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Saturday, September 12, 2020

My process for studying books

I want to put some thought into how I'm studying books. This may result in doing some more work related to the book I just finished reading/taking notes on (_The Choice_ by Goldratt). 

One reason I'm thinking about this is related to Elliot's criticism about my speed running work. He said:

I think you should prioritize finishing a whole run. 200% of the WR time is fine. start by aiming there (or even 300%), then get it down to 175% then 150%. 

then you figure out which parts you have trouble with and practice those. 

don’t optimize the small parts so much b/c you don’t have the whole picture yet, and don’t know where the bottlenecks are, and optimizing the details a lot delays finishing the first big milestone (completed any% speedrun using an actual speedrun route and split timer instead of just playing the game casually). 

So Elliot is talking about something that would help me structure my learning activities re speedrunning but of course that logic applies to things other than speedrunning.

How do I apply the logic to non-speedrunning things? I've thought about this a little bit already. I thought to make some parallels between speedrunning and other stuff. For example, studying each kingdom is like studying a book (or series of books or whole field of knowledge). And studying a kingdom to 200-300% of WR level is like studying The Choice by doing a single reading plus note-taking. So the logic applied to my studying of The Choice would be this: study The Choice to 200-300% of WR level before further studying books I've already studied to 200-300% WR level.

So I think the logic implies that before I study The Choice to a higher standard than 200-300%, I should study other books to the 200-300% of WR level. Which books? I guess all the important ones. I have a problem with this though. I think there are books that are important but too hard for my current skill, like anything by Popper. Or maybe Popper would be fine for me if I lower my standards. 

To address that unknown, I could do a single session learning experiment where I read and comment on some Popper text (say a chapter or less) for the purpose of analyzing that session so that I can decide whether or not to continue studying that text.

Aside from trying to apply Elliot's criticism about structuring my leaning activities, I also have other thoughts related to my studying of books.

I want to practice making idea trees, especially for organizing the ideas of a whole book. Doing this should result in making some improvements that make my future book studying better than without this idea-tree work. The parallel I see is this: idea-treeing The Choice is like discussing my speedrunning work. And I've been prioritizing discussing speedrunning over the act of gameplay practice.

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