Book insights worth spreading.
Joined June 2023
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This is how I turn books into thinking tools.
Every book decomposed into its atomic ideas — structured, linked, and ready to think with.
Full walkthrough below
DeepRead.com retweeted
Most of what you read, you forget.
Not because you're distracted. Not because you have a bad memory. Because reading and remembering are two different skills, and almost nobody practices the second one.
I used to burn through books and retain almost nothing. I'd finish something, feel smarter for a week, then couldn't tell you the author's main argument a month later. The problem wasn't the books. It was that I treated reading as consumption instead of encoding.
Here's what actually works:
1. Read with a pen. Highlight the sentence that made you stop. Not every clever line — only the one you'd want to find again a year from now.
2. Write one sentence per chapter in your own words. If you can't, you didn't understand the chapter. Go back.
3. Transfer the highlights into a single document you actually revisit. The notebook in your drawer doesn't count. The notes app you never open doesn't count. One place. Searchable.
4. Teach it to someone — out loud, over coffee, in a post. The research on the protégé effect is clear: preparing to teach forces you to encode in a way passive reading never will.
The reason most people forget what they read isn't a memory problem. It's that they finish the book and move on. The retention happens in what you do after you close it.
Reading more books isn't the goal. Remembering a few of them is.
this is why kids need face-to-face attention for learning.
iPads are not enough to learn new knowledge.
The most underrated book on how to structure your thinking and writing.
Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle, the McKinsey bible, in 7 minutes:
deepread.com/videos/?v=sOQNZ…
Dostoevsky was a believer.
Yet he wrote the strongest case against God I've ever read, in one scene of The Brothers Karamazov.
New animated video, hand-drawn:
deepread.com/videos?v=qN-uQc…
Try it yourself.
Three levels: hard, middle, easy. The cards adjust to you, not the other way round.
Free, no sign-up:
deepread.com/flashcards#try
How we build them, in 2 minutes:
we take the book apart into its questions, key ideas and highlights, then build the cards from those notes.
youtu.be/S6r3UkU3Bww
We’re turning book highlights into flashcards that are actually fun:
• every card starts with a real argument
• stuck? “Help me” steps down to an easier card
• every answer ends with a quote from the book
Don’t just read. Learn it, with spaced repetition.
"It isn't simply how much time you spend paying attention to information that determines what you retain..
..but, crucially, how you think about that information while you pay attention to it."
— Scott Young, Ultralearning
deepread.com/ultralearning/
Pernah gak kamu selesai baca buku, ngerasa paham betul, tapi begitu tutup buku langsung blank?
Atau sebaliknya, pas lagi belajar pusing dan ngebul rasanya, tapi pas selesai ilmunya malah lebih nyerap?
Kemarin, aku belajar konsep Active Engagement pas baca buku How We Learn karya Stanislas Dehaene, ahli neurosains yang udah meneliti otak manusia selama 3 dekade lebih.
Dia bilang, belajar yang lancar tanpa hambatan itu malah bikin otak kita cepat lupa. Kok bisa?
A thread 🧵 by Narasi Visual
We built a machine that fills minds and mistook the filling for the flourishing.
"We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few."
— Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book
deepread.com/how-to-read-a-b…
"You will find, as you read the poem out loud, that the very act of speaking the words forces you to understand them better."
— Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book
Slop is what prose looks like when misunderstanding costs nothing
Aviation solved AI slop in 1986.
Karpathy is telling people to ask their LLM to write in ASD-STE100, a controlled language built for aircraft maintenance manuals. I went down the rabbit hole on where this spec comes from, and the backstory makes the hack even better.
Back in the late 1970s, European airlines were handing English manuals to mechanics around the world who mostly didn't speak English as a first language. One ambiguous sentence in a fuel line procedure can get people killed. So the industry built a version of English where ambiguity is banned at the dictionary level.
The spec allows roughly 900 approved words. Each word gets one meaning and one part of speech. "Close" can only be a verb, because "close the door" and "the close door" can't be allowed to coexist in a repair manual. "Follow" only means to come after. If you want obey, you write obey.
Procedural sentences max out at 20 words. One instruction per sentence. Active voice only. Around 1,200 common words are explicitly banned, each with a mandated replacement. You don't "commence pumping." You start the pump.
English has about 170,000 words in current use. Aviation decided mechanics get 900, and planes became safer to maintain because of it.
Now flip it to LLMs. Models hedge and synonym-cycle because the training data rewards sounding fluent. STE is 40 years of accumulated rules for stripping exactly that out, written by people whose readers would die if a sentence could be read two ways. It might be the strongest anti-slop prompt in existence, and it's a free PDF.
"It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done"
— Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
"A mind not agitated by good questions cannot appreciate the significance of even the best answers. It is easy enough to learn the answers. But to develop actively inquisitive minds, alive with real questions, profound questions—that is another story."
— Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book
deepread.com/how-to-read-a-b…
Elon’s advice to 20-year-olds on surviving the AI era:
Get as broad-based an education as possible: arts, sciences, engineering, and wide general knowledge.
Why?
AI and robots will fulfill almost any request immediately.The edge won’t be doing the work. It will be knowing what to ask for. The broader your knowledge, the better your questions.
(source: CGTN)
"reading fiction is [...] that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks."
Whatever book you pick up, it’s likely to make you feel better—maybe even a whole lot better. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Ceridwen Dovey writes, in “Can Reading Make You Happier?,” which was published in 2015. Dive into the research behind the therapeutic effect of books: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Wv…
