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.”
Generations hence, I see a future where school children are taught their lessons:
“Now that we’ve studied the classic American authors, like Emerson, let’s learn about the next generation. Their leading light was cantor_S_drug, who brilliantly updated a classic author with modern sensibilities. Just look at those double ellipses — truly a poetic legend.”
Honestly, I actually take OP’s somewhat flippant remark as a very real counterpoint to both the article and to the Emerson quote: be careful what you consume, lest you become it. I have met people whose core sexuality is obviously shaped by porn, I’ve met people who eat unhealthy food every day and are surprised that they’re unhealthy, and I’ve met people who read/watch a ton of useless shit and it subconsciously or consciously starts to shape their identity and beliefs, even if they don’t start out believing what they’re reading/watching.
This is not a political comment, and I hope it doesn't inflame political comments in response.
After Charlie Kirk's sad death (he was a father - his children are children without theirs - this is not political), it really struck me that those who did not agree with his politics could find all these 'gotchas', mostly about gun legislation.
It made me think about the famous part in The Twits (how if you say nasty stuff, you become ugly).
AFAIK It's not true, but it's such a wonderful analogy. Kirk was an inflammatory figure, and spent a great deal of time talking about negative things. This was, essentially, a big part of what he did for a living - he talked about really sad things to win debates.
He did this so much that when something sad did happen in his life, as it does in the lives of all humans, there would have been a 'gotcha' for his detractors. I didn't know him past his name prior to his death, but have since watched a fair few of his videos, and he talked about basically every tragic possible thing.
I know the Twits thing is about saying negative things, not consuming them, but it made me think about the idea of 'karma'. Not 'he deserved it because of his opinion on this', but that surrounding yourself with the trappings of tragedy will, when tragedy does strike, create a sense of irony, or perhaps inevitability.
Less that it makes you ugly, and more that a tragedy can seem, after the fact, strangely coherent for people who make their lives around tragic things.
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?
> 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.)
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.
I highlight as a way to categorize my annotations. I highlight in Zotero as I go, and in the highlight's comment section briefly jot down why (e.g. something to follow up on, or whether this reminded me of something else it contrasts with). I dedicate a certain colour to "background references I should have", another to ~ "things I disagree with" etc., which I find useful when coming back over the paper to type up my notes.
In a sense the highlighting is just a way to localize my thoughts to a particular passage of the text, and the colours (or even highlighting at all) are secondary.
There's some considerable duplication of effort (notes in Zotero, then I type up notes in Obsidian, then also extract out some of those ideas into their own files). But, much like the recent posts about "outsourcing thinking" and GP noting that people sometimes do nothing with their highlights, I find that the work is useful for understanding and remembering.
Out of interest, why have you been considering Logseq?
> Out of interest, why have you been considering Logseq?
Primarily because it's FOSS; I love Obsidian (I even pay for it) but I have to consider the possibility that they'll be bullshit and start charging for stuff or start restricting things arbitrarily. If Logseq becomes bullshit then I (or someone else) can fork it and maintain/grow it. It's also written in ClojureScript, so legally I have to kind of like it :).
I've also kind of grown to like the way that the "unit" of Logseq is the "block" instead of the "page". Pages are more about aggregation than "units" of information, and as a result of this I find that the graph view is actually useful, instead of just something pretty in Obsidian.
There are some things I really don't like about Logseq (the lack of proper Vim keystrokes being a big one for me), but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people try software for five minutes, make zero effort to understand what the application is actually trying to do, give up, and declare the software as "bad". I felt like that's what happened with Gnome Shell, for example.
I will likely eventually go back to Obsidian, but I figured that I should give Logseq a fair shake, and it's different enough from Obsidian that I felt it's only fair to spend a few weeks properly learning it.
I've been gradually updating this post [1] if you want to follow along. It's in a fairly rough state (all good blog posts require multiple rewrites and I haven't done that), but you are welcome to follow along as I compile stuff.
Hopping to the references right away doesn’t work for me. I prefer just going through the whole paper once and coming back. To me it’s analogous to reading a book in a language not familiar to me. You read it lengthy chuck of texts even though you come across words you don’t know. Then you can find the meaning of words and read the texts again for better understanding . This way I think is more helpful to grasp the whole topic and intention of texts faster.
I don’t highlight often, but when I do it is for the same reason I take notes. I never refer back to either one. But they focus my mind to stay on track so it cannot wander as much, in the moment, and prompts me to immediately reflect on or quickly reread what I think might be important or interesting.
