My dad was a busy construction contractor. One summer he tore himself away from work and took the family to a week long boat camp out next to a big beautiful lake. It turned out that our campsite was actually in the lake by a few inches at high water, but dad saw a way to dam it off and keep it dry, so he grabs the shovel and starts digging trenches and building walls and ordering us around.
About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.
My spouse and I dealt with this on our honeymoon. We were both working 50-80 hour weeks for months leading up to our trip. The first day we got to this all-inclusive resort we spent the whole time trying to min/max and be as efficient and calculated as possible. It was a stressful, miserable day.
Day two we looked at each other, had an adult beverage with breakfast, and relaxed for the rest of the trip.
Growing up in a quaint rural town where high-powered people from NYC liked to "get away", this is very common situation, and the inability to disconnect and adopt a slower attitude was, IMO, the primary cause of friction between the weekenders and the locals. They would physically get away from the city, but were unable to mentally release the blend of Type-A competitive neuroses that helped them get ahead in the city but just made them come off as obnoxious in this slower, quieter place.
I've found myself in this mode before, too. A couple of years ago I was preparing for weeklong wilderness backpacking trip with some friends. I'd recently quit my high-stress job to take some time off, and I had a few new pieces of gear I wanted to test before relying on them on a longer trip. When I looked at the calendar, though, every weekend before we were to leave was already spoken for.
I was worrying about it to my wife, trying to decide whether I'd just have to use the old worn out gear or risk it with the new stuff, when she stopped me: "why don't you just... go on Monday?" It took me a second to even get what she was saying—I was still so much in work-all-the-time-mode that my brain didn't even consider whatsoever the possibility that I could just... go off and go camping on a weekday. I was really baffled for a moment, and I've reflected on that a bit since, it's funny how you can be trapped in your own default operating mode and not even realize it.
I've settled in a city 60% smaller than the one I grew up in. It's still a full-blown city, but there's way fewer of those competitive types - they all moved to where I came from.
I'm not really a resort person. But I do subscribe to some travel feeds mostly in the vein of maybe finding some places/attractions/restaurants/etc. that I'm not familiar with. The number of hyper-scheduled spreadsheets I see is amazing. Doesn't mean I don't often have some itinerary and even book some particular, popular attractions/venues. But the 30-minute block scheduling is something I do for work (if that).
ADDED: I'll just add that I created a loose spreadsheet for a ~week-long NYC trip with (I think) just one timed admission for a recently reopened museum and no times otherwise. I think I ended up dynamically scrawling over the printout with changes for most of the trip.
If it works out for more that's great but it's not expected or necessary.
I've traveled with some people who seem focused on just getting pictures in front of as many things as possible which seems a poor way to really take in a place.
I think that's a good plan. I do tend to book hotels, planes, and usually longer trains. But, especially for a longer city trip, I loosely map out--even if just mentally--things I want to see and do but, for example, one museum a day is mostly enough unless another convenient one is small.
I was like this but maybe not as stressful as you described. Still, I wanted to do stuff and see stuff during vacation.
After having kids, my habit changed. Now we enjoy going to local parks and walking around with no goals during vacation. This wonderful attraction? Nah we don't need to see it. If we can walk there, then maybe.
When we were planning a trip to Hawaii the first thing I researched was where all the local parks with playgrounds were. That way if we were driving and my son was getting bored or we needed to stretch our legs we knew where something was. There's usually a town, village, or city park nearby no matter where I've been. Even driving to Crater Lake through rural Oregon there were some great parks in the towns we drove through. Same with the drive out to Yosemite. This was the case up until we got within an hour or two of the park itself.
Some of the most enjoyable parts of those trips were hanging out with my family in a local park.
I tend to default to a midrange place as I'm not much interested in spending a lot of time by the pool. And when traveling on business, if meals weren't being covered, I didn't actually much care for resorts when I felt like a bit of of a prisoner in terms of meals etc.
What did you get out of this comment? What do you think a reader gets? Maybe follow the spirit of the article: slow down and pounder, be curious, maybe you would have gotten the right take away instead of being antagonizing towards someone's fond memory.
I think the response is a great comment. It really is insane that they felt the need to damn the flooded campsite.
The comment actually does a great job of accentuating the point of the story. Everyone offended is too caught up in their achiever mode mindset to truly appreciate the absurdity.
Its not a race to express the first thing that comes to mind, its a mutual discussion themed by top level comments. If you dislike the top level comments for some reason it's better to move on instead, unless some counter points enrich the discussion we're all having.
What makes HN so great is that it's curated towards curiosity. Not simple quibs. If the only value your comment has is to yourself, you could write it without pressing the submit button.
>What makes HN so great is that it's curated towards curiosity. Not simple quibs.
It wasn't just a quib. It contained some sarcasm, but it was also an honest question.
>If the only value your comment has is to yourself, you could write it without pressing the submit button.
I could also just have the thought and not write it down. Neither option would count as having expressed it. I need to have it intrude upon someone else's psyche.
We can get stuck in our minds and lean too much on prior skills instead of fully assessing the problem at hand. More likely than not, given he was a contractor, building a trench and walls seemed like a simple solution to something he has probably dealt with many time and didn't think twice about it.
I just don't understand how it could occur to no one in a group of three or four people for a whole hour. Like, even if the barrier had been fully built and worked perfectly even after considering the tide, they would have been making camp on fully soaked ground. Just what everyone wants first thing in the morning: to trudge through mud.
I think it did occur to everyone and that's part of the conclusion of the story - instead of stubbornly battling the situation we should brace it and adapt to it.
Arizona, Lake Havasu, triple digit temperatures. We spent more time in the water than out of it. Us kids loved the flooded camp because of the tiny fish that would swim up and nibble on our toes. It tickled. The camp was boat access only, and there were a few million acres of desert wilderness higher ground to move up to. The water rose gradually and the tents never got wet.
The bigger problem with that camp was the rattlesnakes. I killed one with the shovel and felt grown up.
I guess this person sees the same mental image as me: Tents with wet floor, moisture sucked into everything inside. A tent that’s been in a lake sounds like a throwaway to me. But maybe what you see as a tent is different from what I see.
For me the story was also a bit weird. “Just take the tents out of the water”. Ok…
Even if that were true (and it obviously isn't), what then would be the point of expending tremendous time and energy to "dam it off and keep it dry"?
These are alternative ways to keep the tents dry ... which entails that they were never soaked in the first place.
> A tent that’s been in a lake
The tents were never in the lake. A few inches of the campsite was in the lake at high water.
> sounds like a throwaway to me
Do you have any experience with this? I've been on trips where tents and even sleeping bags ended up in a river. They don't dissolve ...they can be dried in the sun. And a tent with a wet floor can be wiped down.
> “Just take the tents out of the water”.
Those words don't appear anywhere. Try looking at the actual words and not just your mental images.
> The tents were never in the lake. A few inches of the campsite was in the lake at high water. [...] Those words don't appear anywhere. Try looking at the actual words and not just your mental images.
I think some people are interpreting “campsite” as the literal space occupied by the tent’s ground sheet while you are interpreting it as the broader area - which in an organised institutional arrangement might be called the “campground”
To use an analogy, think of being in a partly flooded parking space vs parking lot
It makes sense that someone with the former interpretation - the tent ground sheet submerged by a few inches of water - would understand that the tent got soaked.
I've always understood "campground" to be a whole area open to camping with dozens or hundreds of campers. A campsite is where your group's claim is staked and the area you occupy including picnic tables, fires, etc--not just the tent.
I'm interpreting the word as what it means and how it is obviously being used. No one takes "campsite" to mean "the literal space occupied by the tent’s ground sheet" unless they are playing some silly sophistic game. Here is what it means (pick your own source ... they are all similar and none agrees with your definition):
"A campsite is a designated area where individuals can set up bedding, sleeping bags, or cooking equipment, such as stoves or fires. This definition encompasses any location that allows for sleeping or cooking, regardless of whether it includes a tent, lean-to, shack, or other structures."
And here's the Wikipedia description, which notes that the English "campsite" is equivalent to the American "campground", but that is broader and neither is so absurdly narrow as your words:
I already refuted this nonsense ... there is no reason to think from the OP's description that the tent got soaked.
> To use an analogy, think of ...
I don't need any help with thinking, especially from bad analogies that are flatly contradicted by the OP's description. What's the parking lot analogy to building dams?
I guess the term "tent" is pretty broad, this is what I see: [0], the cotton does not take being in water very well.
But I guess a synthetic ultra light tent will do better.
I also assumed the tents were already there when he arrived (complete assumption, but the term campsite conjures up a place with tents already there), and so must be of the more heavy more stationary kind.
Anyway, the point is, I also had this question: Where do you go when you mess up your tent like that? How can a dam in a layer of water make it dry? Don't you need a dam and then pump it dry.
This is going too far, I just wanted to defend the question. Maybe it's a cultural difference.
It appears that you are confused with West European camping, which is where you drive two days to the south of France (most of which stuck in traffic), pay large amounts of money for a patch of perfectly flat grass where you are allowed to park your car and set up your tent. In a grid pattern with hundreds of other tents. Where there is a building nearby for toilets and showers. And a swimming pool plus live entertainment for the children.
A “campsite” is a relatively flat and relatively root/stump-free patch of dirt. That’s it. Also tents are generally not made out of the canvas material you linked that yurts and teepees might be made from.
Tents are generally made of a very wuick-drying, thin synthetic.
And like the other person said, this does make it seem like you’ve potentially never been camping but i don’t want to gatekeep the definition of “camping”. My version is carrying everything I need on my back for two weeks and walking 10-15 miles each day to the next campsite (read: “patch of dirt”, preferably near fresh water). Other people “camp” in RV’s though, so.
"A campsite is a designated area where individuals can set up bedding, sleeping bags, or cooking equipment, such as stoves or fires. This definition encompasses any location that allows for sleeping or cooking, regardless of whether it includes a tent, lean-to, shack, or other structures."
I would note that camping also involves sitting in campchairs talking, reading, singing, etc.
And
> I’d call your version hiking/walking/backpacking depending where I am.
The hiking/walking/backpacking is what nerdsniper does between campsites:
> My version is carrying everything I need on my back for two weeks and walking 10-15 miles each day ==> to the next campsite <==
Despite his phrasing, he of course is not saying that hiking == camping.
Have you tried hammock camping? I only tried it at a campground, so, maybe there are some downsides I missed for the real backpackers. But it was pretty cool to not care about roots, the flatness of my patch of ground, or anything like that.
Natural fiber canvas tents take to water about the same as your tee shirt does. Which is to say perfectly fine. Soaking them for a few days or even weeks shouldn't really bother them if the water is not warm and stagnant (like a nice clean lake). The biggest killer is storing them still wet.
I think you’re viewing this through your own cultural lens where camping can be totally solo (in the woods?)
In England, we can’t just pitch up a tent in the woods, we need to pay for a campsite where there’s other tents.
I suspect, from their description, this person is from a different country again, where camping may happen in large open steppe with lots of other yurts.
Nothing you wrote contradicts anything I said about camping. Someone else suggested that "campsite" just means the area covered by a tent and its groundcover, which is closer to the "mental image" of the other person who wrongly believes that tents got waterlogged, but is the arch opposite of yours. I've camped in the woods, on open steppes, and in designated camping areas in French and English towns. In each of those cases I brought my own tent, but I've also "glamped" and stayed in existing canvas-sided structures, from Yosemite to Mont St. Michel.
Also, this is about a campsite a few inches of which is in a lake, and people moving their tents. But apparently paying attention to the actual context is optional for some people.
I’m not trying to dispute your version of events. I’m just offering a suggestion of what teekert had in their mind when they thought of a campsite, to better help you see where the misunderstanding comes from. Given they replied with agreement, I hope I captured it accurately.
I also feel it was unnecessary to dismiss their experience as “not camping,” just because it was different to yours. It turns a learning opportunity for us all into a needlessly toxic argument.
None of this is responsive to my comment that you are responding to ... I find that quite toxic. And I will note that you wrote this toxic criticism:
> I think you’re viewing this through your own cultural lens where camping can be totally solo (in the woods?)
Again, your notion of my experience of camping does not come from anything I actually wrote ... that's quite toxic.
And recognizing the mere possibility of camping solo in the woods (which has nothing to do with anything in this thread--the OP was in a group on a lakeshore) has nothing to do with a "cultural lens".
That's the last I will say about this trivial matter.
I’ve been camping, on trips that ranged from “park on the side of the road and set up a tent” to “hike four days carrying everything” and also “drive to campsite, walk into permanent managed tent”. Sounds like you’ve only done a more limited range of camping trips.
No, it doesn't sound like that at all, and you have offered no reason to think so. It's the other person who clearly has an extremely limited notion of camping: "the term campsite conjures up a place with tents already there" -- perhaps you have the two of us mixed up. And the OP said that they moved the tents, so ass-u-me ing that they were fixed structures is not rational.
Why would noticing that someone had "an extremely limited notion of camping" make you suggest that they had no experience at all? And if you are familiar with the form they mentioned, why would you act like you aren't?
Thanks for the attempt at a generous reading, but the truth of the matter is I just skimmed the comment and missed that bit. These things happen, no biggie.
Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead.
I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk.
This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
I often do this in meetings and have gotten into the habit of saying "I'm thinking". It's not much but it gives both of us time to think and explicitly makes it clear I don't expect the person to say something. I think that helps.
Fair enough, I do like parent’s a bit better, “blurting processing” feels like a too high default setting right after seeing “I’m thinking” :) - not that any of it matters anyways, communicating _something_ gets you there. Rest it just triaging around the edges what people will call you weird for, and if they are, they were going to anyway.
"Give me a second" is something I say when someone just has to break the silence with some unproductive comment. Having 20-30 seconds to think silently should be a completely normal thing.
I that once in a technical interview and got the job (just paused for 30 seconds until the answer came to me). I think they expected a 15 minute process of problem solving.
If I recall correctly the question was something like:
You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of the day you must have an unbiased sampling of cars that have driven by you. How do you record the cars?
Nice statistical problem! I only thought of a solution that is valid for many cars and few worksheet spots. Were you able to fully solve it on the spot?
The best solution I could think of on the spot was this:
First write down every license place until it fills up. Then for each time a car drives by, give it a 1/2 chance to write it down. Moving down the list regardless of the outcome. Then once the bottom is reached, do it again but with 1/3 a chance. Over and over again, decreasing the chance each time.
I checked for which situations it is valid, and it surprisingly was when there are many more cars than the list size. But it is not valid when there are just a few more cars than the list size.
Mine was to roll a number between 1 and N once N is greater than M (N being cars seen so far, M your slots available). If you get a number that is less than or equal to M, replace that slot. If it is greater than M, that sample is dropped.
I have far more trust for people willing to say this.
> I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence
I find that I'm more likely to do this but try to make an effort to stop. There's times to spitball but we should also spend time thinking. And let's be real 30-60s is not that long
> This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying.
I find it absolutely is much of the time - I'll determine the architecture/overall solution, know exactly what needs to go in a multitude of files, and now actualizing all that isn't really thinking anymore, just donkey work. Getting AI to do this has been incredible now that it's finally good enough. I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass, and when I introduced bugs by changing it by hand, it found them instantly from stack traces without even having symbols, saving me hours. I see a future where writing a large codebase all by hand is seen like raising a barn the Amish way with no powertools - impressive and maybe there's something to be said for it philosophically, but just not practical otherwise.
I find however, that while typing it all out, my mind often continues analyzing and thinking, and that I often find a new idea, or new structure, that might be even better. Typing it out and seeing it appear in front of me. It also gives me a feeling for how tedious, brittle, or annoying the solution is.
Granted, sometimes it's really not that interesting to type the stuff. It depends what one is working on.
Each time I write a routine it's different. Its better. I've learned something from last time. In fact, this is one of the things that got me hooked on computing. That there's so much complexity, often hidden, that there's always more to learn and improve upon.
