I always found this about the single most obvious faux-pas of Sherlock Holmes – if you give your brain enough time to properly organise the data, it does have (nearly) infinite storage. Choosing carefully what to read and what to ignore only leads to less information, in turn making it more difficult to build links between different ‘information islands’ and hence retaining said information more easily.
> Basically, if I don’t instantly fall in love with an article/book/blog, I stop reading and move on.
I don’t know the definition of ‘fall in love’ here, but this sounds rather dangerous as well, as it makes it more difficult to learn actually new things and supports living in one’s own little bubble of information.
> Getting informed is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And life’s too short for bad information.
But how to decide whether a given datum is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ information before consuming said datum and linking it up with the rest of your memory? Maybe it looks utterly senseless at the time you first read it, but it might well be missing piece linking two large and so far separate areas together.
Well the first one only works if you balance it with some variety. My point isn't to stop reading different stuff, but consciously choose what you want to read.
Yeah, "fall in love" isn't that concrete, I know. But again, it works for me if I manage to rotate the types of content I consume.
About the last topic, I give you that. But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.
Anyway thanks for taking to time to deconstruct some of the ideas I wrote. I think this topic has too few people writing and thinking about it.
> My point isn't to stop reading different stuff, but consciously choose what you want to read.
Thanks – the first point is the important one, the latter ideally should be a no-brainer. :)[0]
> But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.
Of course, the heuristics that icebraining mentioned come into play here, in a validity to the extent that it is generally safe to assume little to no information on trash TV.
However, heuristics are still heuristics and there are – in my experience – always sufficiently many borderline cases where heuristics will fail and the love-it-or-leave-it attitude makes you stick to one particular newspaper[1], leading you to become uninformed about the arguments of the ‘other side’.
[0] If someone could make a rule please about the relative position of emoticons and punctuation…
[1] Granted, the internet alleviated that issue somewhat, but just the choosing of news Google delivers to you based on your past reading might act somewhat like that, recreating the bubble that was formerly built by newspapers.
True. That's my issue with online filters, anyway. It kinda gets philosophical too because filters only act according to what we choose to filter. So a filter for the other side would be kind of a never-ending journey (but a very important one to achieve, regardless).
About emoticons and punctuation, I deal with that on a daily basis too. Ugh.
Sounds like making excuses for ADD. Only paying attention to things that seem interesting is an obvious failure mode. You will wind up only paying attention to things that have been optimized for attention grabbing.
I will not exclude the first sentence as a justification. Being as honest as I can get here. :)
But can you give me an example of the opposite? Say, an article or book which did not grab you at first but you found quite interesting. (being the keyword "interesting", a subjective concept to each and everyone of us, of course - myself included)
And that's understandable. I got the impression that author enjoys the chewing-gum-for-the-mind kind of read, which tastes good enough for the first 30 pages to finish it, but a little is left afterwards. For something to change the way you see the world it must make you think, and thinking requires some effort. Anything requiring an effrot may not be as pleasant but has more chances to leave a lasting impact.
> Say, an article or book which did not grab you at first but you found quite interesting.
Faust II, though you might not want to learn German just to read it – written 20 years after Faust I, with the knowledge accumulated during the lifetime of one of the world’s greatest authors poured into it; while definitely not attention-grabbing in any way and taking some time to get into, the hours I spent reading it were certainly one of the best spent hours so far.
But how to decide whether a given datum is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ information before consuming said datum and linking it up with the rest of your memory? Maybe it looks utterly senseless at the time you first read it, but it might well be missing piece linking two large and so far separate areas together.
That applies to any decision; you rarely or never have complete information. The solution is to apply heuristics to make a preliminary judgment. For example, by coming to HN instead of any other source of articles you're implicitly deciding that being linked from here means there's a greater probability of the article being good (for any definition of good you prefer).
Hence the filter bubble issue. When are we really open-minded if we always choose to what our minds are open for? I for instance can't deal with Zite's logic, trust me I've tried.
> For example, by coming to HN instead of any other source of articles you're implicitly deciding that being linked from here means there's a greater probability of the article being good (for any definition of good you prefer).
Actually, I spent most of the time I spent here on /newest, where this is guaranteed to a smaller degree[0], offering a relatively diverse random subset of whatever someone wrote on the internet.
[0] Maybe apart from ‘X married Y but held hands with Z!!!!’.
I think you overestimate the diversity of /newest. It's still an extremely thin slice of the breadth of the Internet, which itself contains only a fraction of all content (there are still plenty of articles being printed and not put online).
