How To Read Something - by CasualPhysicsEnjoyer
Casual Physics Enjoyer
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How To Read Something<br>The book is a block of wood. You don't stare at blocks of wood.<br>CasualPhysicsEnjoyer<br>Jul 01, 2026
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I've been working hard on increasing my learning techniques, but the fact that I'm still discovering really useful techniques as an adult has made me realise that I still have a long way to go to the peak of learning efficiency.<br>In particular, I used to think I was good at reading. Trying to do good science at home requires it, because you need to think hard about what you want to investigate. But after a real concerted effort to read better and more efficiently, I realise that I don't know how to read at all. And this is scary because I read a lot. So if I spend time reading without knowing how to read, I might just be wasting my time!<br>I wanted to figure out what reading properly actually means, and how I might do it. This essay is my attempt to do that. I also found that there isn't really a good set of essays out there that try to answer the question of reading something critically, so I'm trying to contribute to the literature on this. Also I realised that they don't really teach you the philosophy of how to read something in school.<br>So here goes.
What does reading mean?
First I asked the basic question. What does reading mean?<br>Suppose an alien came down from a spaceship and observed me whilst I was reading my book. And suppose this alien had some hyper-sensory capabilities so that they could see the electric signals in my brain. What would they observe?<br>This alien would probably conclude that the human act of reading involves a simple physical and biological sequence. First, the human looks at a string of words on paper with their eyes. The light reflects off the page. And then the light is absorbed via their optical nerve. The nerve sends electrical signals to the brain.<br>And then the human brain does something (?).<br>This is ambiguous and unclear - what does this something in the brain mean? I'm not a neuroscientist, but I know enough neuroscientists to confidently claim that this is unclear.<br>Even avoiding the brain electrochemistry question, the first reason it's unclear is because we have different languages, so people build different associations with different words. And secondly, for people who speak the same language, it is likely that we think different things even when we read the same word. For example, if I'm raised in Malaysia, I might associate a bottle of water to be shaped like a long and thin Dasani water bottle. Whereas some rich person in the UK might associate a water bottle with the short and fat Evian bottle.<br>The problem is that this word to mind's-eye mapping is completely unobservable unless we invent some sort of high fidelity imaging device!<br>So I tried to think of this question from a different perspective. Maybe 'what is reading' is the completely wrong question to ask. So I had a think about what the right reframing might be and I thought the following:<br>Instead of what does it mean to read something, maybe the right question is... what do I want out of reading?
What do I want out of reading?
Ok, so now the question is a bit more internal, a bit more unique to my own thoughts and feelings, which makes the question slightly more tractable. When I engage in the act of picking up a book and staring at it, and engaging my brain, what do I want?<br>I realised that I was reading to do one of a few things.<br>The first reason is practical, which is to understand how something works. This is necessary for research because I need to understand what has already been done before extending it. For example, I'm thinking a lot about physics approaches to biology and so one book that I tried to read was Freeman Dyson's ferromagnetic model for life and death in cells. I also had to read about thermodynamics to get a grasp of the kinds of concept that would be useful in reasoning about biological problems. I'm trying to get a better handle of biochemistry now and that involves a lot of reading like Deduve's Blueprint of a Cell.<br>But the point is there's no real physically possible way I could've built these prerequisites without reading things, so I read. I don't think there's a way around this, and reading is good because reinventing the wheel every time is inefficient. The danger with self study is that you can fool yourself into understanding something when you don't. So reading serves as a bit of a hedge.<br>The next reason is to pick up knowledge that I think could be useful later on. Generally, reading about some area of basic science is always useful, and I like to keep a library of useful knowledge that I can use to attack a hard problem. Often times I buy books with no immediate plans, put them on the shelf, read a bit here and there, and pray that something comes in useful later down the line. Usually it does!
The next reason I read is to figure out how people did stuff. I...