And truth be told, if I'm writing the same thing many times it's time to create a library. Maybe just for myself or for the company I work for. But the same thing happens. I always learn more while doing it and it always gets better.
I fear the programmer whose bottleneck is typing. They already know the answer. But the problem is that there is none
If you use that much time for donkey work, you are using the wrong tools. If it is so simple so that can delegate it to a LLM, you need to use a language with more expressive power.
There's no such language, sans Lisp with extreme use of macros.
Here's an alternative take: if typing isn't a bottleneck for you, and you don't experience coding as being donkey work, you are thinking too slow, and/or in too small increments.
How often are you actually doing this though?
I think I probably work in something greenfield about once a decade. The hard part is always going down a rabbit hole in established code bases. I can do the boilerplate in a few days. It saves time, but not really even one hairy issue a year.
> The hard part is always going down a rabbit hole in established code bases.
Actually, I found that this is exactly where they shine (I wouldn't trust them with greenfield implementation myself). Exploring existing code is so much easier when you can ask them how something works. You can even ask them to find problems - you can't trust them to be correct, of course, but at least you get some good brainstorming going. And, incredibly, they often do find actual problems in the code. Pretty impressive for language models.
Nowadays? 4+ times a week. I want to learn as much as I can now that I essentially have 24/7 mentors that can remember everything I've told them.
Sure, I could write it all by hand; but even as a decent typer, I'll never match a tenth speed of claude code or opencode just GOING. Maybe there's a better way to learn, but whatever it is, it's not obvious to me.
I actually felt like I learned the most when I stopped going to Google and StackOverflow for solutions and instead moved to docs. It's far less direct but the information is much more rich. All that auxiliary information compounds. I want to skip it, feeling rushed to get an answer, but I've always been the better for taking the "scenic route". I'd then play around and learn how to push functions and abuse them. Boy there's no learning like learning how to abuse code.
Fwiw, I do use LLMs, but they don't write code for me. They are fantastic rubber ducky machines. Far better than my cat, which is better than an actual rubber duck. They aid in docs too, helping fill in that space when you don't exactly understand them. But don't let them do the hard work nor the boring work. The boring work is where you usually learn the most. It's also the time you don't recognize that's happening
Close to 5 years. I read docs too and love the immersion and the fully grasping of concepts when going with your route, but most days there's just not enough hours for this.
> The boring work is where you usually learn the most. It's also the time you don't recognize that's happening
That was always how I did it before mid-2025. And I do still do boring work when I truly want to master something, but doing that too much just means (for me) not finishing anything.
5 years isn't that long. I've been doing 3X that and I'm constantly learning new things. Not even about new language features but even languages I've been using that whole time. New ways to problem solve. New algorithms. New tools.
Not finishing things can be okay but also not. An important skill to learn is what's good enough. And to write good enough to be easily upgradable. It's important to write code to be flexible for this reason. It's also important to realize it's okay to completely throw away code. But also this is the reason comments are so important. Don't just write what functions do but also write how you envision the design. Even if you can't get to it now. Then when you or anyone else comes back (after lunch, next week, next year, whenever) there's good hints about all that. Knowing how to get up to speed and be effective fast. If anything this helps agents even more. Commenting is a vastly under appreciated skill and only becoming more valuable
Oh my, the AI bros got upset! You must be cranky from having to fix all those bugs your agent keeps throwing up in your "flawless 500+ LOC" code they keep writing.
If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud.
For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.
From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
Sure, but isn't there still an advantage to this? If two people are silently doing this then they don't influence one another as much, helping find a wider range of solutions as well as identify issues with certain solutions that the other might not have seen.
Instead if you're blurting out your thinking more in unison. Naturally you'll stray less, exploring less.
Of course you want collaboration but I find the magic is going back and forth between alone and together. I even find this helpful when just working by myself, stepping away from the problem or context switching, allowing the problem to distill.
I had the same thoughts reading this. I think there’s an optimal blend of blurters and thinkers, one isn’t better than the other. I find that I do both, it just kind of depends on my comfort with the subject matter.
Another way to think of it is if you're blurting out your thinking you're reducing redundant work and perhaps inspiring the other person to think of additional solutions that are offshoots of what you're dismissing. I see merits to both ways of looking at this.
Yeah I agree but that's why I think there's a balance. But the context here is the more nervous blurting which I think is going too much in the other direction. We should be comfortable with some silence and thinking.
But everyone has their own personal preferences. Which is perfectly fine too. But I think it's worth mentioning that, as illustrated by the comment, it's typically more acceptable to blurt than think silently. And there's the bias that blurting makes it harder to think silently by thinking silently doesn't make blurting harder (the uncomfortable with some silence part is not healthy imo. Of course long silence is a different issue but we're talking 30-60s)
Probably true for many. When thinking about hard problems I'm usually not thinking in language, at least not the kind we speak between us humans, so it can be incredibly distracting if I have to "translate" back and forth while both thinking and communicating.
> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying.
As you sort of point out between the lines, it depends on what you work on. I had an AI agent rewrite some ancient (and terrible code) which had stopped working because the v1 of an api on v3 was sunset. It took around 5 minutes out of my day, and most of those were having two people explaining to me where the code was and what they thought had happened to make it break. It would've like taken me a full day to fix without AI because I would have needed to understand things first, and because it was quite a lot of code.
The result wasn't very good, but it was better than what was before, and since that had run for years without anyone tuching it, well... good enough. Heck, it might've taken me more than a day because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".
Aside from this anecdote I think AI writes a good 80% of my code these days. I'm not sure I buy the whole "bottleneck or not" discussion around typing. I think for a lot of people, myself included, AI does 10x part of the process of writing software. Where it doesn't help is when you need to do computer science, and as you point out, those parts AI don't speed up. I sometimes still use AI for computer science parts, but in those situations the AI will be a rubber duck because I tend to think by talking out my own ideas, and at least the AI duck pretends to answer. Even if the answer is more useless than what the actual rubber duck comes up with, which it usually is, it's more immersive for me.
> because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".
Which creates an interesting question. Would that extra time be worth it because your version would break less, do more, and/or last longer?
Don't get me wrong, we all write sloppy code and often not our best. It's one of the difficulties of being an engineer, deciding what exactly is good enough.
> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close.
It's always possible to go slower for practically no cost. -- So, any benefit from going slower is obtainable for everyone.
Whereas, typing faster takes discipline and effort. There are diminishing benefits to putting in more effort to type faster.
The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
> typing faster takes discipline and effort.
>> ***typing isn't the bottleneck***
I believe you read too fast
> The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
You've missed the critical part of what I was saying.
While typing I'm doing other things in parallel.
Those other things are things that require you to scrutinize and look at each character. I think the vacuum analogy from the OP is quite apt here. It's much harder to debug other people's code and more so an LLMs.
I do this a lot as well. I have a bad habit of just freezing physically when I start to think. Since my work is conducted over video, my colleagues will often think I dropped off the call XD
Personally I find it a bad habit of mine, I have no idea how people gracefully take time to think. Whenever I do say something like “hold on, let me just think for a moment” my brain completely freezes and I get no thinking done.
I worked with a guy that operated like this, a technical expert in a very specialized domain. You'd ask him a question - he'd just stare at you in silence for 60s or more, and then give a very well-considered answer that you couldn't get from anyone else in the world.
His manager was used to this and sort of enjoyed the mystique of this monk-like expert that he was responsible for.
I once was in a meeting where we had to talk to the great expert on the phone. Let's just say his name was Otto. Of course, he worked remote quite often, in the days before Zoom. His manager calls him and puts the phone on speakerphone for the room to hear.
Manager: Otto, we need your input on <long technical problem>.
<60 seconds of silence>
Otto: Yes, I think that might work, but you'll run into <other problems>.
Manager: Well, yes, we've considered that, but <explanation>
A few minutes of reasonably normal conversation ensues between the assembled group and Otto. Then:
Manager: Well, I think then that this is a pretty good solution, as long as Otto agrees.
Manager looks around the table, clearly waiting for Otto's concurrence
<60 seconds of silence>
<90 seconds of silence>
<120 seconds of silence>
People are starting to get uncomfortable. The manager makes a reassuring face. This is normal for those of us that work closely with the great expert, do not lose faith.
<240 seconds of silence>
Manager briefly lets slip a concerned look, then quickly hides it
By coincidence I also finished The Fellowship of the Ring about two weeks ago.
I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens.
You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and still know basically what happened to Frodo and where he's going. But that's not really the point. When I read a book of that much importance, I've always read every word and understood every sentence. I get easily distracted and often have to reread passages. I am not a fast reader. Tolkien's descriptions are not always that easy. But this is what I find so rewarding about reading in the first place.
However, when I'm reading an article online, the difference is stark. When I read articles, I usually start from the bottom and read backwards. That's my way of finding out the results, and then piecing together how much context I actually need to understand it. Maybe I should slow that down sometimes.
Although people think LoTR as a novel meant for younger people, it certainly is not an Tolkien never meant it that way and it certainly is not an easy text. It is far more complex than any fantasy I have ever come across. Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring. One would be mad to simply skim it through.
> Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring.
If you want to see it then way Tolkien saw it, probably the best way is to get through all that unimportant stuff involving rings and battles as quickly as possible to get to the appendices where Tolkein spent his time thinking about the history and etymology and even neat little details like how the calendar worked in the Shire...
Reminds me of an ah-ha! moment I had as a kid playing a text adventure game on my C64. I was stuck for a while and tried to find alternative ways forwards. I typed in "cheat" and it replied "OK, you win!" and ended the game.
This is also possible in the first and second Monkey Island games, using hotkeys ctrl+W or maybe alt+W.
The cheat code will immediately end your game while informing you that you scored 800 of 800 points (presumably a Sierra reference; this is the only way to score any number - including zero - of points).
There's no particular reason you'd discover this while playing either game, but if you play the third one, a mandatory plot point will show the message "You lose. You scored 0 of 800 points," referring back to the obscure joke in the earlier games.
One might also argue that The Little Prince is "far more complex" and deeper than anything written at a typical adult reading level. That lower linguistic surface complexity allows more space for the reader to explore ideas and themes.
I'm skeptical. Is there no more value to series like Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse, beyond mere literary masochism, compared to LotR? Like them or not, LotR, as elaborate as its mythology is (if you include Silmarillion and some or all of the History of Middle Earth), is not at the same level.
One would like to point out that the set {Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse} is not a subset of {fantasy books I have come across}. I would not dare to claim that LoTR is the end all of all fantasy writing. Perhaps the word ”complex” was a bad choice here, since I’m sure there is books with more complex structure (which is not necessarily a good thing…)
I think what I tried to say is that the language Tolkien uses is as much or more part of the middle earth as are the characters, maps and whatnot. The obvious point is that he created whole new languages and writing systems for the book, basing the two Elvish languages on Finnish and Welsh etc. Other is that he changes his vocabulary depending on what he is describing. I am not a linguistic scholar, but I’m fairly vertain that at least in Two Towers the parts describing nature, forrests and whatnot use solely words that are celtic in origin, ie. no Latin influence and very old. There’s also structural techniques of interwoven plots that I can’t even start to unwind.
Point being, you can very much read the book on surface level as Frodo and the Ring and Swords and lah-di-daa and that is all fine. That’s how I read it when I was 12-13. But there is so much more, mastery of English language comparable only to Cormac McCarthy and Joyce… Here Tolkien is very much a singular writer, escaping the limits of genre he very much was essential in creating.
So no wonder it is perhaps the most influential book of the 20th century.
I've read that Tolkien wrote There and Back Again / The Hobbit as a book for his children. Then he started writing what would become The Fellowship of The Ring for his kids, but he quickly realized that the story was taking many dark turns and that he was best served by moving away from writing it as a book for his kids.
I think both ways of reading are fine. Sometimes you just want to get on with the plot, other times you want to immerse yourself. Or maybe you always just want to get on with the plot, which is fine, just don't complain about the book being boring, it just wasn't for you. Which is how I feel about Lotr. But at the same time, rushing over the songs, boring parts with Tom etc is also how I managed to make it work for me.
I've been reading "Terminal Alliance", a light, humorous s.f. novel. After reading tfa I've slowed down and after all it's Christmas holidays, what's the rush? Even reading this inconsequential novel more slowly has allowed me to enjoy the details more. The metric in online discussions is always how many books you read, but this is a reminder that that's not the point.
The title, about "default settings" being "too high" makes me want an example from a technical domain, though.
Imagine if Tolkien was writing Fellowship last decade, and the book landed on your hands today. No decades of cult growing, no adaptations or explosive marketing, some word of mouth. Would you think it "much important" before reading it? What makes the importance?
In my opinion it's the prose. It's always the prose. Always gotta be on the lookout for good writers, new and old.
I thought I was crazy for reading articles backwards, but it really does help to build a better picture of what's being shared or reported.
I find that a lot of journalists like to pack their writing with fluff before they even reach the subject of the headline, a lot like recipe blogs sharing their life stories before finally reaching the instructions, as if the recipe is only secondary or tertiary to the background given.
This is why I appreciate articles that include bullet points or a TL;DR right at the beginning to summarize. For anything really long that I'm just not interested in reading fully and only want the main points, I use an LLM with the URL to summarize briefly.
While there's so much value in slowing down as the OP wrote, I feel as if journalists want you to lend the same pace to them for all the time of ours they waste. It's like they forget how much information is available to us and how unimportant it all is.
I find walking can be a similar experience. It really crystalized for me this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago because of the effect of exploring another country. When you walk, you see everything. The world is huge. Everything is slower, higher fidelity, and for me, richer. You can spend an entire day walking from one town to another. Think of everything you will see! Compare this to driving. Driving is like compression. You could drive between the same two towns in less than an hour. You may see many beautiful things while driving, but the experience is fleeting and momentary. You will miss so many details along the way.
As always, there are tradeoffs, and you can't walk everywhere or always have these types of mindful experiences. On the other hand, life is short and perhaps paradoxically, slower experiences can yield richer days.
For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games. The whole thing becomes this strange distorted reality where the travel nodes and their immediate surroundings are over represented in your mental model but most of the rest of the map is blank. Now I don't think games should get rid of their fast travel systems But I find that enjoy the game world a lot more without them and think every one should try.
The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.
My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.
> For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games.
I was playing Wing Commander, Privateer way back when (mid-1990's) and didn't realize that there were ways to travel faster. So I did the obvious: I pretended I was a trader on a long haul route, dug out some books and notebooks, and just did whatever until I arrived at my destination or was attacked by pirates. I loved the passive game play in the moment, but I didn't realize how much until about a decade later. That kinda ruined gaming for me in general since games tend to keep the player busy (even if they aren't action games).
In some respects, I think that slow travel offers a sense of authenticity to the game. Well, I should say to some games. Many games set out goals for players. It's obvious why. If there is nothing to accomplish, there is little sense of accomplishment. Yet goals also ruin things in my mind since there is an urgency to get things done to see what the outcome is. Of course, games also reward following up on that urgency. That's contrary to real life where you may be rewarded or you may have to wait upon the rewards.
Valheim does that so well. The feeling of walking through an unfamiliar forest and stumbling across a faint trail that you made weeks ago, knowing that it will eventually lead you back to your old base and thus back to where you were trying to get to before you got lost…
Reading the Reddit for the game, filled with people complaining that the portal system is too restrictive and forces them to make upwards of three long boat trips over the course of the game is a bit sad. It’s as though they expect the fun to happen when they finish everything, but the fun all happens while you’re actually playing the game.
The hardcore mode of Kingdom Come: Deliverance really made me appreciate the game (although that's the only way I played it). It became a very immersive experience.
Valheim without a map would be a bit too much for me. No way to quickly escape to some safe green pastures sounds too stressful :).
I do agree, playing open world games without fast travel can be a bit of a slog though. I considered playing Skyrim without fast travel but many of the quests make you run half way across the map and back multiple times.
Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.
There is a great meditation in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the differences between riding and driving. Being open to the elements, in and a part of nature, is visceral. Bubbled in a car, our surroundings are observed more than experienced. That's always resonated for me.
That’s a book I’ve been taking my time with. Read a bit every few weeks. Found the part about visual memory mechanics resonated: I have to spread everything out and see it when doing mechanic work.
No to doing books via audiobook because I see the words in my head and it’s massively distracting. Cool if it works for others I guess but like the mechanic excerpt above… not for me.
I like thinking about the scales of speed and the impact it has on one's experience.
I used to fly fairly regularly between Germany and Italy. I'd get on a plane in Munich and get off in Florence, going from a very "German" place to a very "Italian" place. A few years ago I started driving the route, and I was surprised just how much gradation there is between the cultures.
As an American, I always thought of "Italians" and "Germans" as very distinct cultures, but then you drive through Südtirol (or Alto Adige, if you're feeling Italian, the northern most province of Italy) and it feels quite Germanic. Then gradually, as you continue south, you hear more Italian, see more Italianate architecture and place names. Similar story for Alsace between France and Germany.
Of course none of this is all that surprising knowing the history of these areas, but it is very interesting to experience in-person.
I'm sure most places and cultures are like this, even when we think of of them as quite distinct. When you only fly between major cities, you lose so much of the wonderful overlap.
Had the same feeling a while ago, I called it the teleportation effect. From the moment you reduce the time needed to go somewhere, you alter the experience to a point that it's not recognizable. Not to say that it's not nice to see the mountain from the sky for one hour but it is an other thing to go through them.
Something to break the teleportation is obviously to make breaks and enjoy where you are (a lake not too far on the road, any viewpoint...). Plan in advance, have a tent, be ready to not reach your target in one day and you will enjoy a much better a road trip than a train, a plane or even the highway.
Completely agree. I don’t have a car anymore so I walk a lot, and my mental image of the streets is so much more in depth now to the point I could visualise streets down to the stickers on poles.
I love walking and couple of years ago I moved to LA. I fucking hate how hard to walk in this city. I always knew I liked walking but I didn’t realize how crucial it was for mental health (I grew up around Europe, purely on walkable cities and didn’t get my driving license until 30,years old or something)
There was a man who was afraid of his shadow and disliked his footprints. So he tried to get away from them.
He ran, but the faster he ran, the more numerous his footprints became, and his shadow kept up with him without lagging behind.
Thinking he was going too slowly, he ran faster and faster, until he collapsed and died of exhaustion.
He did not realize that if he had simply stayed in the shade, his shadow would have disappeared, and if he had sat still, there would have been no footprints.
And another one [0]:
My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest;
Every year the green ivy grows longer.
No news of the affairs of men,
Only the occasional song of a woodcutter.
The sun shines and I mend my robe;
When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems.
I have nothing to report, my friends.
If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.
If you’re a fan of LOTR but don’t fancy reading it aloud yourself, I’d really recommend the new audio versions read by Andy Serkis. While I don’t vibe with every facet of his performance, overall it’s a tour-de-force, and really makes the prose come to life. Especially in those descriptive sections that it’s possible to glaze over when reading the text. Having an actor of the calibre of Serkis reading them to you brings out the poetry and beauty of Tolkien’s language.
Noooo. Audio books feed you the content at someone else’s pace, not at your (slow) pace, which is exactly what TFA advocates. Or, what are you going to do? Hit Pause after each sentence so you can fully digest and savor it?
Listening to someone talking is how humanity transmitted culture and stories for tens of thousands of years. The fact that "we" cannot tolerate it anymore, is a sign of how badly our brains are being reshaped (or maybe damaged) by screens.
Oral transmission of complex culture is one of the things that separates us from "the state of nature". As we lose it, we move further away from the beasts that conquered the planet and closer to the squirrel.
Transmission of complex culture is what separates us (and enables this complex culture in the first place); oral medium is merely one way to do it. Being the first one, it's probably not the best.
We had tried video in the car for our teens, but found that audio books worked a lot better - shared experience, nobody has a bad angle/line of sight, can still see the scenery and engage in the travel, less looking down prompting motion sickness, etc.
Though now that everybody has a device, we have to intentionally opt for a shared experience, rather than 1:1 devices.
And if you keep reading (at whatever speed), you get to the actual point of the article:
>So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.
Audiobook are mouth speed but have no pause. When reading slowly, I often want to pause a few seconds and think about what I just read before moving on to the next sentence.
I pause audiobooks all the time by squeezing the base of my earbud, or pressing the big pause button on my Bluetooth speaker. Works great. As well as the triple-tap to go back 15 seconds to hear something again.
Not the OP, but to me audio generally x2 slower than I read, so I’m content with the speed, anything slower than that would be weird pace for many stuff.
Having said that yes I do indeed pause if I need to take a moment to think, and I roll back 15 seconds if I want to hear it again. Not a big deal, just part of the experience. -signed ex-hater of audiobooks
First of all, I don’t recommend going through life yucking someone else’s yum.
Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.
Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?
That to me, feels opposite the the article's advice.
And I too, often watch youtube at 1.5x or 2x speed, and dislike audiobooks because I read so much faster that I can possibly listen to them, and there's always an ever growing list/pile of books I want to read after this one. I wonder if that's why a certain type of movie works so well for me - I think of them as "movies made from short stories, not novels", and now I'm wondering if it's something similar to the OP's idea - and that spending 2 hours watching a short story I'd expect to read in 15/20mins is what I'm enjoying, in a different way to, say, the new Dune movies - which so far have been 4-5 hours watching a couple of big novel's worth of story that'd take me a week or so to read? Just writing that out now, I realised theres a two orders of magnitude difference in speed there going from 1/10th of reading speed to 10x reading speed - from a 15 minute read to 2 hour watch, to a week long read to 4-5 hour watch. Hardly surprising they hit my brain differently.
Audiobooks are awesome because I can listen to them while doing other things like walking or biking or lifting weights. And the best narrators actually improve the books like The Hail Mary Project and Blood Meridian.
That's the exact opposite of what the article is about. The desire to time optimize, to rush it cause "this is sooo sloooow, booooring" is what creates only an illusion of time efficiency but you might discover that if you actually give it the time, there is a whole world to discover. That's what the article is about.
It isn't just how fast or slow it is. Reading at a slow pace gives you time to think in a way that is flexible from sentence to sentence.
To borrow the same analogy from the article, image trying to savor a meal where someone else was deciding when you take each bite. Even at a slow pace, the rigidness of the pace and your lack of fine control would still pose a problem with giving each bite it's rightful consideration.
That being said I love audio books and think I would struggle to apply this article's advice in my own life. Slowing down your audiobook is still a step in that direction, though I sometimes find that slowing it down can cause my mind to wander and my comprehension goes down and not up.
I think this often sounds unsettling (like the reader is drunk or otherwise impaired), and anyway the listener doesn't need more time to recognise each individual word -- they want time to take in sentences and paragraphs.
Get a text to speech app and change the lengths between sentences while keeping the actual read aloud speed the same, I recall using something like that before.
I hate audiobooks because they're way too slow and full of moods/tones that often contradict how I would have read it. I can't be the only one who thinks they're overindulgent and annoying.
For me, "overindulgent and annoying" is way too harsh. But they feel _sooooo_ slow and I kind of resent "missing out" on the other books I could have read while the audiobook plods along (even at chipmunk 2x babble speed).
for lotr in particular my last reread was slower paced because I kept this map[0] open and paused frequently to refer to it and see where everyone was. it was super enjoyable, I have literally read the book dozens of times before that and have never gotten so good a sense of the world's geography and the difficulty of various journeys.
Music is an interesting case. You can't slow down the consumption of music (you have to let it play at the speed the performer intended), but you can dial up the attention you give it. Listening with headphones, eyes closed, and phone+doorbell etc. switched off would be close to max. Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time. For music, we can say that the default settings are too LOW.
And similar to the point OP made, you get more out of it when you attend more closely. And similarly, most music does not withstand this level of scrutiny.
I've taken the time to rebuild a large music collection locally. I've adopted every CD collection my friends and family have set aside to rust. It's immensely satisfying to scroll a gigantic list of 40,000 tracks and just pick whatever feels good, knowing I'm not contributing to a profile on my listening habits and that the file will instantly play flawlessly.
I have some excellent garage band CDs that probably have two or three copies still in the wild at most. Unfortunately sometimes the 25 year old burned CDs are missing the TOC data, but even the recovery process is satisfying.
You certainly do not need to play music at the speed the performer intended! There are whole genres (and subgenres) based on this. :) Personally, I have found that slowing a familiar piece down by ~5% tricks my brain into perceiving it as novel again, which helps me attend to it more closely and appreciate it more.
I listen to a lot of music on the side, but Chris Boltendahl of Grave Digger said something that stuck with me. Btw, Grave Digger are not making Heavy Metal inspired by Heavy Metal, they were there making Heavy Metal in the 80s :)
Paraphrasing: With all of the streaming, and easy access to music, music has turned into a fast food. Eaten on the side, but rarely really fully appreciated this day.
And for new albums of bands I follow (or if I want to have a good time), I do exactly that: If the weather permits, get a hammock, a good drink, the good headphones (yes, I have several levels of quality of headphones), and just look at the sun, the trees and the magpies while listening to the music. Improving my own guitar skills has only deepened this appreciation.
> Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time
At least in Metal and to me, concerts are a different beast than the record. The record is usually the best and most perfect take of a song, often with additional effects, better mix. If you want to hear to the best version of a song, it's usually from the record.
Concerts are a party. It's always amusing how different concert cultures are there -- I know of some people who complain that they "can't hear the singer over someone next to them shouting". That's kind of the point of a live celebration of the band at the music in my world.
You actually can slow down music. A novel experience in itself.
When you try to learn the song — once you get a grip – everything slows.
That's why people play so much with metronome – once your brain "slows down", you will speed up naturally.
Spent a few months learning how to get around it as a novice drummer. The only way around I found? It's to notice the slowing speed of time and slow the rhythm into it.
Probably related: most drummers play with a click in their ears.
I noticed similar effects when "locking in" in games or sports. Time gets slower.
So when you slow down, you start to pay more attention. But if you pay more attention, the world itself will slow down. And the music would be slowed
I suffered a burnout fall last year and adapting to a slower lifestyle was my way out of it. I started reading long novels, and taking aimless, leisurely walks. It's hard to overstate the positive effect that had on my mind and well-being. I haven't felt this kind of mental clarity and motivation to do things for over a decade.
This post resonates strongly with me. I strongly believe the default settings _are_ too high, and it takes conscious effort to slow down while bound to the shackles of modern society, but it's so worth it.
In fact, I noticed that whenever a book becomes most exciting, I start reading especially fast (to the point of skipping words), because I want to know what happens next. So I spend the least time with the best parts of the best books.
Ever since I realized that, I have switched pretty much exclusively to audiobooks. I don't really know if it's faster or slower overall, but it's a predetermined pace, and that works better for me.
For me, moving my lips while reading is a surefire way to significantly slow down the pace. I do this all the time when giving a document a final proofread before publishing.
I do something similar, only keeping my lips shut and moving my tongue and throat as if I was speaking. I find it's an intermediate speed between conversation speed and purely reading with my eyes. I started doing it when I wasn't so good at English to give myself time to understand the text, as well as to practice the mechanics of English speech when I didn't have anyone, but I find keeping me at this pace gives me maximum comprehension. I have a friend who reads much faster than me and he quite often misses points in whatever he's reading. I think he got into that habit from literature, but it's disastrous when reading something more densely packed with information, like technical documentation.
This is definitely a disadvantage of audiobooks, although I’ve found having access to a `skip backwards 15 seconds` button can help a lot.
(There was one point during Riyria Revelations where a character was explaining how Elven succession works. After repeating the sequence a bunch of times, I finally had to get out my laptop and take notes.)
I feel the same way. It goes away if I already know what's going to happen. For this reason I strongly recommend reading the things you love a second time.
We read LOTR to our sons when they were little. It was likely the 6th time for me,and 3rd in English. Stupendous experience. The command of the English Tolkien had is sublime. Wish the movies didn't take so much liberty with Faramir.!!!
Yep, read LoTR to my daughters before the film came out. (Thankfully.)
As promising as Fellowship was, the films just kept going down hill—one after the other.
As the girls were growing up we worked through all the Harry Potter books, a half-dozen of the "colored Fairy" books (edited by Andrew Lang), plenty of Uncle Remus tales, the "Little House" books and a number of Sid Fleischman books…
Those were magical years. Only when homework arrived did the reading hour finally come to a close. :-(
I'm bang in the middle of a reread now; I've lost count of how many there've been. I'm 55 now, having first read it in my early teens, and it's astonishing how it just keeps growing and changing with you. Even after all these years, I'm still surprised by a painterly description of a cloud, or the sense of comfortable rootedness of a little Shire lane, or a little "aha, I never noticed that correlation before, that's what those orcs were doing", or "hmm, that's an odd word to put in that sentence, I wonder why he picked it?" followed by a fascinating bit of research.
I've recently started the Letters too, and can thoroughly recommend it. It's fascinating and oddly cosy to get a direct tap into a mind you know so well at second hand, through its fiction.
I am currently reading The Hobbit to my son, who is 5 years old and not quite able to read it by himself yet. Nearly, but it's a lot for him to get through. Some evenings I use my Kindle, some evenings I use the copy I've owned since I was 11.
However now he has started to write stories about dragons and things, and that's a pretty interesting development.
For younger kids I can heartily recommend the Hobbit illustrated by Jemima Catlin- has plenty of pictures to them engaged. Read it to my 6 year old and we’re now excited for LotR.
I can't wait to read LOTR to my (now four-year-old) son. Been looking forward to it since we started trying for a kid. Seriously, peak fatherhood moment. I'll savor it. That (and a few others are) on the embargo list: he's not allowed to see the film before we read the books. I wish I'd got Winnie the Pooh on there in time.
Yeah, I'd have thought so. The lad's a little behind on appreciating narrative, though. Loves books, but can't yet focus on anything that isn't ~= pictures::words. It's fine; he'll get there.
Love both Pooh, and Wind in the Willows, and will enjoy seeing how they take him.
I feel like winnie the pooh won't lose much from having seen the film version beforehand, but also the books had the kind of whimsical humour that I enjoyed a lot more in college than I did as a kid.
When I was about 10, I read the Hobbit to my younger brother (8), over a large number of half-hour car trips. It's one my prouder memories of that time.
I've not braved reading them LOTR yet, but my sons are still getting read to even as one's about to become a teenager; it's some of my favourite time in the evening and it allows me to force them through books just slightly too advanced, with lots of them stopping me to explain (or me stopping to editorialize, and provide historical context etc).
I don't know how long they'll let me keep doing it for, but I don't see any reason to stop
Well done, when I was growing up we would always have some time in the evening when we would read a book out loud. When we were younger my parents would read and as we got older we would read sometimes too. I tried the same with my daughter but she stopped wanting to when she was around 10, but she’s in a better space now two years on so I’m going to try to resurrect the custom. It’s a really lovely thing to do as a family, but as the article suggests is quite strange these days and it can be difficult and require discipline to make the time.
I strongly encourage you to do that. The selection of the material is key: you have to find something that she is going to find fascinating but could not read on her own due to missing vocabulary / context / idiom-and-allusion cultural awareness. Then you get to try to fill that in with asides as you go along, if she'll tolerate it. Good luck!
I really enjoy this train of thought. It rings true to me, its also something Hank Green was recently talking about with the negative effects of the internet. Its not that the internet is bad. We're starved for information and meaning and were being feed a diet of ultraprocessed food in the form of shorts and tiktoks. I think the solution this author laid out is good. Consume quality, with care.
