Unlikely I'll publish my #roamcult tour w/ @Paul_Johnson today, so in the meantime, here's an experimental video of me doing a close reading/commentary/note-taking on @DavidPerrott_'s recent article- Is applied behavioral science reaching a local maximum?
Definitely wasn’t the same experience as reading it normally. Made me pay far more to each individual point, and since I was giving commentary as I went, encouraged me to more deeply connect it to what I already know. Link to the original article: medium.com/@DavePerrott/i…
Made me more consciously aware of a few knowledge work practices that I do normally since I was doing them for demonstration. This is not the way I normally read an article because there was some pressure to be interesting. Ultimately my understanding was better for it.
The notes that I took felt more meaningful than they normally would have, as I normally would have just gone through and highlighted/commented on it. Makes me want to shift the ratio further towards commentary over highlights, as highlights honestly don’t mean much
I’m now starting to realize that highlights are almost like a way of saying “I’ll pay more attention to this later so I don’t have to now,” actually reducing the quality of the initial reading experience. Better in most cases to actively decide what I want to write down.
This also slowed me down majorly. Because I was engaging with each point that felt worth engaging with (which were most, it’s a really good article), providing commentary, going on related tangents, and then writing it down, I only made it through roughly a third of the article.
I don’t think reading more slowly is a bad thing, this article deserved to be considered thoughtfully, but I definitely don’t need to read every article this intensely. I could see myself doing this for more important works.
I think the video adds an interesting layer on top of the article that wasn’t present before. However, I have no idea if anyone will watch it, nor do I particularly care, as it felt valuable for my learning. Lmk any feedback, good chance I'll do more "live work" like this
This was, of course, inspired by @andy_matuschak's livestream of himself grappling with the ideas within Design Unbound in the context of his prior work. Thanks for pushing deliberate knowledge work more into the mainstream! twitch.tv/videos/6110501…
And if anyone wants to just get the gist of the article that I'm doing a close reading of, it's an elaboration on a fantastic thread about the same subject
I want to clarify one thing real quick- despite saying that I don't care whether people watch it or not (I don't), I do care about the feedback and thoughts of those who do.
