You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

Since I realized this, I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.

The other day I was thinking about LLM aggregation and in my internal dialogue used the example of "aliens built the pyramids" as a fringe theory that would be picked up on if tuning for other associated fringe positions by LLMs at places like Gab.

Later in the day I saw in my news feed an article on "how were the pyramids built?" (One of my interests is Egyptian and LBA Mediterranean archeology, so on topic.)

At first I thought "how the heck did it read my mind?"

But then as I thought about it more I remembered that usually my go to example of a fringe position is flat earth. So why was I suddenly using pyramids as the example in my internal dialogue.

What must have happened was that I initially saw the article headline in my feed in passing and didn't consciously register it, but when I was reaching for a fringe position example had been primed for that, and then only after having consciously been reflecting on the topic actually noticed the article in my feed.

Which IMO is a much more alarming explanation for the phenomenon - that my thinking was being written to a degree by my feed - than that my phone was somehow listening in on things or reading my mind.

It reminds me of a graffiti artist in NYC who used to write graffiti about how in reading it he had effectively graffitied your mind.

I heard those quote for the first time about 4 years ago. I had often been a bit disappointed with myself for not taking more notes while reading, or reviewing what I read in a way where I could be one of those people to bring up quotes and concepts, citing back to the original source, with freakish accuracy. This quote made me feel better about simply reading, getting whatever I get out of it, and trusting that I’ve gained some perspective, even if I can’t cite all the sources that built my perspective on a topic.

Once upon a time a man wanted to be handed the title of a poet, so he went to the king of poets at his time, and asked him to give him the title of a poet. The king of poets asked the man, "Do you memorize tens of thousands of the best poetry?", the man said "I do not", the king of poems asked of him: "go memorize them then come back to me". The man went to a faraway isolated monastary, spend a couple of years memorizing the poems, then came back to the king of poets shouting in excitement "I've memorized the tens of thousands of poems! Can you hand me the title of a poet now?". The king of poets asked of him "Now forget them".

Only after years again spent in the monastery forgetting the poems, was the man given the title of a poet.

(Side note: this story also kinda remind me of LLMs, and how they kind of "memorize" text initially but the more data is poured in the more they "forget" the exact texts)

I guess roughly, this is right. But there's more to add. I have a brain with a certain configuration. This configuration is partly genetic and partly environmental. The environmental part has been shaped by every sensory input so far, including all the books. However, some books resonate well. They make me think about the topic weeks after finishing them. Other books don't resonate at all. My brain's is not fit for them. It just ja sequence of words (e.g., the books my high school literature teacher made me read).

I guess humans aren't a ANN that treats every training sample equal. Our brain has a mechanism to put more or less weight on sensory input given previous input. Some ideas are utterly confusing and don't stick at all. I think this happens a lot when people of different religions or political camps interact.

I would apply this to fiction books too. Some people consider reading fiction books a waste of time.

But fiction books too can expand your mind by exploring ideas that may not be possible in non-fiction books or exploring the same ideas but in a way that non-fiction books cannot achieve easily or at all.

This gives natural spaced repetition on the good stuff, and also you pick up different things in subsequent readings.

Sometimes we want to eat those Chicken 'n' Waffles, just like sometimes we go on a trashy TV show binge! It's just a small thing that serves as a comforting release, and we shouldn't let the guilt overcome us!

One way to think about it is that reading on the internet, no matter how casual, is like scattering seeds on the soil of your mind. Some of these seeds will grow into trees and influence your actions and decisions, whether you're aware of it or not.

It's not uncommon to discover that some clever ideas I thought I came up with have been, in fact, read in a book. Humbling.

The thing is, you cannot get to that point by following productivity hacks. It's true that most divulgation books can we summarized in 2 pages. But the way good authors present the same idea again and again, through different examples and viewpoints is what remains in your brain.

The short version is this: there’s nothing inherent about the format of a book that makes it ideal for learning. It is mostly a historical consequence of the fact that scratching symbols onto stone or paper, then replicating that paper/stone is easier to develop than recording and playing back audio or video. Human beings spent thousands of years using languages that were purely spoken ones, and writing is a fairly recent thing historically speaking.

If somehow it became possible to record and play back spoken language thousands of years ago, writing might have never become a widespread thing at all. Even today, speech is how the vast majority of the world uses language. Let’s not forget how influential the book form has been on thought, from the Bible to the Quran, etc.

And so if you brush away the mystique and legacy of books and think about what an ideal learning format would be, I think it would be quite different from a book. Probably it would incorporate audiovisuals, spaced repetition, and some form of storytelling.

