You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now.

Since I realized this, I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

I heard those quote for the first time about 4 years ago. I had often been a bit disappointed with myself for not taking more notes while reading, or reviewing what I read in a way where I could be one of those people to bring up quotes and concepts, citing back to the original source, with freakish accuracy. This quote made me feel better about simply reading, getting whatever I get out of it, and trusting that I’ve gained some perspective, even if I can’t cite all the sources that built my perspective on a topic.

I actually realized recently that this is probably the underlying phenomenon behind "how is my phone listening to my conversations to show me ads/articles?"

The other day I was thinking about LLM aggregation and in my internal dialogue used the example of "aliens built the pyramids" as a fringe theory that would be picked up on if tuning for other associated fringe positions by LLMs at places like Gab.

Later in the day I saw in my news feed an article on "how were the pyramids built?" (One of my interests is Egyptian and LBA Mediterranean archeology, so on topic.)

At first I thought "how the heck did it read my mind?"

But then as I thought about it more I remembered that usually my go to example of a fringe position is flat earth. So why was I suddenly using pyramids as the example in my internal dialogue.

What must have happened was that I initially saw the article headline in my feed in passing and didn't consciously register it, but when I was reaching for a fringe position example had been primed for that, and then only after having consciously been reflecting on the topic actually noticed the article in my feed.

Which IMO is a much more alarming explanation for the phenomenon - that my thinking was being written to a degree by my feed - than that my phone was somehow listening in on things or reading my mind.

It reminds me of a graffiti artist in NYC who used to write graffiti about how in reading it he had effectively graffitied your mind.

A corollary of this idea that also the bad stuff that you read leaves a trace, and not necessarily a good trace. To continue the food metaphor: like junk food there is junk reading and while it may satisfy some need it is all informational empty calories and transfats. Which brings up a subject I pondered many times: to go on an information diet. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.

I've always believed that two things will broaden your horizon - travel and reading.

If you don't have the means or the time to travel then your next best option is reading.

I love reading as much as anyone, and probably finish on average, 100 books a year, but - I’ve gradually become skeptical of the idea that books are an ideal format for acquiring and retaining knowledge. I’ve written a few little comments about this in the past [1] but I’ve been meaning to explore the idea further. I originally began thinking this when I realized I could only remember a handful of details from books I had spent hours reading.

The short version is this: there’s nothing inherent about the format of a book that makes it ideal for learning. It is mostly a historical consequence of the fact that scratching symbols onto stone or paper, then replicating that paper/stone is easier to develop than recording and playing back audio or video. Human beings spent thousands of years using languages that were purely spoken ones, and writing is a fairly recent thing historically speaking.

If somehow it became possible to record and play back spoken language thousands of years ago, writing might have never become a widespread thing at all. Even today, speech is how the vast majority of the world uses language. Let’s not forget how influential the book form has been on thought, from the Bible to the Quran, etc.

And so if you brush away the mystique and legacy of books and think about what an ideal learning format would be, I think it would be quite different from a book. Probably it would incorporate audiovisuals, spaced repetition, and some form of storytelling.

All of this is about reading for information, not for pleasure. But I don’t primarily read fiction for information in the first place.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20940944, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319599, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38095507, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39521964

What about people that don’t read at all? Are they nothing?

One form this takes is that, even when you forget the details, you retain the general shape of the subject matter. You might not remember all the details about XYZ, but now at least you know XYZ exists: your internal map of the world is expanded and corrected, even if parts are a bit fuzzy.

This is why blocking and muting (especially "mute words") are essential on social media. You have to be intentional about the diet of language you feed your brain, just as you have to be intentional about the diet of food you feed your stomach.

the goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking.

I would apply this to fiction books too. Some people consider reading fiction books a waste of time.

But fiction books too can expand your mind by exploring ideas that may not be possible in non-fiction books or exploring the same ideas but in a way that non-fiction books cannot achieve easily or at all.

Is this actually true? I know the text sounds really nice. Also citing nicely crafted words from famous poeple helps.

I guess roughly, this is right. But there's more to add. I have a brain with a certain configuration. This configuration is partly genetic and partly environmental. The environmental part has been shaped by every sensory input so far, including all the books. However, some books resonate well. They make me think about the topic weeks after finishing them. Other books don't resonate at all. My brain's is not fit for them. It just ja sequence of words (e.g., the books my high school literature teacher made me read).