This is one of the reason I use openbsd and emacs as my two main tools. There are better and more suited tools for some specific tasks. But using them is enjoyable and their core philosophy aligns to mine. And it’s not like I actually need those extra things.
This is one of the things I actually remember my mother saying. Festina lente [0]: Make haste slowly. I've always tried to stick to it because when I have I've found more to appreciate in whatever I'm doing (as TFA says)
Sadly, for some reason I now can't read slowly, which pisses me off. I and my partner read aloud together alternating chapters of a chosen book, and I love how get _much_ more out of the book than I would reading alone in a tenth of the time.
I've also found that some books seem written to be read aloud: the sentence structure and punctuation lends itself to easy reading aloud, whereas some books have really convoluted sentences with multiple parenthetical sub-clauses that are a real challenge to read aloud in an a way that's easy to follow. I've ended up so that normally try to write in a way that's easy to read aloud. I think if something's easy to read aloud it's going to be easy to comprehend when read normally. And Yes, I know that the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph probably doesn't match that.
If you are bilingual, with one language being stronger than the other one; try reading something in the language you are least comfortable with. I do this (e.g. reading LoTR in Dutch) and it forces me to pay closer attention to each sentence.
There are words you don't know or know how to use them properly. It will help you learn the second language better, while also helping you to not gloss over whole passages.
> try reading something in the language you are least comfortable with
I did this with Spanish and it was terrible for learning grammar because things tended to be transliterated from English however I found it good for learning vocab.
I chose really trashy romance novels translated from English e.g. Danielle Steel.
\* they tended to use more colloquialisms
\* simple plots, so easy to read
\* useful words
\* often transliterated directly from English so easiest forms of grammar
I tried some literature but that was a bad idea (too complex for beginner, and faaar too boring). I just don't like the Spanish literature I have tried reading.
I also found it screwed up my Spanish pronunciation and had a queer side-effect that it permanently slowed down my English reading.
Personally, I think languages should be learnt by talking and mimicking (as much like a baby as possible). Reading is worthwhile for work but I expect to be more careful for the next language I learn.
> I’ve found reading aloud helpful for staying engaged — limiting myself to mouth-speed rather than eye-speed means I won’t rush, miss important details, and then lose interest, which has always been a problem for me.
This worked for me... for a time. And then what happened surprised me (but maybe shouldn't have): I started zoning out and thinking about other things, missing important details, while reading aloud. Wild that we can even do that.
I initially thought this was just a function of reading the same thing multiple times, but I’ve since had it happen many times when reading something completely new. Somehow my mind wanders and when I tune back in, not only am I reading clearly, I’m still doing the voicing for different characters. It’s so weird.
I haven't had it happen while reading aloud (since I almost never read aloud), but I've definitely had it happen while reading something new that I hated. I'd end up having to read the same page (or more!) three or four times because I kept zoning out.
I feel like this advice could also somewhat apply to your manner of speaking. I'm a pretty fast speaker, and I've noticed that when I try my best to go slower, I understand what I'm trying to say better, I figure out gaps in logic and errors in the sentence while speaking, instead of after, and I get the message across better. And when I'm giving an impromptu speech of some sort, if I slow down and think about every sentence I say, the sentences stitch themselves together in a better-flowing way, and I enjoy speaking because it sounds better.
I, too, speak ridiculously fast. People laugh at me and some (a lot of) people have problems understanding me. As much as I try, as soon as I am not paying attention I speak at the same pace again. Did you manage to slow down your speech consistently?
> When you slow down your eating speed, say to half or a third your default speed, you get much more enjoyment out of a smaller amount of food. The extra attention given to each bite allows more of the “good stuff,” whatever that is exactly, to reach you.
I wonder if this contributes to a good chunk of the experience of fine dining. When you get served expensive food in micro-portions that are accompanied by long explanations, you don't gobble it down but take as much time as possible to savour it.
For a while I've thought so many of us are afraid to slow down because we might feel sad, as sadness is often one of the slowest emotions.
Yet this quote has me thinking that maybe we fear slowing down because of the consciousness overload. That we get so overwhelmed by our senses. Maybe even that can lead to the tears of being so alive.
I'd argue that the issue isn't that the default is too high, but that we assume the default. Think a math class: Often enough, kids are left behind, because the pace is too high, but others get bored to tears, because for them, that very same pace is far too slow. It can even vary by unit: Maybe someone is fine at standard speed in most of AP physics, and just one unit is just completely off. It's a typical problem when engaging with varied audiences: If you have to give a talk to , say, an all hands of a tech company, getting the pacing and the information density right for everyone is just not going to happen.
So the main learning is to be aware of the speed settings, and then consider putting ourselves in situations where we can alter them. Faster or slower isn't better in a vacuum. Expermiment and find what's right for you, or, in communication, for your audience.
This us why I consider sailing to be the best way of travelling the world: You're slow to begin with and the wind dictates your plans. You really don't want to be motoring. Instead you have time to experience the land, the people and the ocean. Preferably without being online constantly.
I'm wondering if using an electric caravan is a similarly good option for slow travelling on land. It would force you to you stop after less than 300 kilometers, unfold the solar panels on the roof, wait a day or two (perhaps also catch some rain using the roof) and then continue.
Another, less romantic option would be to recharge it somewhere faster ;-)
One of the pleasures of reading literature is noticing how compressed they are.
This is true for Tolkien, Turgenev, Hemingway or Pound. The amount of information per page—per word!—is incredibly high, which permits the conveyance of ideas which simply do not land when spoken more plainly.
You don’t need to go to high literature to find this density, by the way. Political speeches from Republican Rome and America’s Founders have a similar aspect to them.
It's interesting you mention that. Even Obamas detractors admit he spoke well. True, but i find JFKs speeches are on a different level from that. And it's not just him, but the contrast is particularly striking.
Now in the UK all we get are monotonous robots or people who have clearly had intensive coaching in how to speak in a clear. Decisive. Direct. Way, to inspire confidence and project competence. The two qualities entirely absent in most of our politicians.
The less said about the other side of the pond the better.
> Even Obamas detractors admit he spoke well. True, but i find JFKs speeches are on a different level from that. And it's not just him, but the contrast is particularly striking.
My off the cuff observation is that there is a lot less mastery of language than there used to be in America. I'm not really sure why, but compare the grand language used by the early political leaders to, say, Obama, and it's striking. And that's not saying Obama is a bad speaker! He has a ton of charisma and makes you want to like his ideas by the way he presents them. But he's never given something on the level of Lincoln's Gettysburg address (in my opinion at least).
> never given something on the level of Lincoln's Gettysburg address (in my opinion at least)
I’m arguing he couldn’t have. Until America regains a literary tradition, the complexity and imagery gained with heavy words is lost against the conciseness soundbites demand.
> I'm not really sure why, but compare the grand language used by the early political leaders to, say, Obama, and it's striking.
IMO that's a direct consequence of becoming a real democracy: can't just target those rich enough to get a fancy education.
IIRC, the land ownership requirements had already gone by the time of Lincoln's Gettysburg address, but I expect them to have still been writing with such an audience in mind.
Not just America. But it's partly a cultural thing. If someone would imitate the style of a century ago, he would be mocked for it and considered a self indulgent show off. The best example i can bring is Jacob Reese Mogg, otherwise known as The Rt Hon Gentleman from the 18th century.
One thing that is thankfully unique to America is that rudeness as a debating tactic can win elections.
I’m no expert in other country’s politics, but it would be pretty surprising if that was unique to America. Boris Johnson? Nicolas Sarkozy? Silvio Berlusconi?
Not even close. The nearest equivalent is Prime Ministers Questions which is a regular staged event.
Look at the debates from 2015 where Trumps opponents are rendered speechless by his overbearing personality. He makes himself the centre of everything and is completely shameless about it. He's an American phenomenon. BUT,
the reason it works is because he means what he says and does what he says he'll do. America has always appreciated straight talkers more then
Europe.
Jacob Reese Mogg isn't only mocked for being anachronistic, but also extreme poshness. That he went canvasing with someone he called his nanny is one such noteworthy oddity.
My experience has been the exact opposite. Yes, there's literally a lot of information, but so much of it is irrelevant fluff that could be eliminated or trimmed without losing much. I've seen multiple paragraphs of Tolkien, for example, that narratively boil down to "they walk across the field". To be clear, I don't see that as a flaw. The fluff serves to set the mood. But that's different from saying that the text is especially information-dense.
> so much of it is irrelevant fluff that could be eliminated or trimmed without losing much
Are you sure? Or is that just superfluous for the way you’re reading it?
In some cases, it’s overly verbose. But if you’re taking this away from acclaimed authors, consider picking up some literary criticism (fancy words for fan theories). Chances are, there is meaning embedded in what you’re dismissing as fluff.
That's not really "information" in the information-theoretic sense that the other person was using, when it can be rewritten in all manner of different ways while conveying the same overall mood. The densest way to communicate "Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired" is exactly that. All the other words one would write around that core idea would not provide any more specificity to the sentiment, they'd just there to allow the reader to immerse themselves. Unless the information is simply the words themselves, in which case no text is any more entropic than any other.
> Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired.
This does not set a mood and thus does not convey the same information. This removes the information about mood and setting away while keeping only rough plot point in.
The outcome in terms of how reader interpret the situation is massively different. The thing you wrote implies that all they need is to go to sleep an hour sooner and rest, all will be fine.
The thing you're describing that's missing is context, not information. At that point in the plot, the reasons why they couldn't simply take a break wherever they wanted had already been explained, so it didn't need restating. As for mood-setting, I've already addressed that in other replies.
> The densest way to communicate "Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired" is exactly that
Uh, yes. This is press-release speak, optimised for a fourth grader’s reading comprehension.
If, on the other hand, you want to develop the motif of the Unseen—central to Tolkien’s work—the type of tired the characters are and how they’re detecting and addressing it is incredibly germane, interesting and totally lost in your summary.
You’re also describing the first scenes we see through familiar eyes of Mordor. The landscape is an extension of Sauron’s will. The contrast with the developed, organised, albeit crowded cities of men; the arrogance implied in the desolation; et cetera pack information lost in your summary.
The type of tired is "really". What happens is not that there's some additional information that I'm not communicating in that one sentence, but rather that the time it takes you to read "they're both really tired" is not enough for your mind to dwell on the idea and empathize with the characters. Now, if I instead were to write "They're both really tired. They're super tired. Oh man, they're so tired. They're so tired, you've never been this tired in your life", that would be extremely shitty writing, but it would give you time to ruminate on the information.
Extended time is your own proposal, and one you successfully defeated. This is generally called a strawman.
Instead, I propose that the type of tied is informationally and qualitatively distinct. The exhaustion of the weight of the world, internal struggle, amidst a dismal hellscape is different than "really tired".
Great writing can build depth of quality and understanding with the authors intent.
LOTR could be summarized with a sentence. The content is in the detail.
>Extended time is your own proposal, and one you successfully defeated. This is generally called a strawman.
Uh... Huh? So it's my argument, which I've refuted, and therefore it's a strawman? I think you should go get refreshed on informal fallacies. No, what's happening here is that there's a phenomenon that's being discussed -- namely, mood-setting in fictional writing -- and I'm proposing as its mechanism not additional information, but rather additional time. If you want to participate in the discussion you can't dismiss my argument my incorrectly calling it a strawman. You have to explain why it doesn't work as an explanation, like this:
>Instead, I propose that the type of tied is informationally and qualitatively distinct. The exhaustion of the weight of the world, internal struggle, amidst a dismal hellscape is different than "really tired".
Yet, if we were to replace the particular flavor of tiredness with a completely different, equally intense one, it would evoke the exact same empathic feeling on the reader, because the imagination is not precise enough to reproduce other people's feelings with such granularity. Someone can't precisely imagine the difference between the tiredness felt by Conan after 12 hours of turning a mill for the sixth day in a row, and that felt by Frodo. The reader is going to reach that passage and feel that the characters are really tired. That's why such long descriptions don't contain any more meaning; because they can be replaced with something completely different and put the same idea in the reader's mind: "Sam and Frodo are really tired".
>LOTR could be summarized with a sentence. The content is in the detail.
I've already addressed that. If the information is the words themselves and not their meaning, then any English text is equally information-dense. "It's raining" contains a third as much information as "it's raining, it's raining, it's raining", since it contains a third as many words.
> * if I instead were to write "They're both really tired. They're super tired. Oh man, they're so tired. They're so tired, you've never been this tired in your life", that would be extremely shitty writing, but it would give you time to ruminate on the information*
You’ve set up a great question. Why is what you wrote shitty writing while what Tolkien wrote not?
The answer isn’t just variation. If you look at what’s been conveyed in his writing that wasn’t with your repetition, you’ll start unlocking what I suspect you know is there but are having trouble describing.
It might sound like I’m just offering clichés – less is more, stop and smell the roses, take your time – and I guess I am. But clichés suffer the same issue: they are often profound insights, consumed and passed on too rapidly for their real meaning to register anymore. You really should stop and smell roses, as you know if you’re in the habit of doing that.
After I finished reviewing the CS textbook "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" in the mid 1990s during a vacation (looking for errors before publication), I found that my brain had been permanently reconfigured for speed reading. For years afterwards, I would automatically read entire sentences at a time, to go as fast as possible. I think I have now recovered sufficiently so that I can read books one word at a time.
This window refused to load until I allowed it to load Facebook. Somewhere, somehow, the content in this page will not display if the browser cannot connect to Facebook servers (I'm using Harmonic HN client on Android; it has built-in adblock for the webviews, but I use Tracker Control to block even more trackers; in this case whitelisting connect.facebook.net allowed the page to load)
It’s impossible to know if the content itself is worth the extra time and effort. Opportunity Cost is especially high in fiction. I agree that LotR should be on that list though.
I slowed myself down to savour this comment for a full 20s. Enough time to linger on each word for a long moment. Just like parent was asking for.
I pictured it spoken with a heavy Californian surfer accent. He wanted elaborate but a huge wave was breaking and he really didn’t want to miss the next one. Was in far too much of a rush to even leave punctuation behind.
So long, dude, I hope the waves keep coming for you.
I partially agree, but it depends on your objective function. If you’re optimising for the enjoyment of the experience of reading, you don’t need to know if the content is “worth it”; just read it slowly and if you’re not enjoying it, stop.
When learning to play a musical instrument and practicing a new song, some common advice is to play it as slowly as you can stand, to learn the motions well.
Right, but then you need to learn the right motions well, motions that will make sense at the final speed. I suppose it's one of those things that are made easier by having a teacher.
Skimmed through it; mostly reading the paragraphs above each picture. The irony of which is not lost on me :)
Really enjoyed the part talking about Tolkien. It reminds me of my own LOTR experience:
I finished the trilogy in three consecutive summers in the hilly countryside of Italy near Rome.
The first summer I made it through the fellowship of the ring with a lot of patience and trying for the slower moving parts.
The summer after that I started over and read book 1 and 2, and in year three I felt I was finally in sync with the pace of the book and enjoyed reading through book 1, 2, and 3 in a few weeks.
Does Dostoyevsky really need the slow treatment? Some parts of crime and punishment merited rereading but, at least in English translation, I didn't find much in the style to savor. Really it was more thematically interesting and suspenseful.
In the original Russian, Dostoyevsky requires the slow treatment. He loves the sort of 1/3 page long sentences that perplex the fast-path parser and force the reader's brain to swap; as if he wants to drive you mad so that you can better understand the madmen whom he writes about.
There is so much to unpack, which requires very slow treatment.
One of the things is savour so much is the time I read Idiot, we were on a cruise completely disconnected from the rest of the world. No distractions and just the sound on waves.
I don’t know any specific name for it, but it is fairly common reading technique used in literary analysis. If you ready any kind of poetry more refined (say [1] or [2]) in its internal structure, it is an absolute necessity.
