How You Know

There&#x27;s also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don&#x27;t remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world.<p>I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten.

An associated problem caused by a change in the mental model due to reading is the &quot;Curse of knowledge&quot; principle - which essentially states that &quot;....better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties.&quot;<p>Once you have read something and your mental model of the world is adjusted to include the new information, you have a difficult time understanding why others don&#x27;t see what you see. This is compounded by the fact - as highlighted by pg in the essay - that you also forget how and when your mental model changes.<p>This is one reason why not every expert is a good teacher - as they fail to see the world from the point of view of students.<p>But it is also relevant and useful to remember this in the world of startups. Established large companies routinely get disrupted by novice startups - often because the experts at the large company fail to see problems the way novices do. It is impossible to become an expert at something while continuing to view the world from the eyes of a beginner.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Curse_of_knowledge</a>

If you haven&#x27;t seen it, S01E03 of Black Mirror, <i>The Entire History of You</i>, deals exactly with what PG describes at the end of this post: technology that lets you review and relive your past. It&#x27;s very much worth watching, and was recently added to Netflix&#x27;s library:<p><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt2089050&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&amp;trkid=3325852" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&amp;trkid=33258...</a>

&gt; Your mind is like a compiled program you&#x27;ve lost the source of.<p>Hence the important art of keeping a journal. You can keep a transaction log of changes. The act of replaying the journal allows you to identify patterns in your thought processes and identify cognitive dissonances. The very act of reading should induce a reactive compulsion to write.<p>As Burroughs taught in his later creative writing courses -- in order to become a better writer one must first learn to read (I&#x27;m paraphrasing here).<p>Part of becoming a better thinker is learning how to think. In order to do that one must catch one&#x27;s self in the act.

I really enjoyed Paul&#x27;s compilation analogy. It reminds me of a quote by Robertson Davies. &quot;A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.&quot;<p>It also reminds me of that MIT paper that gives advice on how to do research. The part it talks about why it is that when your colleague gives you a paper to read and says it&#x27;s particularly poignant, but when you read it it doesn&#x27;t seem like anything special. Maybe it&#x27;s because your colleague had the dependencies in his state of mind that you did not have in yours, so it didn&#x27;t seem as memorable to you as to him when the code compiled.

Most people equate the term &quot;memory&quot; with what is more accurately termed <i>episodic memory</i> - little movies in your head. Most people can&#x27;t remember when &quot;Christmas&quot; was first defined for them, but they can rattle off many things about it - the date, the religious meaning, the corporate meaning, etc. This is <i>semantic memory</i>, and together they form your conscious <i>explicit memory</i> or <i>declarative memory</i> (there are differences between the two that are not relevant here). The brain often throws away the episode but keeps the concept, and that is what Paul is talking about here.<p>But there&#x27;s more to it than that. Your unconscious <i>implicit memory</i> includes things you can&#x27;t even articulate. That&#x27;s the difference between the date of Christmas and how to ride a bike: the latter is nondeclarative. Learning a different way to ride a bike, or approach programming, is even more difficult than recomputing semantic memory.<p>You can (and should) read a new books and gain new episodes to base your facts and opinions on. Read diverse material with abandon. But when learning something nondeclarative, like a weight-lifting technique, it can be well worth seeking out an expert and learning it right the first time. With nondeclarative memory, what you don&#x27;t know <i>can</i> hurt you.<p>For more on the science and classification of memory, the Wikipedia page is as good a starting place as any.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Memory</a>

Why not take notes? Whenever I read a book I want to remember, I just pencil a dash in the margin next to any key fact, insight, or quote. Then after I&#x27;m done with a few chapters I retype these sections into a mindmap. It probably only adds 10 - 20% extra time, but you&#x27;re getting 1000% more value.<p>In general what matters isn&#x27;t how much you read, but how much you retain and what sorts of connections with past and future insight and information. It&#x27;s important to have the full experience of having realizations and making connections while you&#x27;re reading, which is why I just make a dash in the margins as opposed to taking actual notes in real time, but I feel like by not circling back later you&#x27;re cheating yourself out of the true value of learning.<p>Especially since you have no idea if the books you&#x27;re reading are even true or not until you vet the facts with primary sources.

