This note was dictated February 1, 2020 and is mostly unedited.
first South that comes to mind is that you should do as much reading as you are able to process in memorization and writing. Reading is just an input flow and with sufficient reading back pressure that isn't released by processing and incorporating the wisdom of the books into your life, you just get yourself stressed out.
Reading is just the top of the wisdom funnel. If you're not writing, reflecting on, or memorizing the things you read, you may as well have never read them.
As a tangent: I do wonder what the value is of reading books and not processing them explicitly, whether by flashcards flashcards or by writing about them, or by describing them to someone. Are you actually gaining wisdom? There's an argument you made that it affects your thinking, that even after you've forgotten the contents, or can't explain what you read about, you're able to similar arguments resonate more strongly your subconscious mind builds up and remembers like a preponderance of evidence that compresses them into some inexpressible vector that then is more aligned with future things that agree. This is the pattern matching part of your brain at work. reminds me of how you have a longer emotional memory than you do and intellectual one, how long after you can't remember an exact memory, you still have emotional residue from the experience.
Reading without explicitly processing improves your pattern recognition. It plausibly refines your taste, helps your judgment, and affects your decision making. but I think the scales with your intelligence. It seems like not all pattern matching brains are created equal.
that said there is a good argument she made for explicitly remembering all the things that you read. For one if you explicitly remember things then or have the ability to if you've written things down then you can work with them over time and develop your opinions over time. Which is really powerful. I think this is the main key the main outcome the best result from a writing habit. Your opinions get pushed by others who read your content, you push your own opinions by reviewing them more frequently, via space repetition habit they cement themselves into your head, you become known for the thing.
The best reason to treat reading and writing is part of the same wisdom funnel, is that who lets you explicitly develop and expand your opinions over time.
I think Twitter contains a lot of thought-provoking content a lot of good questions, a lot of good starting off points. a lot of those things could be directly incorporated into some outlining flow. It's interesting to see what other people thinking about,.that said Twitter builds up back pressure really quickly because you're about your mind's jumps around between so much different content about so many different things. A Twitter search might be a better experience. Or a list. in fact I'm pretty sure I should be browsing Twitter lists more often. I should have community list to Twitter, I should have machine learning Twitter, and then I should have the rest of my home feed which would ideally exclude both of those lists. Is it possible to exclude lists from your main Twitter feed or create another list that is the exclusion of lists? Ideally I'd have comedy Twitter as well. It's the context switch even micro context switching is just a little stressful, it just makes me worry that I'm missing things, that they're not making any difference, then I'm purely wasting my time.
Twitter especially built up a lot of back pressure because it's constant context switching.
Twitter is probably good for creating new ideas for generating new ideas. It's also full of trash frankly. I do wish I could distill Twitter to just the Golden nuggets the insights cuz right now it's just perfectly optimized for monopolizing and dominating your attention it's random variable words writ large. It's designed to make you feel it could not have been designed more perfectly to make you feel more anxious about context switching.
I think medium length articles contain the most wisdom per punch The wisdom per word ratio is strongest. It's also the least the worst editorial review. So you should be careful about picking your sources. For median life content you just need to be careful to follow the right authors, and ignore most or at least take them with a massive kind of salt. Curate your sources put them into an RSS reader or feed browse the archives, save all of the interesting looking articles, put them all in your Kindle with pockets of Kindle. I like the news blur pocket Kindle flow.
well curated medium length article feed from well-vetted sources is probably the most wisdom for punch. And I highly recommend the news blur to pocket to Kindle flow.
Books are hidden miss equally as much as articles in my opinion. Long books can be just as much of a waste of time as articles, editorial standards don't really seem to vary that much. a long book is often better as a blog poster even a tweet. And to those who argue that a book is a form of space repetition well save yourself some time compress it read it as a tweet, and space repetition that tweet yourself god dammit. That's reading a tweet is 30 seconds creating a flash card is 30 seconds reviewing it is with the space repetition is 7 minutes, but reading a book is 4 hours. I know which one I'd rather have.
This might be a straw man, but I've heard people argue that books are a form of that even books that could be summarized as a series of tweets are still valuable as books because it's a form of built-in space repetition. This is going to be the dumbest argument I've heard in a long time. If a book takes 3 hours to read which is extremely fast, then you could write read three tweets in one minute, encode them all as flashcards in enough 5 minutes, and then the cumulative review time of your entire life to guarantee that you would retain those facts on the tip of your tongue forever, would be less than the amount of time it took you to read 1/10 of the book. In other words, you get an order of magnitude benefit from reading tweets and then actually using face repetition compared to reading a book.
For observing facts for learning new fields textbooks are on parallel.,. You need to be exposed about what you want to learn and map out how you're going to approach the content build your curriculum and be explicit about things you're going to skip. With books you might ideally do the same thing. When tricky thing that you might only be able to get from books or assay collections well no this is not true. Wisdom insight beautiful writing these are things that you could get from books as well. maybe I should practice crafting means more expressing things with style.