I guess humans aren't a ANN that treats every training sample equal. Our brain has a mechanism to put more or less weight on sensory input given previous input. Some ideas are utterly confusing and don't stick at all. I think this happens a lot when people of different religions or political camps interact.

I don’t buy it at all. Effective learning[1] is about effortful recall. Things that you just read have a transient learning effect. But the common way of cramming is done through this transient means because it is a simple strategy for unstructured/otherwise busy students and it works until the exam (but not much after).

And you are… maybe in the sense that it always remains in your unconscious. But what use is that? Memory and learning is about being able to pull things out of the subconscious (unconcious?).

Look at any serious craft or activity where people have to learn things. They learn by doing. Doing things as realistically as possible is better. And doing-learning also transfers to talk/read-learning (discussing how to do something). Meanwhile talk/read-learning does not transfer to doing-learning as much.

Frankly our culture overrates book-learning. By a long shot. This might not seem the case because now frequent long-form reading can be regarded as a practically monastic activity, what with all the stupid alternatives we have at our disposal. But book reading and learning hardly ever directly translates to practical learning.

This attitude (of Emerson’s) sounds like Behavioralism. That you’re whatever input you have processed. I find Chomsky’s Nativism and Rationalism to be more compelling. Consider a socialist who reads 500 liberal think tank pieces. He’s more likely to either be as socialist by the end or more (double-down effect).

I have to constantly remind myself of this. Especially in an environment that prioritizes optimizing and maximizing personal productivity, where it seems if you can’t measure (let alone remember) the impact of a book in your life then it wasn’t worth reading.

This for sure is a problem if you have set some goal of reading one book every week. But that goal is borne out of that exact same Optimization Mindset. Most people don’t fret over how many Good Words pass by their eyes in a year.

[1] the book Make it Stick

except when an AI does it they call it "copyright violation"

Is the Internet a great enabler or is it holding the majority of us back?

Does this mean I'll never escape the influence of those decades of corporate email?

Common current computing can greatly ease the effort to "remember" what have read, written, thought, learned, etc.

E.g., to help "remember" I have a general purpose file that I read/write with my favorite text editor and with some surprising statistics:

Date started: September 2nd, 2005

Number of entries: 8412

Number of lines: 60,436

Number of bytes: 4,736,380

Really simple. Works really well.

A little laptop computer handles this file for zero apparent effort.

Of course, a lot more can be done, e.g., something like everyone having a Google just for their own life, but it is shocking how much can be done with just the statistics here.

I realised this some years back, after an advise that if you find reading hard, read faster. Don't spend too much time understanding each word and line. Good advise

This is why I don't read.

Try writing a poem. Mine were so obviously regurgitations of past material consumed that I realized that to output anything original, I had to develop an individuality by starving the creative neurons, so to speak.

Of course, this is only restricted to fields where one would like to produce novel output. You're free to read academic papers, etc; But if you want to write original sci-fi, start by not reading sci-fi.

This is a great way to frame a shift in perspective around what we consume, but just to add some nuance to this: not only should we be thoughtful about the content we consume in a similar way that we are thoughtful about the food we consume, but we should also be self compassionate.

Sometimes we want to eat those Chicken 'n' Waffles, just like sometimes we go on a trashy TV show binge! It's just a small thing that serves as a comforting release, and we shouldn't let the guilt overcome us!

Not really buying it. I mostly liked the same type of books all my life. I read a lot out of my comfort zone and I never particularly enjoyed it, nor do I think they impacted me much. I read what I am, not the other way. Maybe others are more influenceable.

One approach I like is to relax and read the book quickly the first time, don’t take notes or anything. If it’s good, read it again (and again periodically). If not, don’t.

This gives natural spaced repetition on the good stuff, and also you pick up different things in subsequent readings.

That and the constant feeling of deja vu

This is relevant not only in the context of books and blogs, but also for the shorter forms of reading that we do more often like HN or Reddit comments, tweets etc.

One way to think about it is that reading on the internet, no matter how casual, is like scattering seeds on the soil of your mind. Some of these seeds will grow into trees and influence your actions and decisions, whether you're aware of it or not.