This comment will run the risk of sounding condescending, but I believe it&#x27;s true so I&#x27;m going to post it anyway.<p>Thought processes like the ones captured in pg&#x27;s post are fostered by education in critical analysis--the sort of analysis that one learns in the humanities. Art, literature, philosophy, history, etc. are the products of human thought, and learning to critique them is in part an exploration of how humans think. Not the physics or neurology, but how influences can shape each person&#x27;s mental model.<p>Part of this is exploring the influences that affected the mental model of the person writing or creating the art. Another is exploring the mental model(s) that the artist or writer sought to create. (This is what we experience when we &quot;get into&quot; a book.)<p>So, if you&#x27;re looking for a reason that CS or engineering students should take humanities courses, I think one is illustrated in this post: it teaches you how to read books consciously. It gives you a framework for exploring how the thoughts of others (and therefore yours as well) are influenced and shaped by the information that is consumed during a lifetime.

&gt; And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page.<p>This was reassuring to hear from someone else, because I&#x27;ve had this exact feeling about books I read, films I&#x27;ve watched, conversations I&#x27;ve had, work projects I&#x27;ve completed, etc. This is true even in cases when I was completely engaged in, for example, reading the book, and the book left a positive impression on me.<p>I&#x27;ve always felt guilty about this, especially when I see others who don&#x27;t seem to have the same problem when they talk about the books they&#x27;ve read, etc. I&#x27;ve also found that recall can be greatly improved by repeatedly talking about the specific topic with multiple people.<p>The strange thing is that I have an excellent memory for certain things - information about people and relationships. In light of our evolutionary history as a social species, perhaps this is not so surprising after all.

I remember reading something very similar to this (but can&#x27;t remember where, ha), where it said the important thing about reading is how if affects your general thinking rather than the individual pieces of information that you&#x27;re likely to remember (or not).<p>I spent several years reading a ton of different books on economics and I can recall very few facts from those books, but it did and has completely altered my world view of many things.<p>pg&#x27;s analogy of a program where you&#x27;ve lost the source code doesn&#x27;t feel quite right, because you can&#x27;t make modifications to the program without the code. Some sort of machine learning model seems more appropriate, where you&#x27;ve lost the original training data but can still update the model later with fresh data (a new book), and end up with a better&#x2F;different model, but then lose that training data again.

While I was reading came to my mind the Borges&#x27;s short story &quot;Funes the memorious&quot;. It&#x27;s about someone who can&#x27;t forget any detail. He remembers absolutely all the things and the infinite instances of them through the time. At some point of the story Borges conjectures: &quot;I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget the difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.&quot;

I have an interesting take on this. Most of the books I&#x27;ve read, I have a copy of. A while back, I endeavored to cut, scan and OCR them all into my computer. One idea was then I could do a full-text search, limited to what I&#x27;ve already read rather than what google thinks is relevant.<p>So far, I&#x27;ve found it very handy to find something if I at least remember which book it was in. But I need a program that can extract the OCR&#x27;d text from .pdf files - anyone know of a simple one?<p>(I can do it manually, one at a time, by bringing it up in a pdf reader, but that&#x27;s too tedious and slow.)

I will never understand why this guy&#x27;s essays are so revered. I&#x27;m expecting some profound conclusion, but the only message of the essay is &quot;reading and experience form mental models.&quot; Well, duh! Whats worse, he doesn&#x27;t support his claims with evidence, besides a single anecdote.<p>Am I missing something here?