We're all heavily filtering what we consume, it's effectively impossible to do otherwise.
Yeah, that always bugged me about Holmes. He specifically restricted his fields of knowledge to things that could help him solve cases - so how did he know this in advance? He had encyclopedic knowledge of the muds of England, for example, but Watson was shocked to find he had never heard of the Copernican system of cosmology. So it's damn fortunate he was never engaged to investigate anything involving an astronomer, right?
That was just A Study in Scarlet. Which a lot of scholars think Holmes was more-or-less trolling Watson. In the Valley of Fear Holmes remarked that all knowledge was useful to him
source: I distinctly recalled using this as an argument against my dad when he told me to focus :P
I think that's what makes the character so intriguing. 90% impossible arguments of why he does the things he does but still you don't fail to be amazed.
> I don’t know the definition of ‘fall in love’ here, but this sounds rather dangerous as well, as it makes it more difficult to learn actually new things and supports living in one’s own little bubble of information.
On the face of it yes, on the other hand, there's a ton of crap out there, and the fact that someone wrote a book about something is on it's own a poor indicator for wether it's going to teach you something meaningful. Reading some of it seems to be a better indicator.
Also, abandoning a book doesn't mean abandoning the subject. Sometimes you need a different author and angle and sometimes a more basic primer on the subject before tackling the main work.
By this definition, you could end up filling your life with airport thrillers. War and Peace has barely introduced a character by page 30, let alone got you hooked.
Valid. But if the writer doesn't care about the reader to the point of wanting to make the idea stick by page 30, I choose not to continue reading. Of course this isn't a writer's problem per se, but there's just too many books and too little time to read everything. It's my way of having a filtering pattern without losing my mind.
It's a problem with 21st Century "instant gratification" culture. Like so much of life, many of the most rewarding books require effort to enjoy them, and get anything from them.
By requiring the author to do all the work, you're merely consuming culture. Becoming a culture-producer requires you to invest yourself in it, to think about it and respond to it. You cannot do that based on the first 30 pages alone. If you do, Dan Brown is probably the best author you'll ever read.
I don't want the first 30 pages to tell me everything. Nor should it be like that, it's just not healthy for the writer's imagination. But by then I should be hooked in any way, no?
To use your analogy of falling in love, the first 30 pages are like the first date. They can be beautiful, funny, and interesting, but after a while it can turn out that it was just a combination of good lighting, alcohol, and some overheard jokes. If you get on, then it's mostly lust at this stage anyway. It takes a lot more time together to know whether you're actually in love.
And if you don't click, maybe there's no point in meeting up again. But you have to question whether it's you or them. What are you looking for in a partner? Someone deep and meaningful with whom you can spend a lifetime, or a superficial one-night stand that you forget after a few days.
True, great analogy. But answering your question, I prefer the first of course. But you have a greater probability of finding your special someone if there's some initial chemistry, right? Again, the first date isn't everything. But first impressions matter a lot for what comes next.
To stretch this analogy beyond breaking point, of course you want some initial chemistry, but you need to ask what you're bringing to this relationship / reading.
Imagine you're friends hook you up on a blind date with someone described as "charismatic, supermodel looks, professorial brains". And you turn up, thinking "OK, Blind Date you have 30 minutes to impress me, or I'm outta here." That's what it's like picking up Tolstoy or Hugo and saying "if I'm not hooked after 30 pages, I'm just going to quit reading".
You need to bring something to the reading. Just as you expect Tolstoy to be interesting, so he expects you to be rather knowledgable about 19th Century European history, Christian philosophy, farming practices amongst serfs in Tsarist Russia. You can still fall in love with War and Peace without that knowledge (as I did), but it will take more effort from you and thus might take more than 30 pages.
And Tolstoy expects you to make, and to want to make, the effort to think about what he's writing. Dan Brown expects you to be time-pressed or naive - either unable or unwilling to challenge even his most basic assertions about history. So he writes for his audience, as Tolstoy writes for his. Tolstoy's motivations were closer to evangelism and pushing a political agenda. Dan Brown's are more about becoming rich.
And if all you are thinking while reading the book is "what am I getting from this?" then you're never going to enjoy it as you otherwise might. I read Crime and Punishment because I picked up quickly as I left the house for the airport. Stuck on a plane with nothing else to do, I slogged through the opening section, trying to cope with weird names and an alien culture. But that book, caused me to get into lots of other Russian literature, become Christian, and ultimately inspired some of the conversations that lead me to marrying my wife. I doubt anyone can say that about a Stig Larsson or James Patterson pageturner.
