Brain Dump #2

Second brain dump of ideas to be integrated later.

• It helps to see the structure of the text. For example, if you can identify "bridge paragraphs" that tie idea A with idea B, you can read those lightly or skip over them.

Confirmation Bias / Intellectual Turing Test

From How to Take Smart Notes:

The classic role model would be Charles Darwin. He forced himself to write down (and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories. “I had [...] during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.” (Darwin 1958, 123)

Luhmann's long-term memory

For figuring out what is conceptually important in a text:

[Theoretical texts] do not require just short-term memory but also long-term memory in order to be able to distinguish between what is essential and what is not essential and what is new from what is merely repeated. But one cannot remember everything. This would simply be learning by heart. In other words, one must read very selectively and must be able to extract extensively networked references. One must be able to understand recursions. But how can one learn these skills, if no instructions can be given; or perhaps only about things that are unusual like “recursion” in the previous sentences as opposed to “must”?

It's not totally clear to me what Luhmann means here by networked references. What I think he's saying is that it's impossible to remember everything rote. So, when you read, say, a reference to "Kant's categorical imperative" you might not be able to exactly remember what it is, but you should be able to remember who Kant is (a philosopher) what the categorical imperative generally is (using synthetic a priori to get to the Golden Rule) and then know where to look to find the answer.

This would also let you skip over parts that are already 'well-networked' and know when, say, something is important (how?) to spend an extra time investment to 'connect' something to your own network of ideas.