It is quite amazing how many people do not know that there is a multitude of reading techniques to be used with various kinds of texts. You need to use a right tool for the job. Tolkien’s passages describing the Middle Earths ecological landscape are particularly rich calling for careful reading and lingual analysis. I believe he uses almost sole old Celtic words in those passages, avoiding any newer latin-based words more familiar to a modern reader, which cannot be a coincidence.
The best books improve with rereading and slower reading. Tolkien fits this. I had an English teacher who reread LOTR every summer. I’m not there, but I am on a 5ish year cycle.
Most books are the other way. Zoom through and you can get most of the value. This is especially true of non-fiction, where most have a message that can be gleaned in 15 minutes. (The exceptions are the great ones)
Podcasts are similar. Most give you 80% of the value at 2X speed. Even my favorites - I’d rather speed listen to get 80% the value rather than get 100% of half the backlog. The best podcasts defy this too.
So in the end it’s a bit of a skill to both choose the right things to slow down on, and then a discipline to force the appropriate speed.
I've always taken issue with youtube clips content creators automatically (?) cutting pauses between words or people listening to podcasts in 1.5x or 2x speed or even clips already being sped up. Folks, your brain can't keep up. It may feel great to rush through 10 hours of audio book in 5 hours, or dopamine-pushing even higher if you don't have pauses in that triggering tiktok clip, but it just makes you more and more superficial. Your brain needs time to process and reflect. The best speakers out there have a calm pace, not a rushing one. That's for a reason, and it's an excellent one.
There's certainly slow books still being written but most fantasy books in specific assume a certain amount of knowledge about a tolkien-esque world. You can do entirely new worlds, and some people do, but most stories are about people and the choices they make.
I've not read enough Corey to form a judgement, but I don't think Jordan has nearly enough literary "heft" to satisfy close reading. Don't get me wrong: the story is fun - I enjoyed every bit of Wheel of Time - and would recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing, but the deeper stuff (characters, prosidy, world-building, thematic "meaning") don't bear much examination.
In fantasy / sci-fi, I'd unreservedly recommend:
- Ursula K LeGuin
- Steven Erickson
- Gene Wolfe
With reservations, I'd recommend:
- Patrick Rothfuss (unfinished)
- George RR Martin (unfinished; sometimes dodgy prose, but occasionally transcendent character and theme)
- Dune (just know it goes downhill fast after the first book)
Elsewhere, but still genre (ie: meant to be entertaining, not uber-serious, self-conscious "literature"):
- Patrick O'Brian
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Dorothy Dunnet
I'd recommend Rudyard Kipling's short stories, but they're hit and miss, and sometimes out of step with modern mores. Maybe stick with the Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, and if you like those make sure you read Without Benefit of Clergy, They (short stories), and Kim (a masterpiece of a novel).
Once you've got through those, Hemingway is approachable, and the true modernist master. Fiesta / The Sun Also Rises (same book, known by different names in different parts of the world) is ironic and beautiful; A Farewell to Arms is beautiful and almost unbearably sad; his short stories are impeccable.
Love the idea that speed reshapes taste. When you slow down, a lot of "content" reveals itself as empty, and better stuff suddenly becomes accessible instead of intimidating
I think of this when I brush my teeth and realize I'm trying to be fast. I am tense and rapid, just rushing ahead to nowhere. I'm not really in a hurry.
It is also possible to walk at incredible low speeds. Some times, I try to force myself to walk as slowly as I dear. It is hard to walk slow in a city full of people. It feels silly. However, it feels great once you've actually slowed down.
My default reading speed has always been slow AF. I've always wished I could read faster. But now I'm going to look at it more as a feature, not a bug. Thanks!!
If only I could eat as slowly as I read...
The base material needs to be of a minimum quality for that experience to be enjoyable, I presume. I totally see the value of that, which is one of the reasons to sometimes reduce playback speed below what my default would be. Writings from Tolkien are maybe some of the best suited for that, but I'm not 100% convinced it would work for what I'm reading currently, so I might just try it anyway - the Foundation series from Asimov.
> When you slow down your eating speed, say to half or a third your default speed, you get much more enjoyment out of a smaller amount of food.
That's not always the case. With certain types of food, it's much more enjoyable to have your mouth full than to eat a small amount, for example. It's a trade-off.
It's the same with a story. Taking too long can make it boring, for example.
That doesn't mean we always choose the optimal balance, though.
LoTR isn’t for me, so reading it slowly wouldn’t be an enjoyable experience. There are other books for me where I found myself reading and re-reading, moving through the book slowly, marveling at text wondering how the author managed to pick perfect word after perfect word.
For some books, faster is better. Neuromancer, for example, has a lot of sentences and paragraphs that if I go slowly, I can’t figure out what it is that Gibson is talking about. But if I go fast, I pick up the vibe and things start to make sense.
This was the same epiphany I had in college when I learned how to actually study. Previously I would try to go fast and cram as much as possible into my head and hope my decent memory could save me. That only got me so far. I eventually realized that slowing down to fully comprehend what I was learning before allowing myself to move on yielded much better results and saved a lot more time in the long run. And as a result my grades shot up.
This is why I re-read books. I’ve read the Lord of the Rings probably like 10 times. When I already know what’s going to happen it’s easier for me to slow down and appreciate the scenery along the way. Even later readings might reveal choices the author made; I can start to see how the story was constructed.
I find this approach rewarding across most forms of media. There plenty of movies and music I’ve revisited over and over again.
When I was younger I also re-read The Lord of the Rings perhaps a dozen times. Each reading did seem to land differently—small details I had not noticed the first n times.
For some reason the first half of the first book appealed to me the most. I liked the leaving, the setting out on an adventure that you know not where it will lead you.
After Rivendell the hobbits no longer seemed to be driving.
In one of his essays, Philip Pullman suggested reading Paradise Lost out loud which was a revelation for me. I never considered reading anything out loud for myself but it changes the nature of the experience entirely.
Tolkien recorded some passages of LoTR on a friend's tape recorder while it was still unpublished, I'd highly recommend checking them outz particularly the Ride of the Rohirrim.
Great article. Living and enjoying life is a skill that needs conscious practice and intentionality.
The title would make more sense as the default settings being "too low" since Low is the setting where when we trade off fidelity for speed, but "too high" has a nice ring to it.
Tangential but when reading books like Lord of the Rings with songs periodically written in the text, I’ve always enjoyed trying to sing the songs out loud and set a melody for them that feels appropriate for the universe. It really makes the songs come alive.
This almost reads like the beginning of a mathematical proof of Zen: As the speed with which you pursue satisfaction asymptotically approaches zero, your state of mind asymptotically approaches enlightenment.
When I was meditating regularly I found this easier to do. I had the presence of mind to notice I was rushing and slow down and focus on the details. I need to start meditating again.
I can only read at mouth speed. I'm pronouncing each word in my head. I wished I could go fast sometimes. Finishing books takes me at least twice as long as it does for my wife.
When I use Claude Code and Codex for development, I've had some similar experiences. Claude Code always completes tasks very quickly, but leaves behind a mess that makes me anxious. Codex, on the other hand, is always slow—it slowly reads through the entire project's code, then makes changes very cautiously, testing and verifying after every small modification, and even calls codex review --uncommitted once more before committing.
At first, I found writing code with Claude Code to be enjoyable, while Codex seemed boring. But over time, I've discovered that I actually prefer Codex. Perhaps slowing down really is the key to writing high-quality code.
I think this is reading using System 2 instead of System 1. And as System 2 is much more detail oriented, it makes sense that you would notice a lot more.
If you read the lord of the rings faster, you run out of lord or the rings sooner — there's no away around this. But if you eat faster, you can just eat more food. You can eat just as long, and end up feeling just as full. There is no need to eat slower to prolong the enjoyment of flavor.
tldr; I found something similar when I forced myself to slow down on "The Wheel of Time" series recently.
I've been reading the Wheel of Time (started by Robert Jordan, ended by Brandon Sanderson). I'm on book 11 currently. I've found something similar in that the Jordan's later books in the WOT are basically just incredible slogs if you read for completion (which, I myself did around 20 years ago at around book 10, where I stopped). Around book 6 or so I purposely slowed down and started really imagine the scenes in my minds eye. I also keep the map open on my phone and just kind of keep note of where they are at different points in the series.
Obvious, but it is really striking how much better his books are when you try to "live in the moment" of your imagination as you read, rather than reading to move the plot and action forward. I was kind of confused with myself when I reflected on it. That I somehow thought it made more sense to skim through an entire series and take reduced pleasure from something, when I could just take 50% longer and actually enjoy it.
Made me wonder about where else I am doing this in my life.
I still thinks these books are radically overpadded. He was clearly in love with his characters and his setting. He needed the guidance of a strong armed editor imho. With all that said, if you are going to commit to reading a massive series like this, you might as well appreciate it in the moment, you are going to be here a while.
What worked for us professionally, voraciously taking in information, might be less effective going forward. Being more judicious in consuming fewer, high-quality sources of content is likely to work better in the age of AI slop.
Is it just me, but seeing the general layout of the site, I feel a powerful sense of nostalgia - as if its something straight out of the mid 2000s to early 10s era of internet.
My dad was a busy construction contractor. One summer he tore himself away from work and took the family to a week long boat camp out next to a big beautiful lake. It turned out that our campsite was actually in the lake by a few inches at high water, but dad saw a way to dam it off and keep it dry, so he grabs the shovel and starts digging trenches and building walls and ordering us around.
About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.
My spouse and I dealt with this on our honeymoon. We were both working 50-80 hour weeks for months leading up to our trip. The first day we got to this all-inclusive resort we spent the whole time trying to min/max and be as efficient and calculated as possible. It was a stressful, miserable day.
Day two we looked at each other, had an adult beverage with breakfast, and relaxed for the rest of the trip.
Growing up in a quaint rural town where high-powered people from NYC liked to "get away", this is very common situation, and the inability to disconnect and adopt a slower attitude was, IMO, the primary cause of friction between the weekenders and the locals. They would physically get away from the city, but were unable to mentally release the blend of Type-A competitive neuroses that helped them get ahead in the city but just made them come off as obnoxious in this slower, quieter place.
I've found myself in this mode before, too. A couple of years ago I was preparing for weeklong wilderness backpacking trip with some friends. I'd recently quit my high-stress job to take some time off, and I had a few new pieces of gear I wanted to test before relying on them on a longer trip. When I looked at the calendar, though, every weekend before we were to leave was already spoken for.
I was worrying about it to my wife, trying to decide whether I'd just have to use the old worn out gear or risk it with the new stuff, when she stopped me: "why don't you just... go on Monday?" It took me a second to even get what she was saying—I was still so much in work-all-the-time-mode that my brain didn't even consider whatsoever the possibility that I could just... go off and go camping on a weekday. I was really baffled for a moment, and I've reflected on that a bit since, it's funny how you can be trapped in your own default operating mode and not even realize it.
It’s like those animals that walk in little circles the size of their last pen.
Except the pen is 1/3 of our adult lives.
Which 1/3 is that? It's black iron prisons all the way down
I've settled in a city 60% smaller than the one I grew up in. It's still a full-blown city, but there's way fewer of those competitive types - they all moved to where I came from.
I'm not really a resort person. But I do subscribe to some travel feeds mostly in the vein of maybe finding some places/attractions/restaurants/etc. that I'm not familiar with. The number of hyper-scheduled spreadsheets I see is amazing. Doesn't mean I don't often have some itinerary and even book some particular, popular attractions/venues. But the 30-minute block scheduling is something I do for work (if that).
ADDED: I'll just add that I created a loose spreadsheet for a ~week-long NYC trip with (I think) just one timed admission for a recently reopened museum and no times otherwise. I think I ended up dynamically scrawling over the printout with changes for most of the trip.
I have an upcoming trip planned in asia - never been before.
My firm rule is - have a loose plan, aim for one activity per day, an emergency option, or two, if the weather plays up, and that's it.
It's the type of plan that has worked for every holiday that I have taken that involves a different city to the one I live in.
This is typically what I aim for.
One or two core activities for the day.
If it works out for more that's great but it's not expected or necessary.
I've traveled with some people who seem focused on just getting pictures in front of as many things as possible which seems a poor way to really take in a place.
My family went to Hawaii a couple of years ago and in the exact middle of the trip we took a day doing absolutely nothing and it was kind of great.
I think that's a good plan. I do tend to book hotels, planes, and usually longer trains. But, especially for a longer city trip, I loosely map out--even if just mentally--things I want to see and do but, for example, one museum a day is mostly enough unless another convenient one is small.
one of the funniest things about going to NYC with a toddler was how very chill it was to go with a toddler
there are parks everywhere!
There are! Central Park of course. But also pocket parks all over the place.
I was like this but maybe not as stressful as you described. Still, I wanted to do stuff and see stuff during vacation.
After having kids, my habit changed. Now we enjoy going to local parks and walking around with no goals during vacation. This wonderful attraction? Nah we don't need to see it. If we can walk there, then maybe.
When we were planning a trip to Hawaii the first thing I researched was where all the local parks with playgrounds were. That way if we were driving and my son was getting bored or we needed to stretch our legs we knew where something was. There's usually a town, village, or city park nearby no matter where I've been. Even driving to Crater Lake through rural Oregon there were some great parks in the towns we drove through. Same with the drive out to Yosemite. This was the case up until we got within an hour or two of the park itself.
Some of the most enjoyable parts of those trips were hanging out with my family in a local park.
I have a hard time doing anything when in a nice resort. If it’s too nice, you just want to hangout at your pool villa all day and enjoy the view.
And if you're presumably paying a premium for a nice resort, why wouldn't you spend a lot of your time taking advantage of it?
Yes, if you want to get out and do things, better to go for low or mid range. You don’t want your room to feel like a huge sunk cost.
I tend to default to a midrange place as I'm not much interested in spending a lot of time by the pool. And when traveling on business, if meals weren't being covered, I didn't actually much care for resorts when I felt like a bit of of a prisoner in terms of meals etc.
Slowing down isn't passive, it's a conscious choice
It often takes energy to relax.
Your Dad is a beaver, he heard running water and instinctively began to build a dam.
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What did you get out of this comment? What do you think a reader gets? Maybe follow the spirit of the article: slow down and pounder, be curious, maybe you would have gotten the right take away instead of being antagonizing towards someone's fond memory.
I think the response is a great comment. It really is insane that they felt the need to damn the flooded campsite.
The comment actually does a great job of accentuating the point of the story. Everyone offended is too caught up in their achiever mode mindset to truly appreciate the absurdity.
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Its not a race to express the first thing that comes to mind, its a mutual discussion themed by top level comments. If you dislike the top level comments for some reason it's better to move on instead, unless some counter points enrich the discussion we're all having.
Please move on, then.
What makes HN so great is that it's curated towards curiosity. Not simple quibs. If the only value your comment has is to yourself, you could write it without pressing the submit button.
>What makes HN so great is that it's curated towards curiosity. Not simple quibs.
It wasn't just a quib. It contained some sarcasm, but it was also an honest question.
>If the only value your comment has is to yourself, you could write it without pressing the submit button.
I could also just have the thought and not write it down. Neither option would count as having expressed it. I need to have it intrude upon someone else's psyche.
We can get stuck in our minds and lean too much on prior skills instead of fully assessing the problem at hand. More likely than not, given he was a contractor, building a trench and walls seemed like a simple solution to something he has probably dealt with many time and didn't think twice about it.
I just don't understand how it could occur to no one in a group of three or four people for a whole hour. Like, even if the barrier had been fully built and worked perfectly even after considering the tide, they would have been making camp on fully soaked ground. Just what everyone wants first thing in the morning: to trudge through mud.
I think it did occur to everyone and that's part of the conclusion of the story - instead of stubbornly battling the situation we should brace it and adapt to it.
Where’d you sleep? Going wit the flow and enjoying life is admirable but that sounds like a pretty terrible camp site tbh.