Ok, it's a very good argument. Of course we as readers also have to add something, and our background is important; the more we open our minds I believe the better our criteria of interestingness will be. Today I read stuff 3 years ago I would have no patience to read, it's also an exercise in which you evolve. But you're using an example of a classic while I tried to focus on online articles and other contemporary books, in an era where there's always another stimulum. I say in response to this we must make choices, and "what am I getting from this?" is the way I found to help filter all this information. I'm glad it's not a fixed set of rules, because as your story exemplifies exceptions make much better stories.
Still regarding choices: Dan Brown sure can hook us in the first 30 pages, but we are the ones who choose if we want to read Dan Brown in the first place. It's yet another layer of discussion to add to this.
PS: I'm glad this subject isn't dead and dry and sparks such discussion. Wasn't expecting this at all.
I hope I am not seeing something in the essay that isn't there, but I don't think the 'hook' must be solely intra-textual a la new criticism/close reading. Part of the appeal of War and Peace or Brothers Karamazov is that it's a great book and an adventure to read. A mind prepared this way for an epic should be hooked on the world-building establishment in the early pages. It's still possible to decide it's not the right time to read a classic since the reader might not have the historical context or a large enough vocabulary or few enough distractions to get through dry but rewarding texts. The difference between classics and informational writing is that the classics should be put aside for later since there is no summary or conclusion that provides the useful takeaways, and the material is timeless.
I do totally agree. The characters are some of the most beautiful ever written, and I spent days and days in a hammock unable to tear myself away from it.
But if I judged the book after just 30 pages, I probably would have said that it was dry and boring with too many characters, and too little happening.
No no, not at all. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Sometimes I get frustrated, when f.e. I want to get concepts of a new programming language, and learn it fast. I can't understand that f.e. it's so hard to find a good book/guide in under 100 pages. But ok, that's for the technical books.
So, no sarcasm, I agree with you about the first 30 pages :)
Most introductory programming books lay down the basic principles of programming, describe the specific language the particular book covers, and give you enough of a sense of how you can apply the knowledge to real-world applications that you should be able to decide within 100 pages whether it's for you.
First 30 pages seems a bit too constricted depending on the book size. I like to flip through the whole book while randomly reading a few pages here and there to get a "feel" for it.
Yeah I had a great input about skipping that number and focusing on, say, 30% of the total book. 30 pages in a 1000 pages book is nothing. I also find that process of skimming the following pages to get a feel of it quite effective. That's how I "went through" Tim Ferriss's "4-hour workweek", which quite frankly is not a book for me. Not sure if there are fans here, no harm intended.
42 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 55.6 ms ] threadI always found this about the single most obvious faux-pas of Sherlock Holmes – if you give your brain enough time to properly organise the data, it does have (nearly) infinite storage. Choosing carefully what to read and what to ignore only leads to less information, in turn making it more difficult to build links between different ‘information islands’ and hence retaining said information more easily.
> Basically, if I don’t instantly fall in love with an article/book/blog, I stop reading and move on.
I don’t know the definition of ‘fall in love’ here, but this sounds rather dangerous as well, as it makes it more difficult to learn actually new things and supports living in one’s own little bubble of information.
> Getting informed is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And life’s too short for bad information.
But how to decide whether a given datum is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ information before consuming said datum and linking it up with the rest of your memory? Maybe it looks utterly senseless at the time you first read it, but it might well be missing piece linking two large and so far separate areas together.
Yeah, "fall in love" isn't that concrete, I know. But again, it works for me if I manage to rotate the types of content I consume.
About the last topic, I give you that. But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.
Anyway thanks for taking to time to deconstruct some of the ideas I wrote. I think this topic has too few people writing and thinking about it.
Thanks – the first point is the important one, the latter ideally should be a no-brainer. :)[0]
> But I'll choose reading a good article to watching trash TV or gossip news any time of the day.
Of course, the heuristics that icebraining mentioned come into play here, in a validity to the extent that it is generally safe to assume little to no information on trash TV.
However, heuristics are still heuristics and there are – in my experience – always sufficiently many borderline cases where heuristics will fail and the love-it-or-leave-it attitude makes you stick to one particular newspaper[1], leading you to become uninformed about the arguments of the ‘other side’.
