Notes
One day, it occurred to me that I forget 90% of everything I read, so I started taking reading notes in an attempt to claw back some of that information from the abyss. The note taking didn't last very long, as you can tell by the small number of links below. For starters, taking notes didn't noticeably improve my retention. What's worse, I never liked taking notes, so the note taking was a negative feedback that turned reading into a chore. Consequently, I would put off reading because I didn't feel like taking notes. So I stopped taking notes.
Thankfully, someone smarter than me was apparently worrying about the same thing at around the same time and posted an essay titled "How You Know" just a few months after I stopped taking notes1. In the essay, Graham argues that reading is still worthwhile even if we can't remember much of what we read because reading alters our mental model of the world. Summarized as a pithy hacker's analogy: "Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why."
Good persuasive writing has a way of unwrapping ideas and presenting them to you as if they were your own, so that the conclusions seem obvious in hindsight. As if the ideas were already there in your head and just needed crystallizing2. I still wish I remembered more of what I read, but reading Graham's essay helped me feel a little better about the situation3 (even if I don't remember most of the essay).
Disclaimer
These notes are not expected to be useful to anyone; not even to myself, apparently, since I never refer back to them. I leave them up partially out of a horder's hesitation to throw away something that's still "perfectly good" and partially out fear of breaking some imaginary person's link, however unlikely.
- Lisp In Small Pieces
- Notes on the book Lisp In Small Pieces, by Christian Queinnec.
- Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques
- Notes on the paper Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques, by Paul R. Wilson.
- Hints on Programming Language Design
- Notes on the paper Hints on Programming Language Design, by C.A.R. Hoare.
- Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part 1
- Notes on the paper Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part 1, by John McCarthy.
Footnotes:
I don't think I actually read "How You Know" until a year or more after I stopped taking notes. I only realized in the course of typing this up that the dates were so close. According to the metadata in my notes files, the last notes were taken in September 2014 and "How You Know" gives December 2014 as its publication date.
Of course, I don't believe that I already know everything, only that persuasive writing makes it feel that way. Or maybe I'm inverting cause and effect here, and this is just an instance of confirmation bias. Maybe the truth is that "because I believed the conclusions, the writing felt persuasive," rather than, "because the writing was persuasive, it felt like I already knew the conclusions to be true, although I could not have articulated them so well."
Partially because the conclusions drawn in the essay are comforting, but also partially because, even if I forget most of what I read, at least now I know I'm in good company.