All of this is about reading for information, not for pleasure. But I don’t primarily read fiction for information in the first place.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20940944, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319599, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38095507, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39521964

If you don't have the means or the time to travel then your next best option is reading.

Mass media (electronic media in particular) tends to encourage the user to seek many shallow impressions that do not always leave deep and permanent marks. So, any single impression doesn't leave a big mark or define your character. But deeper study into a single topic or work does have a profound effect on who you are.

The books you read make you as much as you want them to make you. You get out of them what you put into them. If you're consuming books but not able to recall much from them, then you're not putting enough into them.

I especially don't like the Emerson quote because of how consumerist it is in its sentiment. It's a self-soothing license to passively consume and relieve oneself from any obligations to work to derive deeper substance from what they consume.

One of my project ideas now that has been building in my mind is, 12 years on, to go back and re-read and re-evaluate many of these links, and do a short write-up on how I've been influence by this article or any explicit choices that I've made in my life that could likely be attributed to it. I think this would be fascinating from a psychological/neurological POV but also a really cool chance to reflect on how I've changed/grown as a person.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-talk-about-books-you-ha...

The more I practiced mindful reading, the better I got at many things (from work, finances, to friendship and marriage).

I can attribute this to what seems pretty obvious - apply what you learn or think deeply about it to understand its meaning to you.

One interesting finding that I never seen in any blog is the notes part (https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/) where the author shows the notes he collected from various sources with his comments.

This one (https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/#2024-04-15T0822) from The Node.js Documentary, especially his comment, is outstanding:

  A big company is like a giant ship that has to start making its turn a mile before the actual turn itself. Whereas the community is comprised of thousands of small, distributed boats that can make (in contrast) hairpin turns.

But i've started to get back into it, realising that I don't need to take notes, because I rarely referred to them anyway and jus listening to audiobooks is engaging my mind in these topics in ways I might be able to fully grasp at the time and the idea that I need to leave with a notebook full of ideas after the end of a book just isn't true.

(It was Albert Camus' The Plague for me, revealing something of a transition from hopeful idealism to rather jaded realism).

Example - if all matter we interact with in our world (and manipulate) is essentially compiled in different formations but derived from the very same essence of building blocks. . . then every living organism and inate object is inherently linked together somehow, someway.

The same goes then, for human experience (and thus a reflection of material basis and external fields applied). If a ferromagnetic material (iron) is capable of becoming ferromagnetic permanently and also capable of existing without, then not only is the inherent expectation of matter to transform from one form to another; external experiences applicably experienced result in the same manifestation.

But once again - If you happen to concede the notion that all things in the physical universe are essentially built from the same blocks, then so are the experiences of humans as well and as expected would appear to be connected in some way as well. Meaning, the experience affects the subatomic or quantum levels, thus changing quantum properties resulting in a formal change to the underlying building blocks (genes, DNA copy, etc). That's my take.

To me, this OP is just an example of exposing this on a philosophic level.

Everything gets connected and stored away. Repeated every night. The knowledge you have gets connected with the new information you receive. The more knowledge you have the more valuable new information gets. At some point there is simply very little new information about a topic and the topic bores you.

Does this mean I'll never escape the influence of those decades of corporate email?

This is how we are able to use ambiguous language, also known as "Context-Sensitive Grammar". We provide our own backstory (context) that provides a Just-In-Time unambiguous definition of each ambiguous word or phrase.

There is a lot of excitement around LLMs, because they are capable of doing something with Context-Sensitive Grammar. Unfortunately, that something is not equivalent to the arbitrary disambiguation that we do using context. The core feature of an LLM (with respect to natural language processing) is that it never defines anything. Instead, an LLM blindly provides whatever text it deems "most likely to happen next", all without ever associating any text to any meaning. We wrap this process in "training", which hopefully guides common interactions in the direction we want, but that is never a guarantee.

  But how had I come to believe in this idea in the first place? A
  combination of my own experience and other things I'd read.
  None of which I could at that moment remember! And eventually
  I'd forget that Hilbert had confirmed it too. But my increased
  belief in the importance of this idea would remain something I'd
  learned from this book, even after I'd forgotten I'd learned it.
  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.
  
  The place to look for what I learned from Villehardouin's chronicle
  is not what I remember from it, but my mental models of the
  crusades, Venice, medieval culture, siege warfare, and so on.
  Which doesn't mean I couldn't have read more attentively, but at
  least the harvest of reading is not so miserably small as it might
  seem.
  
  This is one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect. But it
  was a Surprise to me and presumably would be to anyone else
  who felt uneasy about (apparently) forgetting so much they'd
  read.
  
  Realizing it does more than make you feel a little better about
  forgetting, though. There are specific implications.
  
