I hope a browser add-on comes along that just replaces all these blog posts with "Just use ChatGPT, lol".
What do you mean by efficiency here...just getting an utterly shallow understanding of some random topic, trusting that someone else, be that human or GPT, has understood it?
Part of the benefit of the slowness of reading is that it gives you time to actually mull over the topic, so you can build it into your own mental framework. The repetition, with slightly different wording, helps anchor the idea in your mind and provides spaced repetition to help you remember.
Other people's summaries are poor because _they don't have your experiences_, so the things that they found relevant might mean nothing to you, and the things they find shallow and skipped might be exactly what you need. Even if the highlight is useful, without the context, it's hard to actually make sure it sticks in your brain in order for it to be functional.
Lists might feel useful because the information is condensed...but how much of it do you _actually_ remember? Efficiency is being able to _use_ the information. Just getting through the material may be _fast_, but that's (in my view) antithetical to efficiency--it leads to shallow understanding and likely poor memory.
We all like to think 'I just need the 1 line summary'...in reality we're not special. You need to put the effort in.
This might be true if you use sparknotes as a 100% substitute for reading, but I disagree if you're using it as a tool to better optimize how you read. One of the biggest parts of learning is just knowing where you need to go to get the information. The summary won't tell you everything of value within a book, but it should be sufficient to guess what sort of value is in the book, and specific chapters within. For example if you can figure out that 25 out of 30 chapters of a book either are either rehashing things you already know or are irrelevant to what you are trying to learn, then you can focus your limited time on the remainder where you have better odds of finding what you are looking for. Of course you can kind of do this just by looking at a table of contents, but sometimes it can be quite difficult to determine from the title alone what a chapter will contain and the level at which it will be discussed. Further, it's great when you're going back to something you've already read to know where to look for some specific piece of information because the goal is not to memorize data but to understand broader concepts.
A summary also serves well as a 20,000ft overview of a topic that gives you the breadth before you dive into the depths of the parts that are more useful. You can pick up context that might be locally helpful but not really something you want to spend a great deal of time on, you can have some idea of what you are going to learn from what you do focus on, and you can perform a sanity check on what you believe you already understand (ie if the summary doesn't make sense, you probably don't know it as well as you might have thought).
Of course the only way to guarantee you don't miss anything at all is to read through everything 100%, but generally what you are looking for is not going to be hidden in a throwaway line in an otherwise unrelated section. Very often the gist is all that really matters.
That's the thing about apps like Blinkist - if the book can be condensed to fifteen minutes, it's not worth reading. If it can't, then I want to read (or listen to) the whole thing, not a summary.
I'll be the first to agree that a lot of books in topics like business strategy are too long. But IMO the ideal length is probably more like 100 pages than a magazine article much less a 1,000 word blog post or a listicle. Context, examples, background, etc. all add to a basic idea in a way that makes it easier to remember and understand.
I think it’s similar to learning most things in life. People can tell you to slip punches in Boxing a thousand times but just getting punched with a jab over and over will actually make you learn the Truth.
Or reading 50 books (with whatever technique you choose) on a topic like programming versus actually opening a IDE and building something.
Chuckling to myself thinking about someone obsessively optimizing the speed at which they read books with titles like "In It To Win It!", "The Pro Inside You!", "You can do ANYTHING!" "10 Chapters to SUPERCHARGE Your Career."
Real nonfiction books are better not to skim. Pick better books.
Exactly! It's a fun natural development -those US breathless sales-based self-improvement books like 4-Hour Workweek, most books that Cal Newport publishes, are often blog-post level ideas inflated into a book for sales. It's only natural that people are finding ways to automatically trim the fat off to go back to the blog-level length.
"good" non-fiction like Thinking, Fast and Slow, The Selfish Gene, Structure of Scientific Revolutions etc. are books that are not easy, or even worthwhile to summarise that way. You'd lose too much information.
In 5th grade, way back in the 80s, my school had a mini-course in skimming that we took for a few weeks. They taught various techniques and the tests were pretty cool: here's 30 pages of text, you have 10 minutes to skim, and now here's a multiple-choice test about the material. Super practical skill and I see nothing like it in my own kids' curriculum. The big lesson was there being more than one way to consume text via reading.
I remember there being several drills on "scanning," which they defined as looking for a word or phrase on a page. I got very quick at that with practice, and those drills have helped me be able to flip back and forth in books. I can quickly scan a page to find and refer to a paragraph I sort of recall but don't really remember. And interestingly, I find it extremely difficult to do the same in eBooks. e.g., my brain is saying, "Go find the short paragraph near the top of the right page, early in the book, that has a bunch of acronyms in it"... and it's impossible to do in an ebook.
I tried Blinkist which seems relevant to the strategy proposed. I listened to summaries of a couple of books I had in fact read and found the summaries superficial and probably focused as much on what people said the book said as what it actually said. I imagine Chatgpt will do the same right now due to available sources of information.
High level reading comprehension is a valuable and extremely rare skill. It's a skill many more people believe they have than actually do. I'd bet that what develops that skill is careful, sustained reading and reflection. I'd also bet that what allows it to atrophy is trying to avoid careful, sustained reading and reflection.
This is what I've started doing in the past couple years to read nonfiction. It's really worked for me.
1. Keep a simple text file of your top books to read. Line number indicates priority: line 1 is the #1 book on the list, 2 is #2, etc.
2. Rearrange the list, or add new books as you learn about them in the appropriate place, over time.
3. Go to your library every few weeks and check out #1 and #2. Delete books you've finished. Let the limited duration of borrowing push you to keep reading.
*you should ideally have a very complete library near you, probably with branches you can also request books from, for this to work
What's the difference between this methodology and others already proposed out there other than this incorporates LLM summarization? See, the slowest part of learning is when your brain deeply engrain the concepts into your subconsciousness, and there're few ways to do this other than repetition and practicing. Read 10 best books again and again is way better than skim-read them
One of the reasons I have trouble consuming non-fiction is the absurd amount of repetition which I can only presume is used to boost the word count. I understand that repetition is an important component to getting content to stick in some instances, but it drives me absolutely crazy in non-fiction writing. I get it. Please move on to your next point. Skimming these sorts of books will give me 80% of the content with 20% of the effort. And yeah, you know exactly where I pulled those numbers from.
Publishers need about a 250 page book minimum. That's actually a lot of words and you can end up doing a lot of padding to hit that target for many topics.
I generally have the notion that the repetition is precisely because people skim. You have to repeat your main point multiple times or else skimmers will simply miss it and then blame the author for being hard to understand!
What do you mean by efficiency here...just getting an utterly shallow understanding of some random topic, trusting that someone else, be that human or GPT, has understood it?
Part of the benefit of the slowness of reading is that it gives you time to actually mull over the topic, so you can build it into your own mental framework. The repetition, with slightly different wording, helps anchor the idea in your mind and provides spaced repetition to help you remember.
Other people's summaries are poor because _they don't have your experiences_, so the things that they found relevant might mean nothing to you, and the things they find shallow and skipped might be exactly what you need. Even if the highlight is useful, without the context, it's hard to actually make sure it sticks in your brain in order for it to be functional.
Lists might feel useful because the information is condensed...but how much of it do you _actually_ remember? Efficiency is being able to _use_ the information. Just getting through the material may be _fast_, but that's (in my view) antithetical to efficiency--it leads to shallow understanding and likely poor memory.
We all like to think 'I just need the 1 line summary'...in reality we're not special. You need to put the effort in.