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reminds me of an old Arab tale (paraphrased, from memory, translated):

Once upon a time a man wanted to be handed the title of a poet, so he went to the king of poets at his time, and asked him to give him the title of a poet. The king of poets asked the man, "Do you memorize tens of thousands of the best poetry?", the man said "I do not", the king of poems asked of him: "go memorize them then come back to me". The man went to a faraway isolated monastary, spend a couple of years memorizing the poems, then came back to the king of poets shouting in excitement "I've memorized the tens of thousands of poems! Can you hand me the title of a poet now?". The king of poets asked of him "Now forget them".

Only after years again spent in the monastery forgetting the poems, was the man given the title of a poet.

(Side note: this story also kinda remind me of LLMs, and how they kind of "memorize" text initially but the more data is poured in the more they "forget" the exact texts)

This is going to come off as esoteric or metaphysically based. However, that is not my intention. I base the understanding of simple and/or complex ideas/theories on context alone. Meaning, much can be extrapolated if you simply philosophize the workings of a given system rather than detailing how the system is actually deployed/executing.

Example - if all matter we interact with in our world (and manipulate) is essentially compiled in different formations but derived from the very same essence of building blocks. . . then every living organism and inate object is inherently linked together somehow, someway.

The same goes then, for human experience (and thus a reflection of material basis and external fields applied). If a ferromagnetic material (iron) is capable of becoming ferromagnetic permanently and also capable of existing without, then not only is the inherent expectation of matter to transform from one form to another; external experiences applicably experienced result in the same manifestation.

But once again - If you happen to concede the notion that all things in the physical universe are essentially built from the same blocks, then so are the experiences of humans as well and as expected would appear to be connected in some way as well. Meaning, the experience affects the subatomic or quantum levels, thus changing quantum properties resulting in a formal change to the underlying building blocks (genes, DNA copy, etc). That's my take.

To me, this OP is just an example of exposing this on a philosophic level.

This gets to some of the difference between human intelligence and LLM training. The machine remembers everything verbatim (plus a vector representation). Most people have faulty memory but somehow make a deeper encoding of the impact a book or life experience had. Agree there is some analogy between vector encoding vs the mind’s representation — but it’s a loose analogy. LLMs and search etc are useful tools for sure - but definitely don’t have anything like human level deeper (yet faulty) intelligence. Sorry if I’m stating the obvious… cheers

Books, generally speaking, have changed my life for the better. I curate my reading list and only mindfully read what is beneficial to me.

The more I practiced mindful reading, the better I got at many things (from work, finances, to friendship and marriage).

I can attribute this to what seems pretty obvious - apply what you learn or think deeply about it to understand its meaning to you.

I got a hunch that a free will is related to both self-control and self-awareness

Reframing inevitably in the direction of AI, this also expresses the difference between, for instance, pretraining and retrieval in LLMs. People expect large models to memorize the dataset and are frustrated when it doesn't, even more so when it does but only partially and not thoroughly enough to rely on. But pretraining data : large models as books : people, building a world-sense that is refined and augmented through fine-tuning (for people, specialized training) and retrieval (for people Google searches, Stack Overflow, etc).

People complain about the extent to which we anthropomorphize GPT-class models, but I gain just as much from backporting the analogies that work for LLMs to my own experience.

I could never put it words like in the article, but I always thought this was true (not just to books, but to all the inputs). Many times in my life, I have remembered obscure stuff from a random movie or specific parts of a conversation that I had many years back. Similarly with books, I can't recall it completely, but the sense of it is something that easily pops up.

Now I have started taking advantage of this using Anki. Whenever I read something having a particularly interesting or thought-provoking idea, I find a way to create flashcard(s) out of it. Now I am able to recall these things more often and many times they have guided me in my life or helping out friends.

This goes both ways: the understanding of what you read is constructed from the worldview you contextualize it with.

This is how we are able to use ambiguous language, also known as "Context-Sensitive Grammar". We provide our own backstory (context) that provides a Just-In-Time unambiguous definition of each ambiguous word or phrase.