Arizona, Lake Havasu, triple digit temperatures. We spent more time in the water than out of it. Us kids loved the flooded camp because of the tiny fish that would swim up and nibble on our toes. It tickled. The camp was boat access only, and there were a few million acres of desert wilderness higher ground to move up to. The water rose gradually and the tents never got wet.
The bigger problem with that camp was the rattlesnakes. I killed one with the shovel and felt grown up.
They moved the tents.
Yep. Slow reading of HN comments also has its benefits.
I guess this person sees the same mental image as me: Tents with wet floor, moisture sucked into everything inside. A tent that’s been in a lake sounds like a throwaway to me. But maybe what you see as a tent is different from what I see.
For me the story was also a bit weird. “Just take the tents out of the water”. Ok…
Even if that were true (and it obviously isn't), what then would be the point of expending tremendous time and energy to "dam it off and keep it dry"?
These are alternative ways to keep the tents dry ... which entails that they were never soaked in the first place.
> A tent that’s been in a lake
The tents were never in the lake. A few inches of the campsite was in the lake at high water.
> sounds like a throwaway to me
Do you have any experience with this? I've been on trips where tents and even sleeping bags ended up in a river. They don't dissolve ...they can be dried in the sun. And a tent with a wet floor can be wiped down.
> “Just take the tents out of the water”.
Those words don't appear anywhere. Try looking at the actual words and not just your mental images.
> The tents were never in the lake. A few inches of the campsite was in the lake at high water. [...] Those words don't appear anywhere. Try looking at the actual words and not just your mental images.
I think some people are interpreting “campsite” as the literal space occupied by the tent’s ground sheet while you are interpreting it as the broader area - which in an organised institutional arrangement might be called the “campground”
To use an analogy, think of being in a partly flooded parking space vs parking lot
It makes sense that someone with the former interpretation - the tent ground sheet submerged by a few inches of water - would understand that the tent got soaked.
I've always understood "campground" to be a whole area open to camping with dozens or hundreds of campers. A campsite is where your group's claim is staked and the area you occupy including picnic tables, fires, etc--not just the tent.
I'm interpreting the word as what it means and how it is obviously being used. No one takes "campsite" to mean "the literal space occupied by the tent’s ground sheet" unless they are playing some silly sophistic game. Here is what it means (pick your own source ... they are all similar and none agrees with your definition):
"A campsite is a designated area where individuals can set up bedding, sleeping bags, or cooking equipment, such as stoves or fires. This definition encompasses any location that allows for sleeping or cooking, regardless of whether it includes a tent, lean-to, shack, or other structures."
And here's the Wikipedia description, which notes that the English "campsite" is equivalent to the American "campground", but that is broader and neither is so absurdly narrow as your words:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campsite
> would understand that the tent got soaked
I already refuted this nonsense ... there is no reason to think from the OP's description that the tent got soaked.
> To use an analogy, think of ...
I don't need any help with thinking, especially from bad analogies that are flatly contradicted by the OP's description. What's the parking lot analogy to building dams?
I guess the term "tent" is pretty broad, this is what I see: [0], the cotton does not take being in water very well.
But I guess a synthetic ultra light tent will do better.
I also assumed the tents were already there when he arrived (complete assumption, but the term campsite conjures up a place with tents already there), and so must be of the more heavy more stationary kind.
Anyway, the point is, I also had this question: Where do you go when you mess up your tent like that? How can a dam in a layer of water make it dry? Don't you need a dam and then pump it dry.
This is going too far, I just wanted to defend the question. Maybe it's a cultural difference.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=de+waard+tent&ia=images&iax...
> Maybe it's a cultural difference.
It appears that you are confused with West European camping, which is where you drive two days to the south of France (most of which stuck in traffic), pay large amounts of money for a patch of perfectly flat grass where you are allowed to park your car and set up your tent. In a grid pattern with hundreds of other tents. Where there is a building nearby for toilets and showers. And a swimming pool plus live entertainment for the children.
OP appears to be talking about camping in nature.
A “campsite” is a relatively flat and relatively root/stump-free patch of dirt. That’s it. Also tents are generally not made out of the canvas material you linked that yurts and teepees might be made from.
Tents are generally made of a very wuick-drying, thin synthetic.
And like the other person said, this does make it seem like you’ve potentially never been camping but i don’t want to gatekeep the definition of “camping”. My version is carrying everything I need on my back for two weeks and walking 10-15 miles each day to the next campsite (read: “patch of dirt”, preferably near fresh water). Other people “camp” in RV’s though, so.
Camping is just the bit about sleeping at night. I’d call your version hiking/walking/backpacking depending where I am.
Of course it's not.
"A campsite is a designated area where individuals can set up bedding, sleeping bags, or cooking equipment, such as stoves or fires. This definition encompasses any location that allows for sleeping or cooking, regardless of whether it includes a tent, lean-to, shack, or other structures."
I would note that camping also involves sitting in campchairs talking, reading, singing, etc.
And
> I’d call your version hiking/walking/backpacking depending where I am.
The hiking/walking/backpacking is what nerdsniper does between campsites:
> My version is carrying everything I need on my back for two weeks and walking 10-15 miles each day ==> to the next campsite <==
Despite his phrasing, he of course is not saying that hiking == camping.
Of course what's not what? If you're going to attempt to be a pedant, you need to also be precise.
Have you tried hammock camping? I only tried it at a campground, so, maybe there are some downsides I missed for the real backpackers. But it was pretty cool to not care about roots, the flatness of my patch of ground, or anything like that.
I have! And i do love it. Hammocks generally benefit from very dense forest/tree cover just in case it’s raining!
Natural fiber canvas tents take to water about the same as your tee shirt does. Which is to say perfectly fine. Soaking them for a few days or even weeks shouldn't really bother them if the water is not warm and stagnant (like a nice clean lake). The biggest killer is storing them still wet.
That's a dangerous conspiracy theory.
> the term campsite conjures up a place with tents already there
You've never been camping. Ok.
I think you’re viewing this through your own cultural lens where camping can be totally solo (in the woods?)
In England, we can’t just pitch up a tent in the woods, we need to pay for a campsite where there’s other tents.
I suspect, from their description, this person is from a different country again, where camping may happen in large open steppe with lots of other yurts.
Nothing you wrote contradicts anything I said about camping. Someone else suggested that "campsite" just means the area covered by a tent and its groundcover, which is closer to the "mental image" of the other person who wrongly believes that tents got waterlogged, but is the arch opposite of yours. I've camped in the woods, on open steppes, and in designated camping areas in French and English towns. In each of those cases I brought my own tent, but I've also "glamped" and stayed in existing canvas-sided structures, from Yosemite to Mont St. Michel.
Also, this is about a campsite a few inches of which is in a lake, and people moving their tents. But apparently paying attention to the actual context is optional for some people.
I’m not trying to dispute your version of events. I’m just offering a suggestion of what teekert had in their mind when they thought of a campsite, to better help you see where the misunderstanding comes from. Given they replied with agreement, I hope I captured it accurately.
I also feel it was unnecessary to dismiss their experience as “not camping,” just because it was different to yours. It turns a learning opportunity for us all into a needlessly toxic argument.
None of this is responsive to my comment that you are responding to ... I find that quite toxic. And I will note that you wrote this toxic criticism:
> I think you’re viewing this through your own cultural lens where camping can be totally solo (in the woods?)
Again, your notion of my experience of camping does not come from anything I actually wrote ... that's quite toxic.
And recognizing the mere possibility of camping solo in the woods (which has nothing to do with anything in this thread--the OP was in a group on a lakeshore) has nothing to do with a "cultural lens".
That's the last I will say about this trivial matter.
> I think you’re viewing this through your own cultural lens where camping can be totally solo (in the woods?)
Allow me to correct myself: I meant to say I believed you were referring wild camping, away from a commercial site (either alone or part of a group).
> None of this is responsive to my comment that you are responding to ... I find that quite toxic.
You find it toxic that I won’t join you in an argument that only you want to have?
> Again, your notion of my experience of camping does not come from anything I actually wrote ... that's quite toxic.
I just woke up an hour ago. Did you find that toxic, too?
Yeah, this.
I’ve been camping, on trips that ranged from “park on the side of the road and set up a tent” to “hike four days carrying everything” and also “drive to campsite, walk into permanent managed tent”. Sounds like you’ve only done a more limited range of camping trips.
No, it doesn't sound like that at all, and you have offered no reason to think so. It's the other person who clearly has an extremely limited notion of camping: "the term campsite conjures up a place with tents already there" -- perhaps you have the two of us mixed up. And the OP said that they moved the tents, so ass-u-me ing that they were fixed structures is not rational.
Why would noticing that someone had "an extremely limited notion of camping" make you suggest that they had no experience at all? And if you are familiar with the form they mentioned, why would you act like you aren't?
Thanks for the attempt at a generous reading, but the truth of the matter is I just skimmed the comment and missed that bit. These things happen, no biggie.
Tents often are waterproof for the first few inches.
They don't teach reading comprehension like they used to.
Do’h
This can work with the way you think as well.
Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead.
I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk.
This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
I often do this in meetings and have gotten into the habit of saying "I'm thinking". It's not much but it gives both of us time to think and explicitly makes it clear I don't expect the person to say something. I think that helps.
I just blurt out "processing" when they start looking at me weird. People tend to take it well.
I read this at first as "I just blurt out "processing" and people look at me weird", which made me smile.
Fair enough, I do like parent’s a bit better, “blurting processing” feels like a too high default setting right after seeing “I’m thinking” :) - not that any of it matters anyways, communicating _something_ gets you there. Rest it just triaging around the edges what people will call you weird for, and if they are, they were going to anyway.
"Give me a second" is something I say when someone just has to break the silence with some unproductive comment. Having 20-30 seconds to think silently should be a completely normal thing.
”Thinking longer for a better answer”
I that once in a technical interview and got the job (just paused for 30 seconds until the answer came to me). I think they expected a 15 minute process of problem solving.
If I recall correctly the question was something like:
You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of the day you must have an unbiased sampling of cars that have driven by you. How do you record the cars?
Nice statistical problem! I only thought of a solution that is valid for many cars and few worksheet spots. Were you able to fully solve it on the spot?
What other situations are you concerned with that your solution doesn’t handle?
The best solution I could think of on the spot was this: First write down every license place until it fills up. Then for each time a car drives by, give it a 1/2 chance to write it down. Moving down the list regardless of the outcome. Then once the bottom is reached, do it again but with 1/3 a chance. Over and over again, decreasing the chance each time.
I checked for which situations it is valid, and it surprisingly was when there are many more cars than the list size. But it is not valid when there are just a few more cars than the list size.
Mine was to roll a number between 1 and N once N is greater than M (N being cars seen so far, M your slots available). If you get a number that is less than or equal to M, replace that slot. If it is greater than M, that sample is dropped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling
> typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close.
I find it absolutely is much of the time - I'll determine the architecture/overall solution, know exactly what needs to go in a multitude of files, and now actualizing all that isn't really thinking anymore, just donkey work. Getting AI to do this has been incredible now that it's finally good enough. I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass, and when I introduced bugs by changing it by hand, it found them instantly from stack traces without even having symbols, saving me hours. I see a future where writing a large codebase all by hand is seen like raising a barn the Amish way with no powertools - impressive and maybe there's something to be said for it philosophically, but just not practical otherwise.
I find however, that while typing it all out, my mind often continues analyzing and thinking, and that I often find a new idea, or new structure, that might be even better. Typing it out and seeing it appear in front of me. It also gives me a feeling for how tedious, brittle, or annoying the solution is.
Granted, sometimes it's really not that interesting to type the stuff. It depends what one is working on.
Each time I write a routine it's different. Its better. I've learned something from last time. In fact, this is one of the things that got me hooked on computing. That there's so much complexity, often hidden, that there's always more to learn and improve upon.
And truth be told, if I'm writing the same thing many times it's time to create a library. Maybe just for myself or for the company I work for. But the same thing happens. I always learn more while doing it and it always gets better.
I fear the programmer whose bottleneck is typing. They already know the answer. But the problem is that there is none
If you use that much time for donkey work, you are using the wrong tools. If it is so simple so that can delegate it to a LLM, you need to use a language with more expressive power.
There's no such language, sans Lisp with extreme use of macros.
Here's an alternative take: if typing isn't a bottleneck for you, and you don't experience coding as being donkey work, you are thinking too slow, and/or in too small increments.
How often are you actually doing this though? I think I probably work in something greenfield about once a decade. The hard part is always going down a rabbit hole in established code bases. I can do the boilerplate in a few days. It saves time, but not really even one hairy issue a year.
> The hard part is always going down a rabbit hole in established code bases.
Actually, I found that this is exactly where they shine (I wouldn't trust them with greenfield implementation myself). Exploring existing code is so much easier when you can ask them how something works. You can even ask them to find problems - you can't trust them to be correct, of course, but at least you get some good brainstorming going. And, incredibly, they often do find actual problems in the code. Pretty impressive for language models.
Nowadays? 4+ times a week. I want to learn as much as I can now that I essentially have 24/7 mentors that can remember everything I've told them.
Sure, I could write it all by hand; but even as a decent typer, I'll never match a tenth speed of claude code or opencode just GOING. Maybe there's a better way to learn, but whatever it is, it's not obvious to me.
How long have you been programming?
I actually felt like I learned the most when I stopped going to Google and StackOverflow for solutions and instead moved to docs. It's far less direct but the information is much more rich. All that auxiliary information compounds. I want to skip it, feeling rushed to get an answer, but I've always been the better for taking the "scenic route". I'd then play around and learn how to push functions and abuse them. Boy there's no learning like learning how to abuse code.
Fwiw, I do use LLMs, but they don't write code for me. They are fantastic rubber ducky machines. Far better than my cat, which is better than an actual rubber duck. They aid in docs too, helping fill in that space when you don't exactly understand them. But don't let them do the hard work nor the boring work. The boring work is where you usually learn the most. It's also the time you don't recognize that's happening
Close to 5 years. I read docs too and love the immersion and the fully grasping of concepts when going with your route, but most days there's just not enough hours for this.
> The boring work is where you usually learn the most. It's also the time you don't recognize that's happening
That was always how I did it before mid-2025. And I do still do boring work when I truly want to master something, but doing that too much just means (for me) not finishing anything.
5 years isn't that long. I've been doing 3X that and I'm constantly learning new things. Not even about new language features but even languages I've been using that whole time. New ways to problem solve. New algorithms. New tools.
Not finishing things can be okay but also not. An important skill to learn is what's good enough. And to write good enough to be easily upgradable. It's important to write code to be flexible for this reason. It's also important to realize it's okay to completely throw away code. But also this is the reason comments are so important. Don't just write what functions do but also write how you envision the design. Even if you can't get to it now. Then when you or anyone else comes back (after lunch, next week, next year, whenever) there's good hints about all that. Knowing how to get up to speed and be effective fast. If anything this helps agents even more. Commenting is a vastly under appreciated skill and only becoming more valuable
> I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass
Lmao, please tell me what products you're working on so I can avoid them
Oh my, the AI bros got upset! You must be cranky from having to fix all those bugs your agent keeps throwing up in your "flawless 500+ LOC" code they keep writing.
If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud.
For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.
From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
Sure, but isn't there still an advantage to this? If two people are silently doing this then they don't influence one another as much, helping find a wider range of solutions as well as identify issues with certain solutions that the other might not have seen.
Instead if you're blurting out your thinking more in unison. Naturally you'll stray less, exploring less.
Of course you want collaboration but I find the magic is going back and forth between alone and together. I even find this helpful when just working by myself, stepping away from the problem or context switching, allowing the problem to distill.
I had the same thoughts reading this. I think there’s an optimal blend of blurters and thinkers, one isn’t better than the other. I find that I do both, it just kind of depends on my comfort with the subject matter.
Another way to think of it is if you're blurting out your thinking you're reducing redundant work and perhaps inspiring the other person to think of additional solutions that are offshoots of what you're dismissing. I see merits to both ways of looking at this.