What i found shocking here, is how casually pg talks about what i believe is the fundamental point of philosophy. That is the mapping of our minds inductive model of the world, and our deductive one.<p>&gt;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.<p>Here, he is pointing out the the relevant information you perceive, your empirical data, is only retained insofar as it effects your deductive model of the world, that is, the model we use to determine truth and falsity. The rest of the data is generally trivial. This is a very sensible insight in my mind, and kudos to him. The dance between empirical data and deductive truth is one of the most difficult things for me to get my head around. This as a model for data retention is something i&#x27;d not thought of.<p>&gt;Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.<p>Here, i find this problematic. In Soros&#x27;s terms, the mind is reflexive. Thus, in reviewing the data, we are experiencing new data. If we edit our thoughts, do we not remember editing them? I don&#x27;t see away to take away the reflexive nature of self examination, that in creating changes, we create new data about the changes.

One of the most significant books I ever read was <i>A Walk Across America</i> by Peter Jenkins. He graduated college in the 70&#x27;s, wasn&#x27;t sure what to do, and decide to walk from New York to the Pacific ocean. This book covered the first half of the walk; he wrote it while taking a break in Louisiana along the way.<p>That book was hugely influential to me. I graduated college and spent two years teaching. The summer after my second year of teaching, I had no obligations to anyone else for the first time in my life. I remembered Peter Jenkins&#x27; story, and decided to bicycle across the US. I knew I wanted to travel under my own power as he had done, but I wanted to go a little faster than he did. Bicycling was perfect for me. I ended up doing two cross-country trips over successive summers, and then I spent a year living on my bicycle, circumnavigating North America.<p>I reread <i>A Walk Across America</i> some years after doing my own trips. I was amazed at how bad I thought the book was. pg observes that<p><i>The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life.</i><p>This is absolutely true. Now that I&#x27;m in my 40&#x27;s, I&#x27;m going to go back and reread the most influential books of my 20&#x27;s. I might even have to change my HN username after doing so, but I hope not.

I don&#x27;t like the flavor of this post. It feels very much like navel-gazing and, if it wasn&#x27;t for the domain name, it likely would have been lost to &#x2F;newest.<p>Where is the knowledge here? That we don&#x27;t have immediate recollection of retained information? Knowledge is based on a beginning and ending context.

It&#x27;s not that you <i>forget</i> the content, it&#x27;s that you forget <i>how to phrase it</i> concisely. If the author needed 70, or 200 pages to explain a concept, and you can at some point raise your hand and claim &#x27;I get the point&#x27;, it&#x27;s not reasonable to expect a 12-word summary. <i>What do I remember?</i> Hard to put into words. Likewise, it&#x27;s not reasonable to expect a perfect memory, reciting paragraph after paragraph of the original text.<p>If you really <i>can</i> summarize a book in a sentence or two, wouldn&#x27;t the author have done that already?<p>Maybe it&#x27;s time for me to reread Cryptonomicon. There are parts of that book I have absolutely no memory of, flipping through it, yet other parts I remember all too often (bicycle sprockets, comets of pee, bisecting alligators, van eck phreaking).<p>(also... &gt; <i>seige warfare</i> ?)

This essay reminds me of a NY Times essay: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;19&#x2F;books&#x2F;review&#x2F;Collins-t.htm...</a><p>Interestingly, if shown a series of hundreds of images, we wouldn&#x27;t remember many in the list. But if we&#x27;re shown alternates (was it a goldfish or a watch?), we would instantly recognize the item.<p>We didn&#x27;t forget, we just couldn&#x27;t access the memory on demand. The conclusion is the same: it&#x27;s there, influencing us and adding to our lives, even if it doesn&#x27;t feel like it sometimes.

