Forming good thoughts from reading

Today, as I was reading and taking notes about my recent favorite book, The Dream Machine, I noticed one thing: Learning through association is not enough.

Okay, before critiquing associative learning, let’s quickly go through several levels of reading books:

• Reading knowledge: You read through the book.
• Highlighting knowledge: You read and highlight.
• Organizing knowledge: You cluster the knowledge or create connections and associations with the knowledge.
• Generating knowledge: You are able to organize the knowledge in your mind using the appropriate framework and export it to the world.

When I was using the note-taking app through association, I realized everything was still quite messy. I copied and pasted some highlights from the book, trying to make it look connected and pretty, but spent lots of time and felt like it was a boring chore. Though I did do some part of generating (e.g., rewriting the highlights), the information is still scattered in my mind. I know the knowledge but in an unmemorable and unstructured way.

On the contrary, when I was writing Chip Way Analysis, I not only organized the entire knowledge myself through drawing and handwriting, but I also rewrote my knowledge at the country, company, and individual levels. Everything is not only in place; I also add a layer of my interpretation that wasn’t previously presented in the book.

I realize that maybe the way I’m thinking about learning in a book has been all wrong. I have also wanted to absorb as much information as I could and create a massive association map, fearing the loss of any piece of interesting highlights. That’s why everything feels like a miso soup in my mind. I should actually make the knowledge generation part the main focus while keeping other things light and easy.

Only association

For instance, my current notes about the Mind-Body Problem are all related to each other with book notes as supporting evidence. Yet, they are all interconnected without a structure.

Knowledge generation

If you ask me to regenerate the knowledge through writing (I’m thinking about this on the fly), I will give you an idea, such as:

In the Mind-Body Problem, humans have explored “what is the mind.” For instance, the state of an apple can only be changed through external forces like gravity, but humans can take initiative through desire, purpose, emotions, and expectation. Does it mean that we have a mind/soul/consciousness? People who say the mind exists argue that humans can introspect. However, believers in only the “body” will argue that it is because humans can receive feedback from the environment and take corresponding action based on it, so the mind doesn’t need to exist.

Writing up to this point, you will probably notice lots of logical flaws and extended questions exist. For instance, what about animals? Or if the mind doesn’t need to exist and humans are just a complex algorithm created through feedback, does it mean we can create AI like humans too?

This is where my external knowledge gets refined internally. Beyond internalizing, many valuable thoughts also get generated through critiquing my own writing and ideations from my old knowledge. And this is where the good thoughts come from.

If I’m a copy-and-paste information machine, I’m just another GPT (In fact, GPT can do much better than I do). But pushing the information into my knowledge repertoire requires fitting, arguing, and restructuring the shape of knowledge. Yes, there will be information loss, but remembering as much as we can is unnecessary for this century. The ability of creativity and critical thinking is much more important. And this process will not be activated merely through absorbing knowledge but by reshaping it, like we are playing with clay.

Hence, my next idea for reading is not to make beautiful notes. I will highlight what’s useful but begin with writing a post about it. The highlights will only serve as supportive evidence for my thesis. I don’t know what the thesis will come out of it, but I’m gonna give it a try!

Nowadays, writing for me has been a good thought-generation practice. Whenever I come up with a vague idea, I try to write it out, extend, debate, and critique it. As you might observe, some of my writing has very weak arguments, but I notice that as I iterate, they compound and become some really good thoughts in my mind.