Read to forget

[otras]

Reminds me of the purported Ralph Waldo Emerson quote which rings true for myself as well: “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

[alberto_ol]

According to the quote investigator website, Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote is dubious.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/20/books/

[cantor_S_drug]

Such statements are profound and vacuous, vapid because it holds for many other areas.

I cannot remember all the naughty movies I have seen even though they made me ......

[kenanfyi]

This does not sound realistic for work in academia or technical stuff. In fact there are some techniques to read a technical paper. I never read a paper just once an move on. An abstract says a lot if a paper worths reading and after that I skim that quickly. Then I skim again more deeper a day or so later. Only after that I read it throughly and take notes.

On taking notes/highlighting I agree with the author. A general behavior I observe in colleagues or co-workers is that they highlight half of a paper, but they never do anything with that highlights. This is something I never understand. If you never use that piece of information anywhere, why bother even spending ink on it?

[neilv]

> A general behavior I observe in colleagues or co-workers is that they highlight half of a paper, but they never do anything with that highlights.

They might be using this exercise to help them focus and absorb what's important on their first pass of reading -- they might not expect anyone to ever use their highlights.

People will have been taught different techniques, and adapted their own.

I never got into highlighters. We were taught to keep our books unmarked, for the next year to reuse them, or for resale value.

In grad school, I was told paper-reading techniques closer to what you describe.

(Skim abstract, decide whether to keep reading, skim results/conclusions, decide whether to keep reading, look at citations, cynical joke about citation politics, decide whether to keep reading, then some order of skimming introduction and related work and other parts that I don't recall because I didn't follow that guidance, and then eventually you might give the whole thing a close read.)

[tombert]

I read papers depth-first recursively. I read the abstract and see how much I understand. If there's a lot of stuff I don't understand, I hop down to the references, find one of those papers, and try again. I do this until I get to a paper I more or less understand and bubble upwards.

I take pretty aggressive notes in Obsidian for each paper [1], which carries the benefit of being able to MediaWiki-tag definitions as I find them and build up a dictionary of terms I can reference.

I've never really seen the point of highlighting, it takes zero comprehension of the material to rub a marker over a page. I try my best to summarize each paragraph into a bullet. I figure that if I can summarize stuff accurately, I at least have some understanding of the material, and again this builds up a repository of notes I can read later (though I rarely do because I usually have a decent enough memory of the source material afterward).

Some day I will start sharing my archive of paper summaries for the world to not-actually-read, though I can't right now because they're kind of intermingled with personal notes that will take some time in order to decorrelate.

[1] I have actually been experimenting with Logseq lately, and I use Codex to synchronize back to Obsidian for the time being.

[admiralrohan]

I found it more useful to read more books than read one book again and again. This helps me to reinforce the same concept from different angles. Our brain is a pattern matching machine, and it automatically picks up related concepts.

[euvin]

That's true, and it's also the reason why it's so important to ensure your information diet is of high quality. Any concept (especially harmful or radical ones) can be reinforced.

I had to learn this lesson a long while ago when I realized many sites I casually browsed were injecting and repeating many dark thoughts that weren't truly reflective of reality. I've been way more careful of my daily intake and the groups I associate with ever since.

[SirensOfTitan]

I do this but annotate books heavily by writing in the margins (digitally through my remarkable) and only very rarely ever revisit them.

Writing while reading is a way of focusing on what either resonates with me or confounds me.

[nilamo]

I look out for books that have been annotated by one of your kin whenever I'm in a used book store. It's fun to see what other people think is interesting or memorable (or unhinged... Why are you highlighting every occurance of the word "earth"?)

Little notes in the margin can also be a fun plot device, used to great effect in one of the Harry Potter books, (I think?) The Chamber of Secrets.

[treetalker]

The corollary is to write to forget (or at least to get thoughts off your mind).

[jlundberg]

This is actually good advice.

Writing down things makes it much easier to move forward to the next project of the day.

Probably various a bit from person to person.

[HPsquared]

That's the idea behind "Getting Things Done" (GTD)

[qwertytyyuu]

Writing seems to more of a tool to refine/coalesce thoughts

[wpollock]

If you read many sources without taking notes, it becomes difficult to later cite your sources.

Your attitude makes sense when reading for pleasure, such as HN posts unrelated to your work.

[JSR_FDED]

Great article, I can’t remember anything from it.

[lblume]

Same. I feel a strong urge to highlight a paper's section on Methodology now, but no idea why.

[benrutter]

I love this advice! Maybe with a caveat that reading is also a good way of discovering what's worth re-reading. If the ideas/evidence from the first read really capture you, then go back again and read more deeply.

I think even more so than non-fiction, this is really true of literature that gets labelled "difficult". I find a lot of people bounce of more dense/experimental texts, especially poetry, because they want to understand every aspect of the text. That's especially true when there's external pressures as well, like with school-children reading Shakespeare.

In my experience, being more loose about the need to understand every part of a text deeply frees people up to actually enjoy things a lot more.

[gcanyon]

I've long thought that most "opinion" books -- self-help, historical analysis, scientific commentary, policy-recommendations etc. -- are 3-5% the actual point they want you to take away, and 95-97% of the material is the anecdotes/cites they use to try to convince you they're right.

Agreeing with the article, you don't need to remember the justification nearly as much as you do the bare facts. Except: in the future, remembering some of the anecdotes helps you remember why you believe what you (now) believe in the first place. It also helps you convince other people of the rightness of the ideas.

