Tag: reading

I recently tried to suggest a friend read Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem, and it was fascinating how much of a struggle it was to come up with a convincing argument to read such an extraordinary book. The best reason I could come up with: “It has such cool world-building, and the characters are so dramatically different than the ones in most western fiction novels… you have to read it, man.” It was an endorsement that pales in comparison to the incredible experience of reading the book. I wondered why it’s so easy to talk about and recommend non-fiction books while it’s impossible to capture the essence of good fiction.

Fiction is fundamentally irreducible. Whereas non-fiction is easy to summarize into a few key points, the narrative structure of fiction makes that impossible. If you attempt to summarize fiction, the best you can do is water it down into some platitude that pales in comparison to the underlying novel. Why is that? Perhaps it is because, at its core, all fiction follows an archetypical story — the foundational pattern of all stories are the same. As Paulo Coelho remarked: “Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”

After reading through Andy Matuschak’s amazing Evergreen note system and Sohren Ahren’s excellent book How to Take Smart Notes (one of the only books on note-taking that’s actually worth reading), I’ve spent a good amount of time overhauling my knowledge creation and synthesis process. Matuschak’s work forced me to think critically about how note-taking fits with the learning process. At the end of the day, augmenting learning is what really matters, and note-taking need to serve that purpose.

I’ve included a snippet below from my own Evergreen notes, which means they’re also probably formatted in a foreign fashion to most readers. The biggest change is the double brackets surrounding clauses or sentences. For those of you familiar with different Markdown syntax, these brackets denote other text files with relevant ideas. Therefore, this note-taking process replicates the real-life learning process: explicitly connecting disparate pieces of information with other ideas. I can’t possibly do this justice by describing it, so please visit Andy Matuschak’s Evergreen notes to explore his implementation.

Here we go:

What is the point of note-taking? It should be to record down new facts that you encounter, such that you can integrate the insight into your existing understanding of the world. Most people are very good at the first part — recording the facts — but then neglect to explicate how each new fragment of knowledge fits into their extant body of knowledge ([[The Feynman Method forces you to explain to understand]]).

Learning is the process of connecting and relating. If your notes don’t explicitly promote that process, what is the point of taking these notes? It just gives you a false illusion of knowledge.

Therefore, effective note-taking should help augment your thinking process. Notes are highly effective for retention of information (“The faintest ink is better than the sharpest mind”), but you need to put in the time and effort to connect everything — you need to do the actual thinking. [[Intelligence is about honesty and the will to think as much as it is about raw intellect]].

Good notes allow you to identify existing connections between your thoughts, and serve to generate more ideas off of these connections — [[The explicit notetaking process mirrors how we want to actually learn]]. We know that knowledge is constructed in an iterative and cumulative way rather than absorbed fully-formed, so good notes should help facilitate this process.