An online commonplace book
I began to read just after I was four. The letters on the page suddenly gave in and admitted what they stood for.
– Penelope Fitzgerald
Some descriptions are well…FIRE. As read from Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 28
Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.
— Margaret Thatcher
Are you reconnaissanceing?
What in your field are studying up on, researching, observing?
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg 91
Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, lofty origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your brilliance penetrate into the darkness of my understanding and take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of both sin and ignorance. Give me a sharp sense of understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations, and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in completion; through Christ our Lord Amen
As students return to school and adults return home from holiday a prayer to whisper before the bell rings or logging on to your email.
Outlining is a fundamental of building.
Planning is a fundamental of doing, and outlining is a fundamental of planning.
– dnbt777
Eager to test this methodology out. Read the article in full below:
Johnson learned wherever he went. On a visit to an army camp in 1778, when he was nearly sixty, he enquired about many aspects of military practice, including the weight of musket balls, and the range at which they could be effective. He displayed a good knowledge of gunpowder, talked on a range of military topics, and sat up late watching a court martial. The inventor Richard Arkwright said Johnson was the only person who, on first view, ‘understood the principal and powers of his most complicated piece of machinery’. He had been advised by his cousin Cornelius Ford, with whom he spent some formative months as a young man, ‘to obtain some general principles of every science’.
– Henry Oliver
Similar to Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Johnson was a man interested in everything.
Second time through on the Samuel Johnson chapter…
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg181, Kindle edition.
looking stupid takes courage, and sometimes it’s easier to just let things slide. It is striking how many situations I am in where I start asking basic questions, feel guilty for slowing the group down, and it turns out that nobody understood what was going on to begin with (often people message me privately saying that they’re relieved I asked), but I was the only one who actually spoke up and asked about it.
This is a habit. It’s easy to pick up. And it makes you smarter.
– Nabeel S. Qureshi
From his essay: How to Understand Things
Willing to look stupid is another method of staying humble. It’s a form of integrity too. You’re admitting to yourself – I don’t understand this yet.
This is on thing I say to all students. That to be a really good mathematician, you have to be lazy. Ok, so you look at that, and you sort of say right, you could go straight in, integrate it, put the values in and get zero. Or you could step back for a minute and say, is there a trick I could use that gets the answer without having to do a lot of work? And the answer is yes, there is. So before you dive into something, sit back, look at the problem, and see, is there a clever way I could do this that’ll save me time?
– Philip Maini
Applies to other disciplines and circumstances. Step back and evaluate before diving in.
The trunk of an elephant might feel cool to the touch. Not what one expects, perhaps, from 200 pounds of writhing muscle, strong enough to uproot a tree, which tapers down to two “fingers,” giving it enough delicacy to detect the ripest berry on a shrub, and pluck it. Feeling an elephant’s trunk draws you to her other great feature: melancholic eyes that are veiled by long and dusty lashes. This combination of might with the suggestion of serene contemplation is surely the reason that elephants seem to embody a special state of grace.
I appreciate this description of an elephant’s trunk. It’s a surprising, captivating way to open a letter. Note the focus, the detail. Wang could have described the entire elephant, but instead he honed in on one appendage.
Good writing is specific.
Also, he recounts this admonition about learning he wrote in his 2017 letter.
“Knowledge can compound. I’d like for us to think more about how to accelerate the growth of learning. The traditional method of reading more books and trying to improve professionally are good starts, but it’s not enough to stop there. One can learn more by traveling to new places, being social in different ways, reading new types of books, changing jobs or professions, moving to a new place, by doing better and by doing more.”
– Dan Wang
Learning can compound.
Dan’s letters are beyond bookmarking. They are worth printing out and reading in hand.
Skip to the full 2023 letter below:
What Carson did was to approach the study of how to create X by turning the question backward—that is, by studying how to create non-X. The great algebraist Jacobi had exactly the same approach as Carson and was known for his constant repetition of one phrase: “Invert, always invert.”83 It is in the nature of things, as Jacobi knew, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward.
– Charlie Munger
It’s not only Charlie’s bits of wisdom that leave you in awe, the number and variety of thinkers Charlie Munger references in each chapter is astonishing.
In this speech alone he draws on Samuel Johnson, Cicero, Johnny Carson, Moses, Benjamin Disraelias, Croesus, Issac Newton, Epictetus…
Stripe Press’s online version of Poor Charlie’s Almanack is what digital reading should be.
More to come.
https://www.stripe.press/poor-charlies-almanack/talk-one?progress=66.79%25
Your only search guaranteed to fail is the one you never run
Gwern
Use Verbatim mode for literal matching.
Who knew? Gwern.
Explore the Internet’s attic. I didn’t even know the Internet Archive existed!
The Internet Archive (IA) deserves special mention as a target because it is the Internet’s attic, bursting at the seams with a remarkable assortment of scans & uploads from all sorts of sources—not just archiving web pages, but scanning university collections, accepting uploads from rogue archivists and hackers and obsessive fans and the aforementioned Indian/Chinese libraries with more laissez-faire approaches.5 This extends to its media collections as well—who would expect to find so many old science-fiction magazines (as well as many other magazines), a near-infinite number of Grateful Dead recordings, the original 114 episodes of Tom and Jerry, or thousands of arcade & console & PC & Flash games (all playable in-browser)? The Internet Archive is a veritable Internet in and of itself; the problem, of course, is finding anything…
So not infrequently, a book may be available, or a paper exists in the middle of a scan of an entire journal volume, but the IA will be ranked very low in search queries and the snippet will be misleading due to bad OCR. A good search strategy is to drop the quotes around titles or excerpts and focus down to
site:archive.organd check the first few hits by hand. (You can also try the relatively new “Internet Archive Scholar”, which appears to be more comprehensive than Google-site-search.)
View your Evernote or OneNote stash like a personalized search engine. Excellent way to think about those tools.
Clippings: note-taking services like Evernote/Microsoft OneNote: regularly making and keeping excerpts creates a personalized search engine, in effect.
This can be vital for refinding old things you read where the search terms are hopelessly generic or you can’t remember an exact quote or reference; it is one thing to search a keyword like “autism” in a few score thousand clippings, and another thing to search that in the entire Internet! (One can also reorganize or edit the notes to add in the keywords one is thinking of, to help with refinding.) I make heavy use of Evernote clipping and it is key to refinding my references.
Snore. Snore. I know, everyone is tired of the AI conversation. But how do these search techniques change with Chat GPT 4 or tools like Perplexity?
Read all of Gwern’s Internet Search Tips here. Table of Contents included!
h/t Tyler Cowen?
Floodlights and Goalposts 