There is a lot of excitement around LLMs, because they are capable of doing something with Context-Sensitive Grammar. Unfortunately, that something is not equivalent to the arbitrary disambiguation that we do using context. The core feature of an LLM (with respect to natural language processing) is that it never defines anything. Instead, an LLM blindly provides whatever text it deems "most likely to happen next", all without ever associating any text to any meaning. We wrap this process in "training", which hopefully guides common interactions in the direction we want, but that is never a guarantee.

I often wonder how much free will I have in my political opinions.

Are they simply a time weighted average of the media viewpoints I consume?

Yes. So much this.

Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams goes into this subject and describes how one processes all experiences during sleep through dreams.

Everything gets connected and stored away. Repeated every night. The knowledge you have gets connected with the new information you receive. The more knowledge you have the more valuable new information gets. At some point there is simply very little new information about a topic and the topic bores you.

I like to think of this like fine-tuning LLMs. When you fine-tune an LLM it doesn't pick up and memorise all of the training data. Rather it adjusts its weights/perspectives based on the content trained on/read.

the emerson quote just hits so hard and true

This reminds me of finetuning LLMs vs using RAG:

In RAG you "know" what the model knows and it's easy for it to give sources - you literally give it to the model in the prompt.

In finetuning, the model learns something, but it might not be able to reproduce it perfectly later on. But it's models have been changed.

This is really an interesting article as well the blog itself, I admire it!

One interesting finding that I never seen in any blog is the notes part (https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/) where the author shows the notes he collected from various sources with his comments.

This one (https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/#2024-04-15T0822) from The Node.js Documentary, especially his comment, is outstanding:

  A big company is like a giant ship that has to start making its turn a mile before the actual turn itself. Whereas the community is comprised of thousands of small, distributed boats that can make (in contrast) hairpin turns.

you are what you read, you are what you eat... it goes on and on :)

Guess that makes me part mysterious novel and part forgotten grocery list.

Having kids has made me realise that how your parents treated you and how your siblings treated you probably plays a bigger role than anything else (maybe apart from genetics, I'm amazed at how much my kids personalities have differed from birth)

And you read what you find in great aggregators:

https://bookmarks.reviews/

https://www.nybooks.com/

https://www.perlentaucher.de

Ever re-read a book you once read a long time ago, only to find your view of it has fundamentally changed in some way? Perhaps you identify with different characters in a story, or your understanding of the author's arguments is entirely different. It's a strange experience, since it's the same book - but you have changed, and so the book has become a kind of time mirror that shows those personal changes reflectively.

(It was Albert Camus' The Plague for me, revealing something of a transition from hopeful idealism to rather jaded realism).

What if we become who we are in the dreams we forget?

One thing here that I disagree with is that there is a major difference between things that you know cold and things that you need to refer to external memory to refresh your recollection. Studying something closely and repetitiously enough to know it by heart makes the knowledge more useful. It also provides you with a sort of navigational buoy or pylon that acts as a referent for other important pieces of knowledge.

Mass media (electronic media in particular) tends to encourage the user to seek many shallow impressions that do not always leave deep and permanent marks. So, any single impression doesn't leave a big mark or define your character. But deeper study into a single topic or work does have a profound effect on who you are.

There is some irony hidden in the remark that his wife sent him the inspiring quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, that compares books to meals having eaten.

We are just weights of an LLM.

I often notice that reading a book will sometimes change my active vocabulary in subtle ways. Influx of NIH-thoughts is very very valuable.

Your body is what you eat and how you use it. Your mind is what you read, hear, and how you apply it.

I read a lot of being a good programmer, but I am far from one, so perhaps this is only true in some circumstances. ;)

My biological father once claimed he was "totally immune" to advertising; I nearly fell over dead that instant with laughter.

Roger Ailes, Edward Bernays, and William Randolph Hearst applied similar principles, leaving lasting influences on the course of American history: one bent a hundred-fifty million Americans towards a retreaded version of the Nixon ideology, one made cigarettes appeal to women and had democracies overthrown for fruit companies, and the latter decided how to spin the news, became a Nazi, and nearly convinced America fascism was a "good idea".

I don't see how any human alive, unless they lived under a rock, can reasonably trace the origin of any of their beliefs or preferences. So, I must conclude beliefs, preferences, and ideologies are more or less arbitrary because most people don't spend metacognition effort on analyzing their formation or their change.

