About these notes

Hi! I’m Andy Matuschak. You’ve stumbled upon my working notes. They’re kind of strange, so some context might help.

These notes are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment (Evergreen notes; My morning writing practice). But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment (Work with the garage door up). If a note seems confusing or under-explained, it’s probably because I didn’t write it for you! Sorry—that’s sort of an essential tension of this experiment (Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience).

For now, there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some starting point. You might be interested in §What’s top of mind.

👋 Andy (email, Twitter, main personal site)

PS: My work is made possible by a crowd-funded research grant from my Patreon community. You can become a member to support future work, and to read patron-only updates and previews of upcoming projects.

PS: Many people ask, so I’ll just note here: no, I haven’t made this system available for others to use. It’s still an early research environment, and Premature scaling can stunt system iteration.

People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice

It seems that most people can remember only a few high-level details of a book weeks later—if that. A typical reader might spend hours finishing some serious non-fiction—then maybe it comes up at a dinner party, and they find you can remember like three sentences. Basically no detailed recall. Barely the gist! (((Scattered notes|Reading comprehension.md|1,99|1,114))) (((Scattered notes|Reading comprehension.md|1,99|1,114)))

What’s more: people seem surprised when this happens. They seem to consistently overestimate how much they’re absorbing from a book.

Part of the problem here is People often struggle to remember details of prose text because they never processed them in the first place.

See How rapidly do people forget practical knowledge?

This observation is unfortunate for many reasons, but among them: Deep understanding requires detailed knowledge of fundamentals and Complex ideas may be hard to learn in part because their components overflow working memory.

For common objections: Many people view memory as unimportant to deep creative work.

DiAlexRev - I try to explain how I learned something so quickly, in @HolbertonCOL @holbertonschool-1271832215215800321.mp4

References

Amlund et al - Repetitive Reading and Recall of Expository Text

• In a limited experimental setting, grad students are given an expository passage; they read once, twice, or three times; delayed (one week) free recall scores at 27% (main idea) and 16% (details) after one reading; cued recall scores at 57% and 64% respectively. Re-reading helps a bit in the cued setting, but not much in for freed recall.

Matuschak, A. (2019). Why books don’t work. Retrieved from https://andymatuschak.org/books