I read the abstract and skim the intro before committing to a read. The authors have to convince me that they know the field, they think they’ve done something interesting, and I think what they’ve done is plausible. If it passes that bar, I assume the most adversarial possible mindset and look for holes in their methods. If their methods are junk, I may skim the conclusion just to see what kind of unfounded nonsense to watch out for in the future, but otherwise I’m done, and really most papers are done at this point. Papers in my field are mostly bogus, unfortunately. Every now and then, somebody uses plausible methods, and only then do I really bother to sit down and read the whole thing.
I tend to work in more theory-heavy CS (at least when I'm reading papers), so sometimes even the abstract is obscured by lots of scary terminology, so if I want to understand even the basics, I need to do it recursively.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't disagree that it performs that function. In my experience, thoughts will persist and remain on my mind until I consciously refine them enough. Writing is one of the best ways (if not the best) for doing so.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Quite often, the meaning of a text relies on the contexts you bring to it. I’ve had many experiences where I’ve returned to a text after reading others, and gleaned entirely new or different insights from it. I disagree with the idea that first exposure exhausts the knowledge (or in OP’s perspective, “Bayesian system”) that can be acquired.
I didn't say it exhausts the knowledge.. what I'm saying is very much the opposite of that -- knowledge is front and center. I'm more referring to the experience and new lenses on past similar experiences, which I think we're in agreement on.
Go play Outer Wilds if you want to experience what I mean. It's the only game I've played that's affected me so strongly in this way.
No. I hold my reaction even with OP’s “given”. You can, in fact, read a text more than once, given the number of compelling works and the limited time available to us.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 ......
Why would wide applicability be a mark against an idea? Do you feel the same way about gravity and normal distributions?
Your example is an excellent one though because it shows a corollary to the way that quote was intended in this conversation.
How it was meant: "It's OK to not remember everything you've read verbatim, because the important parts mixed into who you are/were."
Your corollary: "We must be careful about what we consume because it will be mixed into who you are."
Generations hence, I see a future where school children are taught their lessons:
“Now that we’ve studied the classic American authors, like Emerson, let’s learn about the next generation. Their leading light was cantor_S_drug, who brilliantly updated a classic author with modern sensibilities. Just look at those double ellipses — truly a poetic legend.”
> I cannot remember all the naughty movies I have seen even though they made me ......
Exactly.
Honestly, I actually take OP’s somewhat flippant remark as a very real counterpoint to both the article and to the Emerson quote: be careful what you consume, lest you become it. I have met people whose core sexuality is obviously shaped by porn, I’ve met people who eat unhealthy food every day and are surprised that they’re unhealthy, and I’ve met people who read/watch a ton of useless shit and it subconsciously or consciously starts to shape their identity and beliefs, even if they don’t start out believing what they’re reading/watching.
This is not a political comment, and I hope it doesn't inflame political comments in response.
After Charlie Kirk's sad death (he was a father - his children are children without theirs - this is not political), it really struck me that those who did not agree with his politics could find all these 'gotchas', mostly about gun legislation.
It made me think about the famous part in The Twits (how if you say nasty stuff, you become ugly).
AFAIK It's not true, but it's such a wonderful analogy. Kirk was an inflammatory figure, and spent a great deal of time talking about negative things. This was, essentially, a big part of what he did for a living - he talked about really sad things to win debates.
He did this so much that when something sad did happen in his life, as it does in the lives of all humans, there would have been a 'gotcha' for his detractors. I didn't know him past his name prior to his death, but have since watched a fair few of his videos, and he talked about basically every tragic possible thing.
I know the Twits thing is about saying negative things, not consuming them, but it made me think about the idea of 'karma'. Not 'he deserved it because of his opinion on this', but that surrounding yourself with the trappings of tragedy will, when tragedy does strike, create a sense of irony, or perhaps inevitability.
Less that it makes you ugly, and more that a tragedy can seem, after the fact, strangely coherent for people who make their lives around tragic things.
As long as you’re taking an active role in considering your intellectual intake, it’s all taking a role in shaping you.
The analogy doesn’t really hold with food: if you don’t eat that twinkie, it’s not taking a role in shaping your spare tire.
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?
> 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.)
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.
I highlight as a way to categorize my annotations. I highlight in Zotero as I go, and in the highlight's comment section briefly jot down why (e.g. something to follow up on, or whether this reminded me of something else it contrasts with). I dedicate a certain colour to "background references I should have", another to ~ "things I disagree with" etc., which I find useful when coming back over the paper to type up my notes.
