Hope this isn’t off topic but y’all have such good taste in music. Holy shit.

I don’t think what I wrote was very useful for someone that hasn’t read the book.

For someone that hasn’t read it, I think it’s a really good book. That’s it. It’s easy to read and it has personally helped me on how to absorb larger texts. It’s like a guide on how to build a scaffold to read theory, I think. Adler even gives you a checklist of what you should do, like “Rule 1 - read the title, Rule 2 - read the first lines of each chapter etc.”.

It’s about 300 pages long but I think the chapters on Inspectional and Analytical reading are enough for like 99% of Communist theory and I think you can read them in an afternoon.

For how true it is, it was useful for me, I suppose. I thought about how it relates to working memory and stuff but honestly it’s not relevant. It’s just a checklist with explanations. If it doesn’t work for you, I still think that you can adapt the advice for you.

In short, what I wrote was me looking at a manual on how to read, looking at communist theory and thinking “hmm similar.”

Another comrade on hexbear did a way better job than me of telling what this book is about

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So, the book tells us that there exists 4 levels of reading – Elementary, Inspectional, Analytic, and Synoptical --, each building on each other. Think of a tower. Here’s an explanation:

1. Elementary: reading in it’s most basic terms. If you can read this, you are on this level. If you don’t master this level, when for example you read something in a language you can’t understand, you won’t be able to read a book systematically
2. Inspectional: it’s skimming the book to understand what the book is about, how it’s organized. Here your focus is on the form and purpose of a book. Think how you can instantly know if you are reading a recipe vs a manual, even though both are “instructional”. Not because of the content, but because of the title, the headings, etc. In short, it’s doing the best reading possible in a limited amount of time.
3. Analytical: it’s actually reading the book well. How do you build a good mental model to understand the content of the book?
4. Synoptical: it’s making a synthesis of the content of several books with your own judgement and previous knowledge. As an analogy, it’s like each book became a paragraph in an article. You are the author here.

The book is not a philosophical work. It’s very practical. Each one of those levels has its own practical concrete techniques on how to perform them well.

Also, it has tips on specific types of books like math ones, novels, philosophical works etc.

I liked this book because it helped me see texts differently. Like, for example, think about why authors do not give you an outline of their arguments. Why is prose so important even in technical works? Why did Lenin have to spend so much time talking about other people’s ideas and why was that so important?

I think it’s a good book. Adler 100% was not a Communist (he spends a lot of the chapter on Elementary Reading talking about the US in positive terms. I skipped it) but I think his advice was very dialectical in my opinion.

I hope this helps. Did I understand your question?

“Never invade Russia, you fools.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Scientists wonder if the October Revolution was an example of Russia invading itself or merely a transformation of Russia. Research is ongoing.

Teaching myself. It doesn’t need to be a long text

According to the Open Source Initiative:

Open Weights differ significantly from Open Source AI because they do not include:

1. Training code – The scripts or frameworks used to create and curate the training dataset.

2. Training dataset – The full dataset used for training, when legally possible. As an alternative, when distribution of the training dataset is not legally possible,

   1. Comprehensive data transparency – Full details about dataset composition, such as source domains, cleaning methods, or balancing techniques.

You too Oppo!

lmao couldn’t resist

y.

I hope that the web gets to the point where LaTeX or PDFs aren’t needed anymore. Problem is that it’s so annoying to set up html for print.

ODT documents are like halfway there but I still feel they aren’t enough.

Nerd

Do you know any books or articles on biological evolution?

I wanted to remember this subject this week.

Found another great font for reading (Gentium Plus):

Here’s my conclusions on How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler: while reading any expository text, you should think about three things:

1. What is the purpose of the text?^[1]
2. What is the relationship between the text and its context from the perspective of the text?
3. What is the relationship between the text and its context from the perspective of the context?

The “text” can be an entire book, a paragraph, a sentence, or a single word. The “context” is the wider context in which the text is inserted (paragraph in a chapter, chapter in a book etc) and it also includes the reader, the writer, the wider body of texts in history, and – most importantly – the material world.

How to Read a Book is a guide on the steps the reader must do in order to transform a context into a text.

(I don’t want to clutter this thread, so this is the rest of my thoughts)

Reading Theses on Feuerbach.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

This quote goes hard no matter how many times I have read it.

@sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml

this might be relevant for you lmao

Thanks for the relevant context. I should really stop trying to talk about stuff that I heard on youtube.

Cuba will win this shit.

Good luck!