with
[http://paulgraham.com/rss.html](http://paulgraham.com/rss.html) but seems not
a full article.

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swah
On some level we don't really forget - when you reread a book it comes back to
you like a stream, all the insights and connections appearing stronger and
clearer than before.

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dimfisch
"Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but
you don't know why." Nice.

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herodot
"Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but
you don't know why."

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fab13n
TL;DR: a healthy brain accumulates wisdom, but won't bother archiving the
sources of that wisdom.

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easytiger
> "a perfect formulation of a problem is already half its solution."

Is that simply rubber ducking?

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mempko
So apparently the metaphor that our brains are computers is still used? And
that they "compile" experiences (though we don't understand how).

What if our brains are not easily shaped? And maybe our brains are good at
forgetting experiences?

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applecore
It's deeply heartwarming to see another “OG” PG essay enter the canon.
(Obscure reference to historical French prose in the introductory sentence?
Check!)

~~~
chris_j
What is meant by "OG" in this context?

~~~
pzxc
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=OG](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=OG)

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Tycho
Or put a slightly different way, reading book is a way to test/validate your
model of the world. It's like running unit tests on your assumptions.

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meta-coder
Quote:

There are no facts, only interpretations.

\--Friedrich Nietzsche

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porter
maybe this is more an argument for taking notes while you read rather than
just reading.

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locksley
The mind is a sophisticated algorithm with a shit database. So why not replace
that database by taking notes?

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michaelcrn
What

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michaelochurch
_I 've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two
times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from
it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times
several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves.
What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?_

I've gone through this exact anxiety. Access into past experiences (whether
they're books, vacations, or pieces of visual art) isn't random-access. We
seem to have a lot of on-demand knowledge but struggle to retain deep
knowledge of something in an independent, self-encapsulated state. Depth of
knowledge seems to form, in us, emergently and subconsciously. It makes a case
for the Buddhist argument that all things are interconnected and
interdependent; certainly, in our knowledge bases, that becomes true very
quickly.

For me, the solution was to learn to enjoy the process of learning rather than
completed act of _having acquired_ knowledge, it being difficult to summarize
any acquired knowledge without coming up with a trite, denatured reduction. It
took a while because I was secure in the realization that, yes, I _had_ read
that 500-page book even if I couldn't reproduce more than a few pages of "raw"
and independent knowledge.