I&#x27;ve been thinking about this very issue recently, and coincidentally started working on software two days ago to help manage the problem of remembering things that I&#x27;ve read. Obtaining information in 2015 is remarkably easy. Retaining it is damn near impossible, at least for me. I read books and bookmark links from hn and reddit on a daily basis, consuming constantly. But I find that I recall very little of it. I don&#x27;t know if Stephan Hawking was right about black holes destroying information, but my bookmarks folder comes pretty close. Links go in and then are never seen or heard from again. I take copious book notes and type them up, only for them to be consigned to the void of my hard drive file system. I&#x27;ve tried evernote and anki and several other tools, but it&#x27;s always a one way ticket. My trouble isn&#x27;t remembering what I&#x27;ve read, but remembering to remember. No matter how I&#x27;ve tried, I can&#x27;t change my daily work flow to set aside time to review the notes and information that I&#x27;ve already collected, rendering it useless.<p>If I had a magic device that recorded all of my experiences, it wouldn&#x27;t do me much good because I&#x27;m too busy collecting new experiences to be remembered. It would be great to be able to search for details and trivia, but I wouldn&#x27;t have time to peruse the archive to refresh myself about things that I had forgotten completely. Much in the way that google lets us search for and recall anything, except the things we don&#x27;t remember the name of.<p>I&#x27;m going in the direction of reminding myself about things that I previously read or bookmarked, especially as they tie in to what I&#x27;m currently reading. I think one part of the solution is to display existing bookmarks and typed up book notes to myself in a near random fashion. It&#x27;s not the most sophisticated solution, but at least they won&#x27;t be lost and I&#x27;ll have a chance of reconnecting with something and establishing more anchors in my memory. I think a plugin that relates past content to the current page might be a good idea, ie for this page I could see any previous bookmarks that involve memory and retention. And generally reminding myself to review things I&#x27;ve already learned, even if they don&#x27;t seem relevant at the moment.<p>I don&#x27;t have any great ideas yet, but I&#x27;ve been coding like heck for the past few days to try to take small steps toward a solution. I&#x27;ve been on a quest to make my brain work better, and this essay has definitely given me some ideas and helped to push me along.

Schopenhauer said it first and better:<p>&quot;However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them.&quot; -- Schopenhauer

I am in middle of reading a fascinating book that discusses how the brain, processes, interprets, and retains information as it passes from your Sensory Information Storage to your short term memory to your long term memory, as well as how you retrieve information from your long term memory. (The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis)<p>The book was written as a guide to CIA Analysts to understand the limitations their own filters and mental models place on new information they process.<p>One important point that I find applies to this essay is that the way we retrieve information is through schema that associate various memories with each other. Creativity is about mapping new pathways through your memory or applying other patterns and schema on top of existing memories.<p>So, reading a book a second time, or even &quot;forgetting&quot; what you read, can not only give you new patterns and schema to apply to your other mental models and memories and stimulate creativity.<p>I highly recommend everyone read The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis... or if you want the abridged version you can read my brief recap. <a href="http://www.davidmelamed.com/2014/12/05/internet-marketers-cia-hedge-funds-business/?hvid=2UkF6u" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.davidmelamed.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;internet-marketers-ci...</a>

This goes both ways.<p>Sometimes I avoid rereading books for the same reason. There was a Summer where Catcher in the Rye felt very important. I&#x27;d hate to reread it under my new, adult perspective. I&#x27;d prefer to let it linger in nostalgia.

A few years ago I started an annual tradition, where around the new year I&#x27;ll re-read the Pragmatic Programmer. This year will be the third year, and I expect I&#x27;ll continue to gain new insights from future rereadings.

This is great essay. Few points:<p>1. The more correct analogy would be <i>training data</i> and <i>machine learned model</i> rather than source code and compiled binary.<p>2. Lot of people move from book to book, always reading some book at any point in time. This provides great dopamine hit to brain and keeps boredome away. However one need to <i>reflect</i> on what they read to gain any significant &quot;take always&quot;. The act of reflecting enforces recall which in turn induces analysis and memory storage. I try to create a book review to formalize my reflection process after I complete a book.<p>3. These days I also get digital (usually pdf) copies of most books I&#x27;m reading. This allows me to use tools like GoodReader to highlight striking statements and make notes of my opinions as I read along. You can sure just use pencil and margin of book :). This habit has rewarded me greatly because it makes me take a pause and think about what I read. I can come back to book anytime and refresh it 10X faster. It&#x27;s also fun to know what my opinion used to be on some of the things years ago.