In a sense the highlighting is just a way to localize my thoughts to a particular passage of the text, and the colours (or even highlighting at all) are secondary.
There's some considerable duplication of effort (notes in Zotero, then I type up notes in Obsidian, then also extract out some of those ideas into their own files). But, much like the recent posts about "outsourcing thinking" and GP noting that people sometimes do nothing with their highlights, I find that the work is useful for understanding and remembering.
Out of interest, why have you been considering Logseq?
> Out of interest, why have you been considering Logseq?
Primarily because it's FOSS; I love Obsidian (I even pay for it) but I have to consider the possibility that they'll be bullshit and start charging for stuff or start restricting things arbitrarily. If Logseq becomes bullshit then I (or someone else) can fork it and maintain/grow it. It's also written in ClojureScript, so legally I have to kind of like it :).
I've also kind of grown to like the way that the "unit" of Logseq is the "block" instead of the "page". Pages are more about aggregation than "units" of information, and as a result of this I find that the graph view is actually useful, instead of just something pretty in Obsidian.
There are some things I really don't like about Logseq (the lack of proper Vim keystrokes being a big one for me), but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people try software for five minutes, make zero effort to understand what the application is actually trying to do, give up, and declare the software as "bad". I felt like that's what happened with Gnome Shell, for example.
I will likely eventually go back to Obsidian, but I figured that I should give Logseq a fair shake, and it's different enough from Obsidian that I felt it's only fair to spend a few weeks properly learning it.
That sounds fair enough, I'd be interested in reading your thoughts at a later date on the experience!
I've been gradually updating this post [1] if you want to follow along. It's in a fairly rough state (all good blog posts require multiple rewrites and I haven't done that), but you are welcome to follow along as I compile stuff.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/September-2025/Tryi...
Hopping to the references right away doesn’t work for me. I prefer just going through the whole paper once and coming back. To me it’s analogous to reading a book in a language not familiar to me. You read it lengthy chuck of texts even though you come across words you don’t know. Then you can find the meaning of words and read the texts again for better understanding . This way I think is more helpful to grasp the whole topic and intention of texts faster.
I don’t highlight often, but when I do it is for the same reason I take notes. I never refer back to either one. But they focus my mind to stay on track so it cannot wander as much, in the moment, and prompts me to immediately reflect on or quickly reread what I think might be important or interesting.
I read the abstract and skim the intro before committing to a read. The authors have to convince me that they know the field, they think they’ve done something interesting, and I think what they’ve done is plausible. If it passes that bar, I assume the most adversarial possible mindset and look for holes in their methods. If their methods are junk, I may skim the conclusion just to see what kind of unfounded nonsense to watch out for in the future, but otherwise I’m done, and really most papers are done at this point. Papers in my field are mostly bogus, unfortunately. Every now and then, somebody uses plausible methods, and only then do I really bother to sit down and read the whole thing.
I tend to work in more theory-heavy CS (at least when I'm reading papers), so sometimes even the abstract is obscured by lots of scary terminology, so if I want to understand even the basics, I need to do it recursively.
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.
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.
[dead]
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.
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.
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.
The corollary is to write to forget (or at least to get thoughts off your mind).
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.
That's the idea behind "Getting Things Done" (GTD)
Writing seems to more of a tool to refine/coalesce thoughts
I don't disagree that it performs that function. In my experience, thoughts will persist and remain on my mind until I consciously refine them enough. Writing is one of the best ways (if not the best) for doing so.
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.
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.
Great article, I can’t remember anything from it.
Same. I feel a strong urge to highlight a paper's section on Methodology now, but no idea why.
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.
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
It’s a fine perspective, but:
> We can only read a text once
Is clearly false. OP is expressing a choice, not a truth.
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.
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.
Quite often, the meaning of a text relies on the contexts you bring to it. I’ve had many experiences where I’ve returned to a text after reading others, and gleaned entirely new or different insights from it. I disagree with the idea that first exposure exhausts the knowledge (or in OP’s perspective, “Bayesian system”) that can be acquired.
I didn't say it exhausts the knowledge.. what I'm saying is very much the opposite of that -- knowledge is front and center. I'm more referring to the experience and new lenses on past similar experiences, which I think we're in agreement on.
Go play Outer Wilds if you want to experience what I mean. It's the only game I've played that's affected me so strongly in this way.
"No man ever steps in the same river twice"
> 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?
No. I hold my reaction even with OP’s “given”. You can, in fact, read a text more than once, given the number of compelling works and the limited time available to us.
who even is this guy?
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...
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.
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