Comment by davisoneee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davisoneee | Hacker News Reader

I hope a browser add-on comes along that just replaces all these blog posts with "Just use ChatGPT, lol".

What do you mean by efficiency here...just getting an utterly shallow understanding of some random topic, trusting that someone else, be that human or GPT, has understood it?

Part of the benefit of the slowness of reading is that it gives you time to actually mull over the topic, so you can build it into your own mental framework. The repetition, with slightly different wording, helps anchor the idea in your mind and provides spaced repetition to help you remember.

Other people's summaries are poor because _they don't have your experiences_, so the things that they found relevant might mean nothing to you, and the things they find shallow and skipped might be exactly what you need. Even if the highlight is useful, without the context, it's hard to actually make sure it sticks in your brain in order for it to be functional.

Lists might feel useful because the information is condensed...but how much of it do you _actually_ remember? Efficiency is being able to _use_ the information. Just getting through the material may be _fast_, but that's (in my view) antithetical to efficiency--it leads to shallow understanding and likely poor memory.

We all like to think 'I just need the 1 line summary'...in reality we're not special. You need to put the effort in.

This might be true if you use sparknotes as a 100% substitute for reading, but I disagree if you're using it as a tool to better optimize how you read. One of the biggest parts of learning is just knowing where you need to go to get the information. The summary won't tell you everything of value within a book, but it should be sufficient to guess what sort of value is in the book, and specific chapters within. For example if you can figure out that 25 out of 30 chapters of a book either are either rehashing things you already know or are irrelevant to what you are trying to learn, then you can focus your limited time on the remainder where you have better odds of finding what you are looking for. Of course you can kind of do this just by looking at a table of contents, but sometimes it can be quite difficult to determine from the title alone what a chapter will contain and the level at which it will be discussed. Further, it's great when you're going back to something you've already read to know where to look for some specific piece of information because the goal is not to memorize data but to understand broader concepts.

A summary also serves well as a 20,000ft overview of a topic that gives you the breadth before you dive into the depths of the parts that are more useful. You can pick up context that might be locally helpful but not really something you want to spend a great deal of time on, you can have some idea of what you are going to learn from what you do focus on, and you can perform a sanity check on what you believe you already understand (ie if the summary doesn't make sense, you probably don't know it as well as you might have thought).

Of course the only way to guarantee you don't miss anything at all is to read through everything 100%, but generally what you are looking for is not going to be hidden in a throwaway line in an otherwise unrelated section. Very often the gist is all that really matters.

That's the thing about apps like Blinkist - if the book can be condensed to fifteen minutes, it's not worth reading. If it can't, then I want to read (or listen to) the whole thing, not a summary.

I'll be the first to agree that a lot of books in topics like business strategy are too long. But IMO the ideal length is probably more like 100 pages than a magazine article much less a 1,000 word blog post or a listicle. Context, examples, background, etc. all add to a basic idea in a way that makes it easier to remember and understand.

I think it’s similar to learning most things in life. People can tell you to slip punches in Boxing a thousand times but just getting punched with a jab over and over will actually make you learn the Truth.

Or reading 50 books (with whatever technique you choose) on a topic like programming versus actually opening a IDE and building something.

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