Yeah I agree but that's why I think there's a balance. But the context here is the more nervous blurting which I think is going too much in the other direction. We should be comfortable with some silence and thinking.
But everyone has their own personal preferences. Which is perfectly fine too. But I think it's worth mentioning that, as illustrated by the comment, it's typically more acceptable to blurt than think silently. And there's the bias that blurting makes it harder to think silently by thinking silently doesn't make blurting harder (the uncomfortable with some silence part is not healthy imo. Of course long silence is a different issue but we're talking 30-60s)
Probably true for many. When thinking about hard problems I'm usually not thinking in language, at least not the kind we speak between us humans, so it can be incredibly distracting if I have to "translate" back and forth while both thinking and communicating.
> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying.
As you sort of point out between the lines, it depends on what you work on. I had an AI agent rewrite some ancient (and terrible code) which had stopped working because the v1 of an api on v3 was sunset. It took around 5 minutes out of my day, and most of those were having two people explaining to me where the code was and what they thought had happened to make it break. It would've like taken me a full day to fix without AI because I would have needed to understand things first, and because it was quite a lot of code.
The result wasn't very good, but it was better than what was before, and since that had run for years without anyone tuching it, well... good enough. Heck, it might've taken me more than a day because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".
Aside from this anecdote I think AI writes a good 80% of my code these days. I'm not sure I buy the whole "bottleneck or not" discussion around typing. I think for a lot of people, myself included, AI does 10x part of the process of writing software. Where it doesn't help is when you need to do computer science, and as you point out, those parts AI don't speed up. I sometimes still use AI for computer science parts, but in those situations the AI will be a rubber duck because I tend to think by talking out my own ideas, and at least the AI duck pretends to answer. Even if the answer is more useless than what the actual rubber duck comes up with, which it usually is, it's more immersive for me.
Don't get me wrong, we all write sloppy code and often not our best. It's one of the difficulties of being an engineer, deciding what exactly is good enough.
> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close.
It's always possible to go slower for practically no cost. -- So, any benefit from going slower is obtainable for everyone.
Whereas, typing faster takes discipline and effort. There are diminishing benefits to putting in more effort to type faster.
The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
While typing I'm doing other things in parallel.
Those other things are things that require you to scrutinize and look at each character. I think the vacuum analogy from the OP is quite apt here. It's much harder to debug other people's code and more so an LLMs.
I do this a lot as well. I have a bad habit of just freezing physically when I start to think. Since my work is conducted over video, my colleagues will often think I dropped off the call XD
Personally I find it a bad habit of mine, I have no idea how people gracefully take time to think. Whenever I do say something like “hold on, let me just think for a moment” my brain completely freezes and I get no thinking done.
I worked with a guy that operated like this, a technical expert in a very specialized domain. You'd ask him a question - he'd just stare at you in silence for 60s or more, and then give a very well-considered answer that you couldn't get from anyone else in the world.
His manager was used to this and sort of enjoyed the mystique of this monk-like expert that he was responsible for.
I once was in a meeting where we had to talk to the great expert on the phone. Let's just say his name was Otto. Of course, he worked remote quite often, in the days before Zoom. His manager calls him and puts the phone on speakerphone for the room to hear.
Manager: Otto, we need your input on <long technical problem>.
<60 seconds of silence>
Otto: Yes, I think that might work, but you'll run into <other problems>.
Manager: Well, yes, we've considered that, but <explanation>
A few minutes of reasonably normal conversation ensues between the assembled group and Otto. Then:
Manager: Well, I think then that this is a pretty good solution, as long as Otto agrees.
Manager looks around the table, clearly waiting for Otto's concurrence
<60 seconds of silence>
<90 seconds of silence>
<120 seconds of silence>
People are starting to get uncomfortable. The manager makes a reassuring face. This is normal for those of us that work closely with the great expert, do not lose faith.
<240 seconds of silence>
Manager briefly lets slip a concerned look, then quickly hides it
<360 seconds of silence>
Manager: Um, Otto?
Otto: Oh, I thought I was waiting for you.
I think it gets at something we've collectively trained ourselves out of: tolerating silence while thinking
By coincidence I also finished The Fellowship of the Ring about two weeks ago.
I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens.
You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and still know basically what happened to Frodo and where he's going. But that's not really the point. When I read a book of that much importance, I've always read every word and understood every sentence. I get easily distracted and often have to reread passages. I am not a fast reader. Tolkien's descriptions are not always that easy. But this is what I find so rewarding about reading in the first place.
However, when I'm reading an article online, the difference is stark. When I read articles, I usually start from the bottom and read backwards. That's my way of finding out the results, and then piecing together how much context I actually need to understand it. Maybe I should slow that down sometimes.
Although people think LoTR as a novel meant for younger people, it certainly is not an Tolkien never meant it that way and it certainly is not an easy text. It is far more complex than any fantasy I have ever come across. Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring. One would be mad to simply skim it through.
> Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring.
If you want to see it then way Tolkien saw it, probably the best way is to get through all that unimportant stuff involving rings and battles as quickly as possible to get to the appendices where Tolkein spent his time thinking about the history and etymology and even neat little details like how the calendar worked in the Shire...
(I'm only half joking)
> One would be mad to simply skim it through.
Reminds me of an ah-ha! moment I had as a kid playing a text adventure game on my C64. I was stuck for a while and tried to find alternative ways forwards. I typed in "cheat" and it replied "OK, you win!" and ended the game.
This is also possible in the first and second Monkey Island games, using hotkeys ctrl+W or maybe alt+W.
The cheat code will immediately end your game while informing you that you scored 800 of 800 points (presumably a Sierra reference; this is the only way to score any number - including zero - of points).
There's no particular reason you'd discover this while playing either game, but if you play the third one, a mandatory plot point will show the message "You lose. You scored 0 of 800 points," referring back to the obscure joke in the earlier games.
Haha! Love it.
One might also argue that The Little Prince is "far more complex" and deeper than anything written at a typical adult reading level. That lower linguistic surface complexity allows more space for the reader to explore ideas and themes.
I'm skeptical. Is there no more value to series like Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse, beyond mere literary masochism, compared to LotR? Like them or not, LotR, as elaborate as its mythology is (if you include Silmarillion and some or all of the History of Middle Earth), is not at the same level.
One would like to point out that the set {Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse} is not a subset of {fantasy books I have come across}. I would not dare to claim that LoTR is the end all of all fantasy writing. Perhaps the word ”complex” was a bad choice here, since I’m sure there is books with more complex structure (which is not necessarily a good thing…)
I think what I tried to say is that the language Tolkien uses is as much or more part of the middle earth as are the characters, maps and whatnot. The obvious point is that he created whole new languages and writing systems for the book, basing the two Elvish languages on Finnish and Welsh etc. Other is that he changes his vocabulary depending on what he is describing. I am not a linguistic scholar, but I’m fairly vertain that at least in Two Towers the parts describing nature, forrests and whatnot use solely words that are celtic in origin, ie. no Latin influence and very old. There’s also structural techniques of interwoven plots that I can’t even start to unwind.
Point being, you can very much read the book on surface level as Frodo and the Ring and Swords and lah-di-daa and that is all fine. That’s how I read it when I was 12-13. But there is so much more, mastery of English language comparable only to Cormac McCarthy and Joyce… Here Tolkien is very much a singular writer, escaping the limits of genre he very much was essential in creating.
So no wonder it is perhaps the most influential book of the 20th century.
Not celtic, germanic, i.e. Anglo-Saxon derived words.
I've read that Tolkien wrote There and Back Again / The Hobbit as a book for his children. Then he started writing what would become The Fellowship of The Ring for his kids, but he quickly realized that the story was taking many dark turns and that he was best served by moving away from writing it as a book for his kids.
I read that he partly wrote LOTR to have a "source" for the new languages made up!
I don't know. I enjoyed it in tweens and high school, couldn't get into it again in later life.
I think both ways of reading are fine. Sometimes you just want to get on with the plot, other times you want to immerse yourself. Or maybe you always just want to get on with the plot, which is fine, just don't complain about the book being boring, it just wasn't for you. Which is how I feel about Lotr. But at the same time, rushing over the songs, boring parts with Tom etc is also how I managed to make it work for me.
Speed reading absolutely works if the goal is "what happened and why," but Tolkien is a good reminder that plot is just the skeleton
I've been reading "Terminal Alliance", a light, humorous s.f. novel. After reading tfa I've slowed down and after all it's Christmas holidays, what's the rush? Even reading this inconsequential novel more slowly has allowed me to enjoy the details more. The metric in online discussions is always how many books you read, but this is a reminder that that's not the point.
The title, about "default settings" being "too high" makes me want an example from a technical domain, though.
> When I read a book of that much importance
Imagine if Tolkien was writing Fellowship last decade, and the book landed on your hands today. No decades of cult growing, no adaptations or explosive marketing, some word of mouth. Would you think it "much important" before reading it? What makes the importance?
In my opinion it's the prose. It's always the prose. Always gotta be on the lookout for good writers, new and old.
I love Woody Allen's speed reading joke:
> "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."
I could see value in slowing down or re-reading crafted writing like Tolkien's. I've been doing that with St. Paul's epistles.
There is no value in doing it for modern clickbait or AI slop though.
I thought I was crazy for reading articles backwards, but it really does help to build a better picture of what's being shared or reported.
I find that a lot of journalists like to pack their writing with fluff before they even reach the subject of the headline, a lot like recipe blogs sharing their life stories before finally reaching the instructions, as if the recipe is only secondary or tertiary to the background given.
This is why I appreciate articles that include bullet points or a TL;DR right at the beginning to summarize. For anything really long that I'm just not interested in reading fully and only want the main points, I use an LLM with the URL to summarize briefly.
While there's so much value in slowing down as the OP wrote, I feel as if journalists want you to lend the same pace to them for all the time of ours they waste. It's like they forget how much information is available to us and how unimportant it all is.
I find walking can be a similar experience. It really crystalized for me this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago because of the effect of exploring another country. When you walk, you see everything. The world is huge. Everything is slower, higher fidelity, and for me, richer. You can spend an entire day walking from one town to another. Think of everything you will see! Compare this to driving. Driving is like compression. You could drive between the same two towns in less than an hour. You may see many beautiful things while driving, but the experience is fleeting and momentary. You will miss so many details along the way.
As always, there are tradeoffs, and you can't walk everywhere or always have these types of mindful experiences. On the other hand, life is short and perhaps paradoxically, slower experiences can yield richer days.
For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games. The whole thing becomes this strange distorted reality where the travel nodes and their immediate surroundings are over represented in your mental model but most of the rest of the map is blank. Now I don't think games should get rid of their fast travel systems But I find that enjoy the game world a lot more without them and think every one should try.
The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.
My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.
> For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games.
I was playing Wing Commander, Privateer way back when (mid-1990's) and didn't realize that there were ways to travel faster. So I did the obvious: I pretended I was a trader on a long haul route, dug out some books and notebooks, and just did whatever until I arrived at my destination or was attacked by pirates. I loved the passive game play in the moment, but I didn't realize how much until about a decade later. That kinda ruined gaming for me in general since games tend to keep the player busy (even if they aren't action games).
In some respects, I think that slow travel offers a sense of authenticity to the game. Well, I should say to some games. Many games set out goals for players. It's obvious why. If there is nothing to accomplish, there is little sense of accomplishment. Yet goals also ruin things in my mind since there is an urgency to get things done to see what the outcome is. Of course, games also reward following up on that urgency. That's contrary to real life where you may be rewarded or you may have to wait upon the rewards.
Valheim does that so well. The feeling of walking through an unfamiliar forest and stumbling across a faint trail that you made weeks ago, knowing that it will eventually lead you back to your old base and thus back to where you were trying to get to before you got lost…
Reading the Reddit for the game, filled with people complaining that the portal system is too restrictive and forces them to make upwards of three long boat trips over the course of the game is a bit sad. It’s as though they expect the fun to happen when they finish everything, but the fun all happens while you’re actually playing the game.
The hardcore mode of Kingdom Come: Deliverance really made me appreciate the game (although that's the only way I played it). It became a very immersive experience.
Valheim without a map would be a bit too much for me. No way to quickly escape to some safe green pastures sounds too stressful :).
I do agree, playing open world games without fast travel can be a bit of a slog though. I considered playing Skyrim without fast travel but many of the quests make you run half way across the map and back multiple times.
Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.
I'm thinking of the The Forest survival game. The first one in the series was great.
The successor game added an in-game compass/radar which detracted from the immersion, made the world feel small and boring.
There is a great meditation in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the differences between riding and driving. Being open to the elements, in and a part of nature, is visceral. Bubbled in a car, our surroundings are observed more than experienced. That's always resonated for me.
That’s a book I’ve been taking my time with. Read a bit every few weeks. Found the part about visual memory mechanics resonated: I have to spread everything out and see it when doing mechanic work.
No to doing books via audiobook because I see the words in my head and it’s massively distracting. Cool if it works for others I guess but like the mechanic excerpt above… not for me.
I like thinking about the scales of speed and the impact it has on one's experience.
I used to fly fairly regularly between Germany and Italy. I'd get on a plane in Munich and get off in Florence, going from a very "German" place to a very "Italian" place. A few years ago I started driving the route, and I was surprised just how much gradation there is between the cultures.
As an American, I always thought of "Italians" and "Germans" as very distinct cultures, but then you drive through Südtirol (or Alto Adige, if you're feeling Italian, the northern most province of Italy) and it feels quite Germanic. Then gradually, as you continue south, you hear more Italian, see more Italianate architecture and place names. Similar story for Alsace between France and Germany.
Of course none of this is all that surprising knowing the history of these areas, but it is very interesting to experience in-person.
I'm sure most places and cultures are like this, even when we think of of them as quite distinct. When you only fly between major cities, you lose so much of the wonderful overlap.
Had the same feeling a while ago, I called it the teleportation effect. From the moment you reduce the time needed to go somewhere, you alter the experience to a point that it's not recognizable. Not to say that it's not nice to see the mountain from the sky for one hour but it is an other thing to go through them.
Something to break the teleportation is obviously to make breaks and enjoy where you are (a lake not too far on the road, any viewpoint...). Plan in advance, have a tent, be ready to not reach your target in one day and you will enjoy a much better a road trip than a train, a plane or even the highway.
Completely agree. I don’t have a car anymore so I walk a lot, and my mental image of the streets is so much more in depth now to the point I could visualise streets down to the stickers on poles.
Yep, slower days often feel longer and fuller at the same time
¡Buen Camino! I walked it 10 years ago and hope to repeat it soon.
I love walking and couple of years ago I moved to LA. I fucking hate how hard to walk in this city. I always knew I liked walking but I didn’t realize how crucial it was for mental health (I grew up around Europe, purely on walkable cities and didn’t get my driving license until 30,years old or something)
Quote that I always like:
There was a man who was afraid of his shadow and disliked his footprints. So he tried to get away from them. He ran, but the faster he ran, the more numerous his footprints became, and his shadow kept up with him without lagging behind. Thinking he was going too slowly, he ran faster and faster, until he collapsed and died of exhaustion. He did not realize that if he had simply stayed in the shade, his shadow would have disappeared, and if he had sat still, there would have been no footprints.
And another one [0]:
My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest; Every year the green ivy grows longer. No news of the affairs of men, Only the occasional song of a woodcutter. The sun shines and I mend my robe; When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems. I have nothing to report, my friends. If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.
[0] https://firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.com/2011/06/stop-chasing...
If you’re a fan of LOTR but don’t fancy reading it aloud yourself, I’d really recommend the new audio versions read by Andy Serkis. While I don’t vibe with every facet of his performance, overall it’s a tour-de-force, and really makes the prose come to life. Especially in those descriptive sections that it’s possible to glaze over when reading the text. Having an actor of the calibre of Serkis reading them to you brings out the poetry and beauty of Tolkien’s language.