This makes a lot of sense. However, a machine learning model + data analogy feels more satisfactory (and accurate?) to me. We throw away the data but our model as well as its parameters are retained. The model as well as the parameters get refined with experience and it&#x27;s possible that the model is recursively made up of multiple models and that combination is governed by parameters which are also governed by experience. Realizing this has always been fascinating to me and it makes it clear that exposing the brain to more data in pretty deliberate ways can yield profound results. The &quot;smarter&quot; you are the less data you need. If you are not so smart&#x2F;knowledgeable you need more data. The data you need is also specifically of the question-answer form i.e. examples of what it is you are trying to learn. Anyways before i go down the rabbit hole, I think these metaphors are extremely helpful for the purpose of self analysis and improvement.

&quot;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. &quot;<p>I also find that this rings true with movies as well.

I experienced this phenomenon starkly when I started a book, and felt it was filled with obvious remarks and little novelty. It took me 50 pages to realize I had already read it.

&quot;What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?&quot;<p>Well for one things it gives you pleasure. You could also say &quot;what&#x27;s the point of listening to music&quot; or &quot;what&#x27;s the point of watching comedy&quot;. Other than pleasure, as a generality, you might read because it makes you feel good to do so.<p>I find that a key to good mental health (that works for me) is not to question what harmless things make you feel good and why. If I did that it would make me unhappy. Just go with the good feeling.<p>One thing that I&#x27;m sad about is that I don&#x27;t get the same pleasure that I used to from browsing books at Barnes and Noble. With the internet there is to much to read already. I don&#x27;t find the same utility that I used to from books that are essentially a single perspective (at least the ones that I used to buy, non-fiction).

This theory explains why many smart people also read a lot. Not necessarily books or even any body of text, but reading as a generic behavior to find meanings in various objects and events in life (Books, I feel, is just one of the easiest things to read). Because they read a lot, they have broader and deeper mental models, which they use to model new&#x2F;different things&#x2F;events well.<p>Also, in my experience, what sets the smartest people apart from &quot;just&quot; smart people is their ability to retain the how: not only do they have broad and deep models, but they also know how these models are built and can adapt them quickly as they acquire new information.<p>Most people need to run a disassembler of their compiled thoughts, and after a certain point in life, their binaries are so bloated that they can&#x27;t decompile them at all.

Having read Carl Sagan&#x27;s Cosmos in my youth, I always feel guilty re-reading a book:<p>“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

<p><pre><code> 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&#x27;ve lost the source of. It works, but you don&#x27;t know why. </code></pre> I often feel like that, but much more in regard to people than to books and experiences. It&#x27;s strange, how much others have formed me, but how little I do remember about them. How little I remember about my parents, but how big a part of my compiled program they are.<p>Of all the time I spend with my daughter, of all the activities we do, she probably will not remember much in a few years, but at least I can hope it will have an effect of her model of the world that persists.

When I was a freshman in college, I was in a humanities class that focused on the intersection between humans and machines. We had an assignment to build and test out a &quot;prosthesis&quot;, i.e. a technology that extends human capability, in Second Life.<p>I created a simple wristwatch accessory that was scripted to upload a copy of all of your chatbox text to an external service. Later, you could log in to this external service and search through a history of all of the conversations your character ever overheard.<p>Real-world versions of this technology appear inevitable as digital storage costs trend to zero. A rudimentary digital copy of the physical world is being created in services like Google Maps. The Google self-driving car records a 3D copy of its surroundings with accuracy at the centimeter level. Dropcam uploads video and audio data from within your home to cloud storage.<p>A world with fully recorded life experiences seems creepy at first blush, but I believe we&#x27;ll discover a mechanism for trust that will allow everyone to safely record a digital copy of their lives that is inaccessible to third parties. Perhaps in the future we&#x27;ll each own an open-source private cloud container of CPU and storage resources. Instead of processing your data on external servers, third-party services might provide code that runs in your own container under tight network permission restrictions. Such a system might be able to maintain the benefits of continuous software deployment while allowing consumers to keep their data under their control.

