It's worth noting that the meanings of a number of very important words have changed over the last 500 years -- sometimes enlarged, sometimes really changing, including: true/false, fact, theory, explanation, believe, logic, etc.
And "thinking". Consider the difference between using logic in traditional mathematics to how thinking needs to be done in the sciences. In the former, we are deriving something, in the latter we are -negotiating- between phenomena and our representations. In science, we don't get to nail our premises/definitions, and we don't get to enumerate the extent cases. We only get inductions. And so on. A "perfectly reasoned conclusion" still needs to be checked out with nature.
In life in the large we have to be even more careful about logic, because it plays into several dozens of biases we have -- ultimately from genetics, but many have been honed by our cultures. In order to do modern thinking in almost every arena, we have to add a lot of context to normal logic, and often have to paradoxically weaken it in order to think better.
In talks, I try to get audiences to understand that logic is not nearly as good a way to think about thinking and do thinking as (say) science is. And science is not the only powerful context we can use to help us calibrate our mental compasses.
With regard to "thinking", logic is one of the servants of the Art, not the Master.
In the early 90s, on two separate occasions, I was offered
"3 Altos" for just a few dollars (one batch was from Stanford that had been using them for printer servers, and I don't remember where the second batch came from).
Over the years I wound up donating them to various places (the Computer History Museum, the Kyoto Prize museum, the Boston Science Museum, etc.). We kept one at Viewpoints as a mascot, and my last one I gave to Sam Altman because he wanted to do a restoration. That one turned out to be a late hybrid that Ken Shirriff and company are having fun puzzling out.
The "random mouse on ebay" was at my suggestion, because the Alto I donated to Sam didn't have a mouse.
Most of the original runs of Alto IIs (at least 1500 of them were built) cost in 70s dollars about $22.5K apiece. Inflation (according to the web) since then has been about a factor of 5, so each Alto would have been about $112.5K (and I'd love to have a $112.5K personal computer today -- that would really be "computing in the future" as we did at Parc).
Good point! (Cog Psych shows that we don't really multi-task.) I've always been partial to beds and couches for reading ... and especially in the very early mornings ...
Anecdote about how time of day affects reading: Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm and one of the country's best readers, says that during the day he reads at a relatively slow pace, say 50 pages per hour; but he will often wake up in the middle of the night and read an entire book over a few hours. I believe he referred to it as "nightbrain."
So, I'm not the only one. (Some of my best reading occurs in bed. I've sometimes felt a little weird about that, but as I've grown older, hey, if it works...)
I think these are good advice. A few additions and complements:
What seemed to work for me:
1. I started reading very early in life, and like early sports and music learning, I think this made a difference.
2. Most recall and understanding is relative to existing knowledge, so the more you have to link up to (and the more you read with linking up in mind) the better.
3. I've found that association (2.) works better than trying to understand everything while reading (the understanding is generally there the next day).
A start here would be to see if your reading of the AMA resulted in an accurate memory. For example, did I actually claim to have read "20,000+ books"? What did I actually say? No amount of speed is going to help if the recall is so noisy? And, something to ponder, it would have been easy to look to see if what you attributed to me was accurate? Why didn't you? And so forth.
Here is something for all to ponder. Remember when someone switched the TV channel into the middle of a movie you haven't seen for 20 years. How long did it take for you to recognize the movie? And how often did you have a good sense of what is next? Most people report "a second or so". Think about this: when you saw the movie you were not trying to remember it, you did not know you would be tested 20 years later.
One way to think of this is that it is highly likely that memory is not the problem to be dealt with, but that recall is.
I don't take notes. (It's worth pondering whether taking notes is really an aid to internal remembering...) In any case, what I was trying to point out was that it could be the case that we actually remember almost everything, but have real difficulties in recalling our memories without cues. (It's also worth pondering just what it is that "autistic savants" might actually be doing ...)
Aren't we reading, in part, for recall of insights (during conversations, brainstorming, or otherwise)?
If we take notes, our eyes are away from the text itself, practicing a simple exercise in recall. In a sense, you are "chunking" the concept.
In addition, the commonplace book become your second brain, an accumulation of cues that will trigger the chunks. A semi-permanent digital repository of knowledge that you can tap into on need-basis.
Whizzing through a book without necessary stops for chunking seems to put to question why we read in the first place.
I was quite disappointed in this book -- having followed Kahneman since his early research with pupillometry as an indication of interest. I agree with many of the comments in this thread. Given the author -- and the importance of the subject -- it just should have been done better.
But I still recommend that it be looked at for a variety of reasons, including what Kahneman calls the "expository fictions" of "System 1" and "System 2". (In talks I usually pair this up with a slide of "Maps of the Mind" by Turner to make the point that there are many characterizations of mental architectures, some at odds and some harmonious (i.e. be careful when trying to reason with such suppositions).
Still, the "System 1" and "System 2" simplifications are very useful as aids to thinking about many important areas, including learning, user interface design, etc.
And "thinking". Consider the difference between using logic in traditional mathematics to how thinking needs to be done in the sciences. In the former, we are deriving something, in the latter we are -negotiating- between phenomena and our representations. In science, we don't get to nail our premises/definitions, and we don't get to enumerate the extent cases. We only get inductions. And so on. A "perfectly reasoned conclusion" still needs to be checked out with nature.
In life in the large we have to be even more careful about logic, because it plays into several dozens of biases we have -- ultimately from genetics, but many have been honed by our cultures. In order to do modern thinking in almost every arena, we have to add a lot of context to normal logic, and often have to paradoxically weaken it in order to think better.
In talks, I try to get audiences to understand that logic is not nearly as good a way to think about thinking and do thinking as (say) science is. And science is not the only powerful context we can use to help us calibrate our mental compasses.
With regard to "thinking", logic is one of the servants of the Art, not the Master.