[0] If someone could make a rule please about the relative position of emoticons and punctuation…
[1] Granted, the internet alleviated that issue somewhat, but just the choosing of news Google delivers to you based on your past reading might act somewhat like that, recreating the bubble that was formerly built by newspapers.
About emoticons and punctuation, I deal with that on a daily basis too. Ugh.
But can you give me an example of the opposite? Say, an article or book which did not grab you at first but you found quite interesting. (being the keyword "interesting", a subjective concept to each and everyone of us, of course - myself included)
Faust II, though you might not want to learn German just to read it – written 20 years after Faust I, with the knowledge accumulated during the lifetime of one of the world’s greatest authors poured into it; while definitely not attention-grabbing in any way and taking some time to get into, the hours I spent reading it were certainly one of the best spent hours so far.
That applies to any decision; you rarely or never have complete information. The solution is to apply heuristics to make a preliminary judgment. For example, by coming to HN instead of any other source of articles you're implicitly deciding that being linked from here means there's a greater probability of the article being good (for any definition of good you prefer).
Actually, I spent most of the time I spent here on /newest, where this is guaranteed to a smaller degree[0], offering a relatively diverse random subset of whatever someone wrote on the internet.
[0] Maybe apart from ‘X married Y but held hands with Z!!!!’.
We're all heavily filtering what we consume, it's effectively impossible to do otherwise.
source: I distinctly recalled using this as an argument against my dad when he told me to focus :P
On the face of it yes, on the other hand, there's a ton of crap out there, and the fact that someone wrote a book about something is on it's own a poor indicator for wether it's going to teach you something meaningful. Reading some of it seems to be a better indicator.
Also, abandoning a book doesn't mean abandoning the subject. Sometimes you need a different author and angle and sometimes a more basic primer on the subject before tackling the main work.
By this definition, you could end up filling your life with airport thrillers. War and Peace has barely introduced a character by page 30, let alone got you hooked.
By requiring the author to do all the work, you're merely consuming culture. Becoming a culture-producer requires you to invest yourself in it, to think about it and respond to it. You cannot do that based on the first 30 pages alone. If you do, Dan Brown is probably the best author you'll ever read.
And if you don't click, maybe there's no point in meeting up again. But you have to question whether it's you or them. What are you looking for in a partner? Someone deep and meaningful with whom you can spend a lifetime, or a superficial one-night stand that you forget after a few days.
Imagine you're friends hook you up on a blind date with someone described as "charismatic, supermodel looks, professorial brains". And you turn up, thinking "OK, Blind Date you have 30 minutes to impress me, or I'm outta here." That's what it's like picking up Tolstoy or Hugo and saying "if I'm not hooked after 30 pages, I'm just going to quit reading".
You need to bring something to the reading. Just as you expect Tolstoy to be interesting, so he expects you to be rather knowledgable about 19th Century European history, Christian philosophy, farming practices amongst serfs in Tsarist Russia. You can still fall in love with War and Peace without that knowledge (as I did), but it will take more effort from you and thus might take more than 30 pages.
And Tolstoy expects you to make, and to want to make, the effort to think about what he's writing. Dan Brown expects you to be time-pressed or naive - either unable or unwilling to challenge even his most basic assertions about history. So he writes for his audience, as Tolstoy writes for his. Tolstoy's motivations were closer to evangelism and pushing a political agenda. Dan Brown's are more about becoming rich.
And if all you are thinking while reading the book is "what am I getting from this?" then you're never going to enjoy it as you otherwise might. I read Crime and Punishment because I picked up quickly as I left the house for the airport. Stuck on a plane with nothing else to do, I slogged through the opening section, trying to cope with weird names and an alien culture. But that book, caused me to get into lots of other Russian literature, become Christian, and ultimately inspired some of the conversations that lead me to marrying my wife. I doubt anyone can say that about a Stig Larsson or James Patterson pageturner.
Still regarding choices: Dan Brown sure can hook us in the first 30 pages, but we are the ones who choose if we want to read Dan Brown in the first place. It's yet another layer of discussion to add to this.
PS: I'm glad this subject isn't dead and dry and sparks such discussion. Wasn't expecting this at all.
But if I judged the book after just 30 pages, I probably would have said that it was dry and boring with too many characters, and too little happening.
So, no sarcasm, I agree with you about the first 30 pages :)
And, in five-page book form! https://leanpub.com/learn-python
I can't help but liking an essay that starts like that.