The problems is figuring out which books provide those useful mental models. I found that fiction usually doesn&#x27;t but a list with recommendations in the comments would be great.

This raises two interesting questions to me:<p>1. Are technological advances required for re-living experiences? Wouldn&#x27;t (some forms of) meditation achieve similar results? Personally, I have found myself remembering many past events, a few days into the start of meditation.<p>2. When we re-read books, we often choose to re-read those that we liked. But could there be some benefit in re-reading books that we <i>didn&#x27;t</i> like (and surpasses a minimum threshold of quality).

I strongly advise pg to go find a DVD of Black Mirror a horribly under-rated TV series from the excellent Charlie Brooker - the one on replaying ones memories suggests just reading will be a lot less troublesome !<p>I do suspect we will be less likely to record our lives for later playback than have them analysed at or near the time for feedback on how to improve. Twitch TV is (I am told) full of streams of top rated people playing WoW and commenting on their actions (so others can learn, or be entertained). It&#x27;s probable that there are shows now or soon that have players commentating on other players streams, and a fairly short leap from that to commenting on videos of me training my dog, or performing reps or basically anything in the life coach &#x2F; therapy repertoire.<p>Audio and visual analysis already allows therapists to zoom in on the important parts of observed patients (certainly in sleep therapy) and will only get better.<p>Whilst the unexamined life is not worth living, there is no reason you have to be the only examiner. We shall all have our own life long therapists.

I hate this: &quot;What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?&quot;<p>Because reading is enjoyable?

&gt; Intriguingly, this implication isn&#x27;t limited to books.<p>We can see it clearly with the functional paradigm renaissance right now. The same arguments already existed 40 years ago, but _something_ changed recently where the perception of some people toward functional paradigm completely changed.

I started reading books about an year ago - read about 16 this year and I am not sure if it just a phony hunch or a real thing but I feel reading has helped me a lot in programming.<p>I am able to grasp things pretty quickly, I am able to link two different things to get ideas to solve problems, and also, I have grown more confident in approaching challenging problems.<p>Albeit, with anecdotal evidence, I believe, taking interest in wide variety of fields may not give immediate benefits but it helps you in ways you don&#x27;t imagine. The very fact about which I used to worry - not focusing on specialising and hoping from one thing to another, is what I think has helped me grow my skills in programming, in general.

I think this is part of a larger point. Books aren&#x27;t just collections of facts. Deleuze and Guattari perhaps said it best in the introduction to &quot;A Thousand Plateaus&quot; - &quot;A book itself is a little machine...&quot;<p>They then go on to say: &quot;We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with...&quot; Books are machines you plug into your understanding of the world and they either have an effect on you or they have no effect at all. What and how a book plugs into your understanding and works on it is more important than the content of the book itself under this view.

&gt; &quot;when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering the childhood trauma that prevented him from singing&quot;<p>Does anyone know what this is referring to? Searching for &quot;stephen fry singing trauma&quot; doesn&#x27;t return anything useful except pg&#x27;s essay.

This is a really interesting perspective on cognition, and it all kind of makes sense if you consider the brain to be a black box pattern recognition machine with various built-in biases.<p>New data is always added to the model, but not in an entirely rational fashion. The updated model is likely to slightly overfit new data (&quot;compiled at the time they happen&quot;), and particularly salient bits and pieces of old data (see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases</a>) are disproportionately weighted.

