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BrandonReinhart comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong
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Here's a question: does learning to read faster provide a net marginal benefit to the pursuit of scholarship? Are there narrow, focused, and confirmed methods of learning to read faster that yield positive results? This would be beneficial to all, but perhaps moreso to those of us that have full time jobs that are not scholarship.
I've never had success with 'speed reading' in a way that allows me to consume more words per minute and have the same degree of retention and comprehension, especially for dense scholarly material.
Efficient scholarship benefits much more, I think, from learning to be strategic and have good intuitions about what to read - on the level of fields of knowledge, on the level of books and articles, and on the level of paragraphs within books and articles. I've been doing something like what I described in this post for at least two years and I have the impression that this is where I've gained the most utility.
The difference between somebody who is just getting into continuous scholarship and myself is, I suspect, almost entirely to be found in the fact that I can be extremely strategic about which fields of knowledge to consume, which books and articles to consume within those fields, and which paragraphs within those books and articles to consume. That's only what it seems like to me, though.
Genuine 'speed reading' can be achieved with a different brain architecture than I have, of course.
Here is another question, regarding the basic methdology of study. When you are reading a scholastic work and you encounter an unfamiliar concept, do you stop to identify the concept or continue but add the concept to a list to be pursued later? In other words, do you queue the concept for later inspection or do you 'step into' the concept for immediate inspection?
I expect the answer to be conditional, but knowing what conditions is useful. I find myself sometimes falling down the rabbit hole of chasing chained concepts. Wikipedia makes this mistake easy.
Adding to the tangent, in my opinion, the concepts of scholastic philosophy are actually incredibly useful for rationality in general. They usually end up being logic terms, and they are employed well outside of their concept even in modern works. A lot of times, for example, when you read an argument and understand there is something wrong with the argument, but have a hard time putting your finger on what is wrong with the argument, there's typically some scholastic term that will nail it for you. The scholastics were incredibly subtle, and are typically the ones ridiculed when the expression "splitting hairs" comes to fore. But usually that ridicule is made by people who aren't subtle, and don't realize that the distinctions are incredibly important.
It depends on whether the concept appears to be necessary to my understanding of what I care about or not. Sorry I can't give an example right now.
It helps with skimming material that isn't very dense, which would be approximately none of what this post is about. If it's comprehension you're after, do a skim followed by slow reading. This is work, but is more likely to gain you understanding.