One of my most significant problems is that I do not like to read, although it is generally believed that all “smart” people must adore it. And accordingly to overcome my dislike of reading, the book itself has to be very interesting for me, and such are rare and difficult to find them for me (I was thinking that it would be nice to have some kind of recommendation service on your previous evaluations, which there are for movies, but for books I do not know such).
And accordingly, another problem follows from this. I didn’t read a collection of science fiction and fantasy books as a kid, I didn’t read Escher Bach’s Gödel, Step into the Future, Impact: Science and Practice, Science and Sanity, Probability Theory: the Logic of Science, Feynman Lectures in Physics, and so on. And I feel like I’m missing out on much of the obvious stuff for “our cluster people” because of this.
That is, the sequences were written to point out some non-obvious things that weren’t already said by someone else and known to everyone. And I don’t know if there’s a list somewhere of such most significant books that predate the sequences, so that a person from outside this cluster would at least know which direction to look, or else it’s hard to identify such things that are obvious background facts to some people, but unknown to others altogether.
In a broader sense, you could say that I was making the mistake of looking too little at other people’s experiences. I didn’t realize that no one person is capable of inventing all the wisdom of a tribe on their own. And this manifested itself everywhere, in every field, in programming, in music, in writing books, in creating languages, in everything.
Probably one is related to the other, I didn’t read a bunch of books, so I didn’t see how much higher than my own intelligence other people’s knowledge could be. So I intuitively, without realizing it, proceeded as if they were equal, as if I were competing with a single other person, without even considering the obvious fact that there were simply many more other people, let alone what could be achieved by investing more time, summing up the experience of many generations, using collaborative work, practical experiments and computer calculations.
Actually, I didn’t quite put it that way, though. Yes, I don’t adore reading, but let’s say I don’t have any problem with reading blog posts (e.g. here on Lezvrong) or even just Wikipedia pages, here I rather have the opposite problem, opening one article and following the interested hypertext links I can sit down and read for hours.
So it’s probably more accurate to say that I have a “clip thinking” problem, however… I have no problem watching hours of lectures, reading 4 hour podcast transcripts, or listening to hours of audiobooks.
So it’s probably “reading books” that’s the problem. Perhaps I associate them with school, with the most boring reading of history textbooks when my brain literally stops perceiving, or with literature classes, including assigned readings for the summer, where of all the years of school I can remember exactly one work that seemed interesting to me. I’m not sure what the big deal is.
One of my most significant problems is that I do not like to read, although it is generally believed that all “smart” people must adore it. And accordingly to overcome my dislike of reading, the book itself has to be very interesting for me, and such are rare and difficult to find them for me (I was thinking that it would be nice to have some kind of recommendation service on your previous evaluations, which there are for movies, but for books I do not know such).
And accordingly, another problem follows from this. I didn’t read a collection of science fiction and fantasy books as a kid, I didn’t read Escher Bach’s Gödel, Step into the Future, Impact: Science and Practice, Science and Sanity, Probability Theory: the Logic of Science, Feynman Lectures in Physics, and so on. And I feel like I’m missing out on much of the obvious stuff for “our cluster people” because of this.
That is, the sequences were written to point out some non-obvious things that weren’t already said by someone else and known to everyone. And I don’t know if there’s a list somewhere of such most significant books that predate the sequences, so that a person from outside this cluster would at least know which direction to look, or else it’s hard to identify such things that are obvious background facts to some people, but unknown to others altogether.
In a broader sense, you could say that I was making the mistake of looking too little at other people’s experiences. I didn’t realize that no one person is capable of inventing all the wisdom of a tribe on their own. And this manifested itself everywhere, in every field, in programming, in music, in writing books, in creating languages, in everything.
Probably one is related to the other, I didn’t read a bunch of books, so I didn’t see how much higher than my own intelligence other people’s knowledge could be. So I intuitively, without realizing it, proceeded as if they were equal, as if I were competing with a single other person, without even considering the obvious fact that there were simply many more other people, let alone what could be achieved by investing more time, summing up the experience of many generations, using collaborative work, practical experiments and computer calculations.
Actually, I didn’t quite put it that way, though. Yes, I don’t adore reading, but let’s say I don’t have any problem with reading blog posts (e.g. here on Lezvrong) or even just Wikipedia pages, here I rather have the opposite problem, opening one article and following the interested hypertext links I can sit down and read for hours.
So it’s probably more accurate to say that I have a “clip thinking” problem, however… I have no problem watching hours of lectures, reading 4 hour podcast transcripts, or listening to hours of audiobooks.
So it’s probably “reading books” that’s the problem. Perhaps I associate them with school, with the most boring reading of history textbooks when my brain literally stops perceiving, or with literature classes, including assigned readings for the summer, where of all the years of school I can remember exactly one work that seemed interesting to me. I’m not sure what the big deal is.
LibraryThing has a great book recommendation feature.