&#x27;Reliving experiences&#x27; is part of the Exposure Therapy that is used to treat PTSD. I remember watching on NOVA or some science program how virtual reality was being used to treat veterans suffering from PTSD. By reliving a dangerous situation in the VR world, they are able to &#x27;recompile&#x27; the program in a safer context than it actually happened.<p>EDIT: Found the link <a href="http://www.nami.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Top_Story/Using_Virtual_Reality_to_Treat_PTSD.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nami.org&#x2F;Content&#x2F;NavigationMenu&#x2F;Top_Story&#x2F;Using_V...</a>

I&#x27;ve read other takes on this interesting subject as well. They too, convinced me reading is worthwhile despite our memory limitations.<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;19&#x2F;books&#x2F;review&#x2F;Collins-t.htm...</a><p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-curse-of-reading-and-forgetting" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;page-turner&#x2F;the-curse-of-read...</a>

I recently met some people who swore that photoreading was legit and that because of it they&#x27;d read about 10 thick books per week. Not knowing what it was, I looked it up and immediately didn&#x27;t believe the premise. There&#x27;s something to be said for speed reading (at a rate slightly faster than normal) but photoreading just seems ridiculous. Not only can no real content&#x2F;meaning be gained from doing it, but no mental models can be formed. I&#x27;d love to be proven wrong, though...

&gt;Reading and experience train your model of the world.<p>This sounds convincing but then an argument against reading fiction follows since fiction trains your model of the world with fake data.

I am a firm believer in actively curating a mental model. At work I could be accused of over-communicating and I demand the same from those around me. I do so because my goal is to help refine the mental model of myself and all my coworkers so that everyone has a better intuitive understanding of the system&#x2F;process&#x2F;organization we&#x27;re working with.<p>By this process I&#x27;ve been able to internalize much of a massively complex system (SAP) in a relatively short period of time.

&gt; Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them.<p>Like most things this may have unintended consequences. I think our ability to forget is an important &quot;feature&quot; of cognition. What would happen if we were unable to forget even petty squabbles between friends, loved ones, supposed enemies? How far could this escalate? Our ability to forget and put things behind us may be the reason we&#x27;re still around.

I&#x27;m just really happy to hear that I&#x27;m not alone in my anxieties about needing to re-read books and my inability to remember everything written in a book!

&gt; e.g. when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering the childhood trauma that prevented him from singing<p>That sounds fascinating, does anyone have a reference for this?

Knowledge is an interesting subject. When I read, I don&#x27;t remember the exact order of words. Especially in the age of Google, we have a choice of what to burden our memory with and what to leave to Google. Are names and dates important? What&#x27;s important is to have models of how things work in your mind. It is through the process of reading that we develop and refine these models.

I don&#x27;t like the use of the word &quot;compiled&quot;. It&#x27;s more like a program that modifies it&#x27;s source at runtime. This reminds me of how JavaScript used to be simply interpreted but now with V8 (and friends) the hottest paths are optimized at runtime so that the result is more performant than any compilation because you have more information than you do statically.

I experience this phenomenon powerfully reading scientific articles. You read a bunch of articles when you are trying to wrap your head around some topic, but if you then go back and read them again after you&#x27;ve worked on it for a while, you&#x27;ll find all kinds of things that now are very meaningful while they previously didn&#x27;t seem important to you.

The idea of compilation without the source is a great way to put it. A beginners mind is a good way to look at things and learn. With a beginners mindset when needed, maybe temporarily you can recompile portions to take down the filters and walls in your current binaries, with that mindset maybe you can update and refresh from the basics.

I also think that its equally important to reread books that gave you great insight. A few years later with more experience and knowledge you derive more from it.<p>On first read you have a few key points and years later sometimes those end up knitted together forming a greater insight that eluded you previously.

I think this is the phenomenon that forms the basis for Gladwell&#x27;s BLINK.<p>It took me a while to learn that almost everything I have heard or seen has already been stored. The problem of memory is in retrieval.<p>This also applies to creative work. When you have seen quite a lot of things, it ends up influencing stuff you could swear was original.

“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”<p>― Ralph Waldo Emerson

&quot;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&#x27;ve lost the source of. It works, but you don&#x27;t know why.&quot; -- love this

I think one of the points from this essay can be made that &quot;content&quot; discovery is going to be a hot problem to crack if it is not already has been. Because good discovery mechanism leads to more user engagement that ultimately results in creating products with lasting impact.

