The Noam Chomsky topic reminded me of something I was thinking of the other day and that is why do we read? Several years ago I read this book from Chomsky and today I can not recall anything that was in that book, it is a total blank. I recall the title, I know it was a collection of essays, and I remember it somewhere mentioned some nuns killed in Central America. This is all. From a 300 pages long book (I looked it up) I have nothing. And it is not just this book, when I think about it there are loads and loads that I basically don’t remember anything from.
So what is the point of reading if from 80% of books you are going to forget basically everything that was in it? And do you get the same thing or should I start to go easy on the booze?
Well chomsky is a very dry writer. He doesn’t inspire much emotion, so I think it might make him harder to remember him.
I think we read in order to gain an idea that is valuable to us (makes us comfortable or that we think is true). So we read non-fiction in order to have a point be explained and proven to us to our own satifaction. It is very possible that the chomsky book that you were reading was saying something that was not very contraversial to you, so there wasn’t much reason to take note of a whole body of knowledge proving that the united states government is violent. You already know that.
Same thing with Hayek, I read the road to serfdom, and I don’t remember a word of it because I had already read all of those ideas via his intellectual decendents.
I find conversations and books more memorable when I disagree with them, they present a new idea, and when they are challenging.
I still remember the book King Rat by James Clavell to a tee. I read it when I was 10-years-old and it completely shaped my thinking with regards to overcoming authoritarianism through commerce and ingenuity; how a man with absolutely no power through force could outwit and rule the people with the guns by merely using his gusto.
Though I didn’t know it then it probably changed my life forever and gave me the foundation for deeper philosophical and economic pondering later in my learnings. I definitely recommend it as a work of brilliant fiction to introduce people to capitalist notions.
I don’t think that reading is about getting information. Not nowadays. Rather reading does, in some mystical way, fire up neurons and can truly increase a guy’s ability to think, envison thinks, express thoughts, create and logic. The written word still reigns supreme as an intellect freer. I wouldn’t have gone libertarian by listening to Podcasts, only reading could free my mind.
Thus what is in a book is often relegated to the unconscious, but the brain never falls asleep again.
Every book, conversation, thought, idea, film, experience, that you’ve “consumed” need not be retained in detail for it to have an impact on the model of the universe being built in your mind. There’s simply physically not enough storage in your brain to retain all the content being fed through your senses. Through abstraction, analogy, and connection to concepts already stored in your mind (“fertile grounds”) any new input finds its place in the total structure. The content itself gets discarded after being used as a vehicle for the transfer of the concept. Thus, your model of the universe gets updated (changed, improved, chipped, refreshed, questioned, etc) and becomes ready to act as “fertile grounds” for whatever is coming next. If a book does not fall on a “fertile ground” you simply give up reading it after few pages. The fact that you’ve completed it suggests that the content has landed on fertile grounds and has changed your model in some way, and that’s all one could hope for.