  For example, reading and experience are usually "compiled" at
  the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time.
  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 always used to feel some misgivings
  about rereading books. I unconsciously lumped reading together
  with work like carpentry, where having to do something again is a
  sign you did it wrong the first time. Whereas now the phrase
  "already read" seems almost ill-formed.

https://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

People complain about the extent to which we anthropomorphize GPT-class models, but I gain just as much from backporting the analogies that work for LLMs to my own experience.

Because I can read a book without taking such a huge amount of notes, which makes it easier to stay with those ideas and quicker to read and then I can load a PDF of the book into an LLM and chat with it about the concepts in the book, use it to produce notes, or discuss ideas that were in it and ask it to cross reference it.

It also makes it easier for me to come back to it several months later, I find that this can be better than my notes, as if i remember something from a book that is now relevant, can be loaded into an AI and ask it about that specific part and the quotes that are relevant.

Now I have started taking advantage of this using Anki. Whenever I read something having a particularly interesting or thought-provoking idea, I find a way to create flashcard(s) out of it. Now I am able to recall these things more often and many times they have guided me in my life or helping out friends.

E.g., to help "remember" I have a general purpose file that I read/write with my favorite text editor and with some surprising statistics:

Date started: September 2nd, 2005

Number of entries: 8412

Number of lines: 60,436

Number of bytes: 4,736,380

Really simple. Works really well.

A little laptop computer handles this file for zero apparent effort.

Of course, a lot more can be done, e.g., something like everyone having a Google just for their own life, but it is shocking how much can be done with just the statistics here.

Roger Ailes, Edward Bernays, and William Randolph Hearst applied similar principles, leaving lasting influences on the course of American history: one bent a hundred-fifty million Americans towards a retreaded version of the Nixon ideology, one made cigarettes appeal to women and had democracies overthrown for fruit companies, and the latter decided how to spin the news, became a Nazi, and nearly convinced America fascism was a "good idea".

I don't see how any human alive, unless they lived under a rock, can reasonably trace the origin of any of their beliefs or preferences. So, I must conclude beliefs, preferences, and ideologies are more or less arbitrary because most people don't spend metacognition effort on analyzing their formation or their change.

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

Tell me your habits, I will tell you who you are.

Try writing a poem. Mine were so obviously regurgitations of past material consumed that I realized that to output anything original, I had to develop an individuality by starving the creative neurons, so to speak.

Of course, this is only restricted to fields where one would like to produce novel output. You're free to read academic papers, etc; But if you want to write original sci-fi, start by not reading sci-fi.

Does anybody have a link to Nietzsche's reading list? It seems it is hard to find things on the internet lately.

https://bookmarks.reviews/

https://www.nybooks.com/

https://www.perlentaucher.de

Depending on where you are in life, a book can model, confront, polish, and/or destroy (no always a net negative) your core principles – either passively or intentionally, by taking notes and rereading.

In RAG you "know" what the model knows and it's easy for it to give sources - you literally give it to the model in the prompt.

In finetuning, the model learns something, but it might not be able to reproduce it perfectly later on. But it's models have been changed.

> Education is something you have even if you don't remember anything

Though the professor's test is just as poor quality as the whole blog's conversation where intellectual exercise is compared to remembering breakfasts

Are they simply a time weighted average of the media viewpoints I consume?

"We become what we behold"

This can sound like spiritual woo-woo but that's the distillation of a pretty good scientific model. More here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...

And you are… maybe in the sense that it always remains in your unconscious. But what use is that? Memory and learning is about being able to pull things out of the subconscious (unconcious?).

Look at any serious craft or activity where people have to learn things. They learn by doing. Doing things as realistically as possible is better. And doing-learning also transfers to talk/read-learning (discussing how to do something). Meanwhile talk/read-learning does not transfer to doing-learning as much.

Frankly our culture overrates book-learning. By a long shot. This might not seem the case because now frequent long-form reading can be regarded as a practically monastic activity, what with all the stupid alternatives we have at our disposal. But book reading and learning hardly ever directly translates to practical learning.

This attitude (of Emerson’s) sounds like Behavioralism. That you’re whatever input you have processed. I find Chomsky’s Nativism and Rationalism to be more compelling. Consider a socialist who reads 500 liberal think tank pieces. He’s more likely to either be as socialist by the end or more (double-down effect).

> I have to constantly remind myself of this. Especially in an environment that prioritizes optimizing and maximizing personal productivity, where it seems if you can’t measure (let alone remember) the impact of a book in your life then it wasn’t worth reading.

This for sure is a problem if you have set some goal of reading one book every week. But that goal is borne out of that exact same Optimization Mindset. Most people don’t fret over how many Good Words pass by their eyes in a year.

[1] the book Make it Stick