Fascinating. A corollary would be: be careful what you read and be critical of what you read. There is danger of manipulation, particularly by others. The plus is that you could manipulate yourself, change personal perceptions and mode of thinking.

This helps alleviate the fear of potentially &quot;wasting time&quot; if a startup or project we&#x27;re working on doesn&#x27;t take off. Either way, the things learned while undertaking the endeavor will affect our mindset, usually for the better.

Regarding the retention from books, it&#x27;s often the case that I could fill a dozen pages with correct answers to questions that I only know from having read a particular book, even if I could only fill one page with unprompted recollections.

There&#x27;s a quote which I (ironically) can&#x27;t remember about how a mind is made up of the books it has read in much the same way as a lion is made of of the animals it consumes. Or to put it another way, &quot;you are what you eat.&quot;

Not for nothing, the laying of new memories in the brain is exactly context sensitive. The hippocampus is actively weighting new information based on what we already know. And emotion hacks the hippocampal patterns that much more.

It takes a deeper understanding of the mind and how it works to grasps these things.<p>When you learn about the four aspects of the mind and how each plays a role in your outlook, then you have the key to this &quot;mystery&quot;.

&quot; 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.&quot; -- I loved this statement most.

See also, the psycological litterature on source amnesia <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_amnesia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Source_amnesia</a>

The funny thing is I had just posted on hear to ask about how others help improve their reading retention, since I&#x27;ve been feeling bad about forgetting thing after I read them.

Anybody know how to rss his feed? i try with <a href="http://paulgraham.com/rss.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;rss.html</a> but seems not a full article.

On some level we don&#x27;t really forget - when you reread a book it comes back to you like a stream, all the insights and connections appearing stronger and clearer than before.

&quot;Your mind is like a compiled program you&#x27;ve lost the source of. It works, but you don&#x27;t know why.&quot; Nice.

&quot;Your mind is like a compiled program you&#x27;ve lost the source of. It works, but you don&#x27;t know why.&quot;

TL;DR: a healthy brain accumulates wisdom, but won&#x27;t bother archiving the sources of that wisdom.

&gt; &quot;a perfect formulation of a problem is already half its solution.&quot;<p>Is that simply rubber ducking?

So apparently the metaphor that our brains are computers is still used? And that they &quot;compile&quot; experiences (though we don&#x27;t understand how).<p>What if our brains are not easily shaped? And maybe our brains are good at forgetting experiences?

It&#x27;s deeply heartwarming to see another “OG” PG essay enter the canon. (Obscure reference to historical French prose in the introductory sentence? Check!)

Or put a slightly different way, reading book is a way to test&#x2F;validate your model of the world. It&#x27;s like running unit tests on your assumptions.

Quote:<p>There are no facts, only interpretations.<p>--Friedrich Nietzsche

maybe this is more an argument for taking notes while you read rather than just reading.

The mind is a sophisticated algorithm with a shit database. So why not replace that database by taking notes?

What

<i>I&#x27;ve read Villehardouin&#x27;s chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?</i><p>I&#x27;ve gone through this exact anxiety. Access into past experiences (whether they&#x27;re books, vacations, or pieces of visual art) isn&#x27;t random-access. We seem to have a lot of on-demand knowledge but struggle to retain deep knowledge of something in an independent, self-encapsulated state. Depth of knowledge seems to form, in us, emergently and subconsciously. It makes a case for the Buddhist argument that all things are interconnected and interdependent; certainly, in our knowledge bases, that becomes true very quickly.<p>For me, the solution was to learn to enjoy the process of learning rather than completed act of <i>having acquired</i> knowledge, it being difficult to summarize any acquired knowledge without coming up with a trite, denatured reduction. It took a while because I was secure in the realization that, yes, I <i>had</i> read that 500-page book even if I couldn&#x27;t reproduce more than a few pages of &quot;raw&quot; and independent knowledge.