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aydyn a day ago

Or you dont read the book at all and ask the llm to give you the salient points?

noah_buddy a day ago | parent | next [-]

Socratic method usually refers to a questioning process, which is what the poster above is getting at in their terminology. Imo

teg4n_ a day ago | parent | prev [-]

And cross your fingers it didn’t make them up?

aydyn a day ago | parent [-]

Yes. If it can get me through 10 books in the same time it takes you to get through 1 I am fine with an extra 1% error rate or whatever.

jdiff a day ago | parent [-]

If I spend an afternoon on CliffNotes, I haven't read a hundred books in a day. This isn't one weird trick to accelerate your reading, it's entirely missing the point. If any book could be summarized in a few points, there would be no point to writing anything more than a BuzzFeed listicle.

aydyn a day ago | parent [-]

Lots of books CAN be summarized in a few points.

komali2 a day ago | parent [-]

Yes, that's true, but bullet point ideology isn't very useful imo.

For example you can easily sum up "How to Win Friends and Influence People" into a few short recommendations. "Empathize with people, listen closely to people, let them do most of the talking, be quick to be upfront and honest with your faults." But it gets tenuous and some of the exact meaning is lost, and the bullet points aren't very convincing on their own of the effectiveness of the recommended methods.

The book fleshes out the advice with clarifications as well as stories from Carnegie's life of times he used the techniques and their results.

I think humans are good at remembering stories. For example I always remember the story about him letting his dog off the leash in a dog park and how he leveraged his technique for getting off the hook when a cop confronted him about it. I think I remember that better than the single bullet point advice of "readily and quickly admit when you're wrong." In fact I think the end of each chapter succinctly states the exact tip and I'm sure I'm misstating it here.

I could use anki to memorize a summary but I don't think I'd be able to as effectively incorporate the techniques into my behavior without the working examples, stories, and evidence he provides.

And that's just non fiction. I can't fathom the point of summarizing a fiction book, whose entire enjoyment comes from the reading of it.

aydyn 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I think that perspective is mostly just romanticization of reading, which is fine; if you have a book reading fetish nobody is stopping you from reading books.

But in terms of efficiently grokking information I don't think it holds up.

Cliff notes is not the same as ChatGPT. Using cliff notes, you only have a fixed bullet point summarization. But with ChatGPT, if a bullet point is not sticking, you can ask ChatGPT to expound on it. Expound on the stories from Carnegie's life and how that lead him to the techniques he talks about. That mode of learning, having someone to bounce discussion back and forth is really efficient for me.