[m-hodges]

It’s a fine perspective, but:

> We can only read a text once

Is clearly false. OP is expressing a choice, not a truth.

[turtletontine]

I think their point is clear if you read the rest of the sentence: “… given the number of compelling works and the limited time available to us”.

Yes, it’s the OP’s choice, it’s their information diet. You COULD read the good stuff over and over, but you risk falling behind the flood. This is their approach to keeping up. It makes me a little sad, sure, but as a practical solution I get it.

I certainly don’t use this approach to literature. I’ve reread my favorite books a few times over the years (Cat’s Cradle, White Noise), but I’m sure that’s not the kind of thing OP is talking about.

[chaps]

I recoiled at that a bit too, but I think what they mean is similar to how some games can "only be played once". Best example of that is Outer Wilds, where attaining information is the goal of each gameplay loop. Once you've acquired that knowledge already, the fun of acquiring it can no longer be experienced since you already know what the "next step" is.

[wiseowise]

> We can only read a text once, given the number of compelling works and the limited time available to us.

You deliberately pulled it out of context, didn't you?

[Nevermark]

Completely agree that the biggest benefit from most texts is absorbing new ways to think, and developing familiarity with subjects and ideas.

Most individual facts will evaporate, but it’s likely if I need them in the future I will rember where to look.

> I remember co-workers highlighting large chunks of text, sometimes 40%.

Only quibble, is nobody underlines things they plan on remembering.

It’s a tool for focusing the mind.

In rare, very rare occasions I have benefited as well from being able to review a book in record time since the points my brain works from are all underlined and page corners bent.

That might be one out of a thousand books.

Mostly, creating a physical act, to accompany the mental act, of identifying key points, is the point.

I don’t just underline, but mark things with stars, exclamation points, happy faces, etc. in the margins. Institutionalizes paying attention, lets my hands move so my body doesn’t think I am supposed to be taking a nap, and creates regular but very micro-pauses where I process the words I am decorating.

[hungmung]

Reminds me of one of my favorite stories, from Phaedrus:

> Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved. The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

https://www.antiquitatem.com/en/origin-of-writing-memory-pla...

[treetalker]

Whenever I read this parable, I take memory to mean internalization or thorough learning. It doesn't fit the text word for word, but I think it's closer to the main point than the idea of memorizing something verbatim.

[bluechair]

I disagree with the author at a surface level; we can retain much more than 90% of what we read. The curious can look up deep reading strategies, e.g., those summarized by Benjamin Keep.

At a deeper level, though, there’s truth that we have limited time here; we can’t read everything.

[IAmBroom]

90% of what you intend to keep, or 90% of everything you read for pleasure? The latter is much more to remember.

[axdsk]

For academic papers I find constructing an outline of the introduction distills 80% of the information I need.

I place a post-it note over each paragraph with a few words, motivation: xyz, challenge:xyz, SOTA, approach xyz.

I read to forget because my words are much easier to skim than someone else’s.

[pacificmaelstrm]

This is an engineer perspective.

Reading/studying is only really about learning what knowledge exists so you can find it and employ it later in the service of building something.

Trying to memorize many specific details or formulas or algorithms at the expense of a broader knowledge map is suboptimal.

But for science, medicine etc this may not be the case.

[blueridge]

We See from the Periphery, Not the Center: Reflections on Literature in an Age of Crisis, Alfred Kazin:

"How in 1977 can any great book help me to live better, I who am a creature of anxiety, involved against my will in all twentieth-century injustices and cruelties? How can Kafka relieve me of guilt, he who knew as a Jew even before the Nazis murdered his sisters, since powerlessness is a crime that invites exploitation, that "not the murderer but the victim is considered guilty"? How can Proust, who died to the world in order to live again through his great book retracing the past-how can he relieve me of my dread of death, when I can no longer accept the next world, the world of imagination, promised to me by his last-minute discovery of art in the volume Time Recaptured? But these are rhetorical questions whose emptiness I do not wish to conceal.

Because no book has enabled anyone to live better. The influence of any book on my consciousness is necessarily intermittent, a flash, a hope, an illusion, a picture. No more than any other external agent can a book effect a transformation that lasts.

What a great literary work does do for me is to clear my mind, to rearrange the order of my thinking, to show me, in the immortal words of Porgy and Bess, that "it ain't necessarily so." The real power of a literary work consists in presenting us with alternatives. If the work is emotionally effective enough, it can be an antidote to our usual mental confinement. It is the vision of another mind, another way of thinking, not a lasting way out."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40133281

[directevolve]

I make 1-2 flash cards on the topic and main advance of papers I read. It’s a nice sweet spot, and I find that I retain much more than what’s on the cards. Without them, I forget the whole thing.

[notcodingtoday]

This is a good approach to take when assisted with building knowledge base (with your choice of retrieval system, ex. LLMs). 'Train' your brain like the article suggests, defer mental load to another system.

[kelseydh]

When I come across a profound excerpt or cool quote I stash it in my Random Excerpts section of my note taking app.

It's a pleasure to go back and read the cool things I've totally forgotten about.

[Havoc]

Noticed this while studying accounting. Mountains of technical standards that you forget pretty rapidly but it accumulates to a sort of subconscious technical instinct

[ruthvik947]

This stands in pretty stark contrast to a recent popular post on here about how important memorising things is to developing knowledge

[alessandru]

who even is this guy?