I like to point out our first language is usually the best example. We remember where or when we learned very few of the thousands of first-language words we know. Yet, there they are, waiting to be recalled. Sometimes this is called "white knowledge," after white noise, meaning it's there, hidden, indiscernible, until you strain your senses to retrieve it.

This is just a convenient excuse, just like this

Education is something you have even if you don't remember anything

Though the professor's test is just as poor quality as the whole blog's conversation where intellectual exercise is compared to remembering breakfasts

I'd argue the reverse is also true: you can remember books perfectly and not integrate their teachings.

Depending on where you are in life, a book can model, confront, polish, and/or destroy (no always a net negative) your core principles – either passively or intentionally, by taking notes and rereading.

Just like any other LLM.

Same thing is true about all your other habits: your thoughts, your food, your friendships, your music, what you buy and so on.

Tell me your habits, I will tell you who you are.

I've saved a link to more or less every thought-provoking article I've read since the last 12 years (first in Evernote, and now Obsidian). I have two notes, one "links", the other "article notes", that's just a bare minimum note-taking system for stuff I read on the web. Both notes are huge, and undoubtedly contain many tidbits of advice, perception shifting ideas, or "subjectivity merges" (https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/books-are-subjectivity-me...).

One of my project ideas now that has been building in my mind is, 12 years on, to go back and re-read and re-evaluate many of these links, and do a short write-up on how I've been influence by this article or any explicit choices that I've made in my life that could likely be attributed to it. I think this would be fascinating from a psychological/neurological POV but also a really cool chance to reflect on how I've changed/grown as a person.

I'm hackernews

Nowadays, I'm re-reading books that left a mark on me.

It's not uncommon to discover that some clever ideas I thought I came up with have been, in fact, read in a book. Humbling.

The thing is, you cannot get to that point by following productivity hacks. It's true that most divulgation books can we summarized in 2 pages. But the way good authors present the same idea again and again, through different examples and viewpoints is what remains in your brain.

If I read something with a critical eye, it’s not the content that shapes me, but the way I engage with the text. Otherwise, every conspiracy theory I read about would shape and change me.

I think that Emerson quote is just one big cope.

The books you read make you as much as you want them to make you. You get out of them what you put into them. If you're consuming books but not able to recall much from them, then you're not putting enough into them.

I especially don't like the Emerson quote because of how consumerist it is in its sentiment. It's a self-soothing license to passively consume and relieve oneself from any obligations to work to derive deeper substance from what they consume.

I found “How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read” by Pierre Bayard to be a fascinating look at how we remember and fail to remember what we do and do not read. (Yes, I read it.)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-talk-about-books-you-ha...

Surprised nobody has linked PG's short piece on the same topic: https://paulgraham.com/know.html

Nietzsche said something similar, I believe he advocated picking 100 books and just reading them deeply, thus curating by not reading every junk book that came along. But can't find the quote where he said that, or his list.

Does anybody have a link to Nietzsche's reading list? It seems it is hard to find things on the internet lately.

This is great. A few years ago I read a book a month and too this day my thinking is still guided a lot by a lot of those books, but I stopped doing it because it was taking so much time in the amount of notes I was taking and I just don't have the time anymore.

But i've started to get back into it, realising that I don't need to take notes, because I rarely referred to them anyway and jus listening to audiobooks is engaging my mind in these topics in ways I might be able to fully grasp at the time and the idea that I need to leave with a notebook full of ideas after the end of a book just isn't true.

The advancement in AI and LLMs with decent context windows is a usecase I am excited about for all of this.

Because I can read a book without taking such a huge amount of notes, which makes it easier to stay with those ideas and quicker to read and then I can load a PDF of the book into an LLM and chat with it about the concepts in the book, use it to produce notes, or discuss ideas that were in it and ask it to cross reference it.

It also makes it easier for me to come back to it several months later, I find that this can be better than my notes, as if i remember something from a book that is now relevant, can be loaded into an AI and ask it about that specific part and the quotes that are relevant.

There's an even more profound truth here. You are what you experience, even if you don't always remember each one. You are a constellation of experiences. Consciousness is the consensus mechanism that stitches them together to make you.

This can sound like spiritual woo-woo but that's the distillation of a pretty good scientific model. More here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...

test

Citation needed. Assertions without evidence.