eigen's Shortform

eigen

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Last week I had a rather random thought come immediately at my mind. It was about the things I use and frequent daily. It was something like this:

“What has reddit.com provided you this week?”

I could not find a single thing that benefited me from looking at Reddit every day, I could not take a single insight from all the news and from the discussion that I read. Of course, what came naturally afterwards was to prohibit all interaction with Reddit.

Instead of visiting Reddit I shifted my focus and started reading books that I had currently on hold, and without needing to say, I have much more to say about these books than to lurking the web aimlessly.

I want to hold on a little bit on using it this question for other things (like for lesswrong.com) but I know that regardless I will do it.

“So what has x provided you this week?”

2Viliam7y

I don't read Reddit, but I have a similar experience with Hacker News. While I am reading it, it seems interesting, but when I afterwards try to remember anything useful, I can't. My explanation is that I spend my time reading, but I don't spend my time processing what I have just read, because I am immediately moving to the next topic. Passivity is bad for remembering. (Compare with how spaced repetition learning software requires you to guess the correct answer, before telling you. Or how the mere act of note-taking improves remembering, even if you don't read your notes afterwards.) But again, reading without actively working with the topic seems to be the default approach when reading sites such as Reddit that throw a lot of content at you. With active engagement, my procrastination sessions wouldn't take an hour or two, but the entire day. Seems like the rule is that you can only meaningfully process a limited amount of topics during a day. Reading a book seems like about the right amount. Also, the things in the book are related to each other, it is not a random mix of unrelated facts. (Related things are easier to remember than unrelated ones. Even if you make up a silly relation between them; a few mnemonic techniques are based on that.)

6eigen7y

You are very on point with passivity being bad for remembering, completely agree. [...] I think I'm starting to disagree with this. (weird phrasing but I'll explain). For the longest time I used to think that I had at most only a few hours to learn/study in a day. But what happened was that I pretty much overloaded my working memory with a particular subject and then tried to keep building on that, it reached a point where I just could not keep up (maybe four hours straight on a subject); when I started changing subjects (and using much more of Anki which plays the biggest role here) I found out that I could keep going on learning and dedicate another four hours to another subject, while knowing that Anki takes care that I don't forget anything of both subjects. I think, more or less, the same idea applies here, as you remark: * Twitter: One tweet, a few comments and then I drop it all from my memory. Go on to the next tweet. * Reddit: One post, few comments and to the next post. What I'm trying to say is that you can read a book, drop it and then go on to the next and the same applies for learning. You don't have to read just one book, you don't have to study only one subject in a day.

I agree, reading a book... and then reading a book on a different topic when you already had too much of the former... seems like a good approach.

Actually, the school seems to be designed this way, of course only if you assume that 45 minutes is the optimal time to spend with one subject. (Which is probably wrong, and also depends on age, subject, etc. But the idea of "focus on X for nontrivial time, then focus on Y" is there.)

eigen's Shortform

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eigen's Shortform

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