Noooo. Audio books feed you the content at someone else’s pace, not at your (slow) pace, which is exactly what TFA advocates. Or, what are you going to do? Hit Pause after each sentence so you can fully digest and savor it?
Listening to someone talking is how humanity transmitted culture and stories for tens of thousands of years. The fact that "we" cannot tolerate it anymore, is a sign of how badly our brains are being reshaped (or maybe damaged) by screens.
OTOH, fire, writing and sanitation are significant upgrades to what we were doing "for tens of thousands of years".
State of nature isn't inherently good. It's bloody, smelly, dirty, and only incidentally nice, by virtue of evolutionary path dependence.
Oral transmission of complex culture is one of the things that separates us from "the state of nature". As we lose it, we move further away from the beasts that conquered the planet and closer to the squirrel.
Transmission of complex culture is what separates us (and enables this complex culture in the first place); oral medium is merely one way to do it. Being the first one, it's probably not the best.
Considering it's the only medium that needs literally nothing but ourselves to work, I disagree with your statement. But to each its own.
I think a long drive in the car is complemented exceptionally well by audiobooks.
and audiobooks with really good narrators? the miles will melt away.
(I like Wil Wheaton)
(don't know about lotr oudiobooks)
(currently part way through we are legion read by ray porter)
We had tried video in the car for our teens, but found that audio books worked a lot better - shared experience, nobody has a bad angle/line of sight, can still see the scenery and engage in the travel, less looking down prompting motion sickness, etc.
Though now that everybody has a device, we have to intentionally opt for a shared experience, rather than 1:1 devices.
An audiobook is bad if you want to go extra slow. I don't think I want to go that slow.
The article advocates not rushing. In general, that's a good fit for audiobooks.
The article literally says:
> limiting myself to mouth-speed
Audiobooks are mouth-speed.
The article suggests this is the right slow speed, at least for the author.
Maybe you yourself want even slower, but that's not what the article is suggesting.
And if you keep reading (at whatever speed), you get to the actual point of the article:
>So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.
Audiobook are mouth speed but have no pause. When reading slowly, I often want to pause a few seconds and think about what I just read before moving on to the next sentence.
I pause audiobooks all the time by squeezing the base of my earbud, or pressing the big pause button on my Bluetooth speaker. Works great. As well as the triple-tap to go back 15 seconds to hear something again.
> Audiobook are mouth speed but have no pause.
You can’t pause your audiobooks?
Not the OP, but to me audio generally x2 slower than I read, so I’m content with the speed, anything slower than that would be weird pace for many stuff.
Having said that yes I do indeed pause if I need to take a moment to think, and I roll back 15 seconds if I want to hear it again. Not a big deal, just part of the experience. -signed ex-hater of audiobooks
Not each sentence but I do regularly pause and sometimes skip back in audiobooks, yes.
Use the playback speed settings, tough hitting pause every once in a while is also a good idea
First of all, I don’t recommend going through life yucking someone else’s yum.
Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.
Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?
Interesting how in your second paragraph you do exactly the thing you said not to do in your first.
Audible and most audiobook player apps let you control the speed. I usually listen at 1.25 to 1.5
That to me, feels opposite the the article's advice.
And I too, often watch youtube at 1.5x or 2x speed, and dislike audiobooks because I read so much faster that I can possibly listen to them, and there's always an ever growing list/pile of books I want to read after this one. I wonder if that's why a certain type of movie works so well for me - I think of them as "movies made from short stories, not novels", and now I'm wondering if it's something similar to the OP's idea - and that spending 2 hours watching a short story I'd expect to read in 15/20mins is what I'm enjoying, in a different way to, say, the new Dune movies - which so far have been 4-5 hours watching a couple of big novel's worth of story that'd take me a week or so to read? Just writing that out now, I realised theres a two orders of magnitude difference in speed there going from 1/10th of reading speed to 10x reading speed - from a 15 minute read to 2 hour watch, to a week long read to 4-5 hour watch. Hardly surprising they hit my brain differently.
Audiobooks are awesome because I can listen to them while doing other things like walking or biking or lifting weights. And the best narrators actually improve the books like The Hail Mary Project and Blood Meridian.
That's the exact opposite of what the article is about. The desire to time optimize, to rush it cause "this is sooo sloooow, booooring" is what creates only an illusion of time efficiency but you might discover that if you actually give it the time, there is a whole world to discover. That's what the article is about.
Reading books as slow as the article says is rather silly.
You are free to have that opinion and I personally also find it a little too extreme, but the author's main point is a good one.
Then just use 0.75 or 0.5x speed? I don't understand this question.
It isn't just how fast or slow it is. Reading at a slow pace gives you time to think in a way that is flexible from sentence to sentence.
To borrow the same analogy from the article, image trying to savor a meal where someone else was deciding when you take each bite. Even at a slow pace, the rigidness of the pace and your lack of fine control would still pose a problem with giving each bite it's rightful consideration.
That being said I love audio books and think I would struggle to apply this article's advice in my own life. Slowing down your audiobook is still a step in that direction, though I sometimes find that slowing it down can cause my mind to wander and my comprehension goes down and not up.
> Then just use 0.75 or 0.5x speed?
I think this often sounds unsettling (like the reader is drunk or otherwise impaired), and anyway the listener doesn't need more time to recognise each individual word -- they want time to take in sentences and paragraphs.
Get a text to speech app and change the lengths between sentences while keeping the actual read aloud speed the same, I recall using something like that before.
I hate audiobooks because they're way too slow and full of moods/tones that often contradict how I would have read it. I can't be the only one who thinks they're overindulgent and annoying.
For me, "overindulgent and annoying" is way too harsh. But they feel _sooooo_ slow and I kind of resent "missing out" on the other books I could have read while the audiobook plods along (even at chipmunk 2x babble speed).
I save audiobooks for times when I couldn't have read something else - while doing chores, driving, etc. - so I can avoid that "missing out" feeling.
for lotr in particular my last reread was slower paced because I kept this map[0] open and paused frequently to refer to it and see where everyone was. it was super enjoyable, I have literally read the book dozens of times before that and have never gotten so good a sense of the world's geography and the difficulty of various journeys.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/100n0y/maybe_t...
Is the entire thing narrated in Gollum’s voice?
He does lots of different voices, it's very good
> "Fly-ses you foool-ses", exclaimed stupid, dry tricksy one
I guess he gets the Gollum parts just perfectly.
Music is an interesting case. You can't slow down the consumption of music (you have to let it play at the speed the performer intended), but you can dial up the attention you give it. Listening with headphones, eyes closed, and phone+doorbell etc. switched off would be close to max. Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time. For music, we can say that the default settings are too LOW.
And similar to the point OP made, you get more out of it when you attend more closely. And similarly, most music does not withstand this level of scrutiny.
I've taken the time to rebuild a large music collection locally. I've adopted every CD collection my friends and family have set aside to rust. It's immensely satisfying to scroll a gigantic list of 40,000 tracks and just pick whatever feels good, knowing I'm not contributing to a profile on my listening habits and that the file will instantly play flawlessly.
I have some excellent garage band CDs that probably have two or three copies still in the wild at most. Unfortunately sometimes the 25 year old burned CDs are missing the TOC data, but even the recovery process is satisfying.
(Same with the DVD collections.)
You certainly do not need to play music at the speed the performer intended! There are whole genres (and subgenres) based on this. :) Personally, I have found that slowing a familiar piece down by ~5% tricks my brain into perceiving it as novel again, which helps me attend to it more closely and appreciate it more.
Them being entire genres, to me, implies they are no longer the same music. You are listening to a different song.
I was about to comment this as well.
I listen to a lot of music on the side, but Chris Boltendahl of Grave Digger said something that stuck with me. Btw, Grave Digger are not making Heavy Metal inspired by Heavy Metal, they were there making Heavy Metal in the 80s :)
Paraphrasing: With all of the streaming, and easy access to music, music has turned into a fast food. Eaten on the side, but rarely really fully appreciated this day.
And for new albums of bands I follow (or if I want to have a good time), I do exactly that: If the weather permits, get a hammock, a good drink, the good headphones (yes, I have several levels of quality of headphones), and just look at the sun, the trees and the magpies while listening to the music. Improving my own guitar skills has only deepened this appreciation.
> Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time
At least in Metal and to me, concerts are a different beast than the record. The record is usually the best and most perfect take of a song, often with additional effects, better mix. If you want to hear to the best version of a song, it's usually from the record.
Concerts are a party. It's always amusing how different concert cultures are there -- I know of some people who complain that they "can't hear the singer over someone next to them shouting". That's kind of the point of a live celebration of the band at the music in my world.
You actually can slow down music. A novel experience in itself. When you try to learn the song — once you get a grip – everything slows. That's why people play so much with metronome – once your brain "slows down", you will speed up naturally. Spent a few months learning how to get around it as a novice drummer. The only way around I found? It's to notice the slowing speed of time and slow the rhythm into it. Probably related: most drummers play with a click in their ears.
I noticed similar effects when "locking in" in games or sports. Time gets slower.
So when you slow down, you start to pay more attention. But if you pay more attention, the world itself will slow down. And the music would be slowed
I suffered a burnout fall last year and adapting to a slower lifestyle was my way out of it. I started reading long novels, and taking aimless, leisurely walks. It's hard to overstate the positive effect that had on my mind and well-being. I haven't felt this kind of mental clarity and motivation to do things for over a decade.
This post resonates strongly with me. I strongly believe the default settings _are_ too high, and it takes conscious effort to slow down while bound to the shackles of modern society, but it's so worth it.
I can't control the speed that I read.
In fact, I noticed that whenever a book becomes most exciting, I start reading especially fast (to the point of skipping words), because I want to know what happens next. So I spend the least time with the best parts of the best books.
Ever since I realized that, I have switched pretty much exclusively to audiobooks. I don't really know if it's faster or slower overall, but it's a predetermined pace, and that works better for me.
> I can't control the speed that I read.
For me, moving my lips while reading is a surefire way to significantly slow down the pace. I do this all the time when giving a document a final proofread before publishing.
I do something similar, only keeping my lips shut and moving my tongue and throat as if I was speaking. I find it's an intermediate speed between conversation speed and purely reading with my eyes. I started doing it when I wasn't so good at English to give myself time to understand the text, as well as to practice the mechanics of English speech when I didn't have anyone, but I find keeping me at this pace gives me maximum comprehension. I have a friend who reads much faster than me and he quite often misses points in whatever he's reading. I think he got into that habit from literature, but it's disastrous when reading something more densely packed with information, like technical documentation.
Oh, I forgot to mention—reading out loud (silently or not) does work, but then I find it difficult to actually pay attention to what I’m reading.
Like you, I do proofread this way, and for that it works well.
Audiobooks are great, while driving or walking or riding a bike. But for complex topics, I miss the ability to read a sentence or a paragraph again.
This is definitely a disadvantage of audiobooks, although I’ve found having access to a `skip backwards 15 seconds` button can help a lot.
(There was one point during Riyria Revelations where a character was explaining how Elven succession works. After repeating the sequence a bunch of times, I finally had to get out my laptop and take notes.)
Have you made a serious effort to try lately? I think it should be possible for everyone.
Yes.
I feel the same way. It goes away if I already know what's going to happen. For this reason I strongly recommend reading the things you love a second time.
We read LOTR to our sons when they were little. It was likely the 6th time for me,and 3rd in English. Stupendous experience. The command of the English Tolkien had is sublime. Wish the movies didn't take so much liberty with Faramir.!!!
Yep, read LoTR to my daughters before the film came out. (Thankfully.)
As promising as Fellowship was, the films just kept going down hill—one after the other.
As the girls were growing up we worked through all the Harry Potter books, a half-dozen of the "colored Fairy" books (edited by Andrew Lang), plenty of Uncle Remus tales, the "Little House" books and a number of Sid Fleischman books…
Those were magical years. Only when homework arrived did the reading hour finally come to a close. :-(
How old were they when you started?
I'm bang in the middle of a reread now; I've lost count of how many there've been. I'm 55 now, having first read it in my early teens, and it's astonishing how it just keeps growing and changing with you. Even after all these years, I'm still surprised by a painterly description of a cloud, or the sense of comfortable rootedness of a little Shire lane, or a little "aha, I never noticed that correlation before, that's what those orcs were doing", or "hmm, that's an odd word to put in that sentence, I wonder why he picked it?" followed by a fascinating bit of research.
I've recently started the Letters too, and can thoroughly recommend it. It's fascinating and oddly cosy to get a direct tap into a mind you know so well at second hand, through its fiction.
I am currently reading The Hobbit to my son, who is 5 years old and not quite able to read it by himself yet. Nearly, but it's a lot for him to get through. Some evenings I use my Kindle, some evenings I use the copy I've owned since I was 11.
However now he has started to write stories about dragons and things, and that's a pretty interesting development.
For younger kids I can heartily recommend the Hobbit illustrated by Jemima Catlin- has plenty of pictures to them engaged. Read it to my 6 year old and we’re now excited for LotR.
Oh, this looks excellent, thanks :-)
I can't wait to read LOTR to my (now four-year-old) son. Been looking forward to it since we started trying for a kid. Seriously, peak fatherhood moment. I'll savor it. That (and a few others are) on the embargo list: he's not allowed to see the film before we read the books. I wish I'd got Winnie the Pooh on there in time.
You're at a good time for The Hobbit. Strangely I find that Winnie the Pooh does not age well and is an awkward read.
The Wind in the Willows is good beginning around that age too.
Yeah, I'd have thought so. The lad's a little behind on appreciating narrative, though. Loves books, but can't yet focus on anything that isn't ~= pictures::words. It's fine; he'll get there.
Love both Pooh, and Wind in the Willows, and will enjoy seeing how they take him.
Really? I still love Winnie the Pooh, but I grew up with him so I’m somewhat biased. But I love the whimsy and musicality in the language.
I feel like winnie the pooh won't lose much from having seen the film version beforehand, but also the books had the kind of whimsical humour that I enjoyed a lot more in college than I did as a kid.
When I was about 10, I read the Hobbit to my younger brother (8), over a large number of half-hour car trips. It's one my prouder memories of that time.
I've not braved reading them LOTR yet, but my sons are still getting read to even as one's about to become a teenager; it's some of my favourite time in the evening and it allows me to force them through books just slightly too advanced, with lots of them stopping me to explain (or me stopping to editorialize, and provide historical context etc).
I don't know how long they'll let me keep doing it for, but I don't see any reason to stop
Well done, when I was growing up we would always have some time in the evening when we would read a book out loud. When we were younger my parents would read and as we got older we would read sometimes too. I tried the same with my daughter but she stopped wanting to when she was around 10, but she’s in a better space now two years on so I’m going to try to resurrect the custom. It’s a really lovely thing to do as a family, but as the article suggests is quite strange these days and it can be difficult and require discipline to make the time.
I strongly encourage you to do that. The selection of the material is key: you have to find something that she is going to find fascinating but could not read on her own due to missing vocabulary / context / idiom-and-allusion cultural awareness. Then you get to try to fill that in with asides as you go along, if she'll tolerate it. Good luck!
I really enjoy this train of thought. It rings true to me, its also something Hank Green was recently talking about with the negative effects of the internet. Its not that the internet is bad. We're starved for information and meaning and were being feed a diet of ultraprocessed food in the form of shorts and tiktoks. I think the solution this author laid out is good. Consume quality, with care.
This is one of the reason I use openbsd and emacs as my two main tools. There are better and more suited tools for some specific tasks. But using them is enjoyable and their core philosophy aligns to mine. And it’s not like I actually need those extra things.
This is one of the things I actually remember my mother saying. Festina lente [0]: Make haste slowly. I've always tried to stick to it because when I have I've found more to appreciate in whatever I'm doing (as TFA says)
Sadly, for some reason I now can't read slowly, which pisses me off. I and my partner read aloud together alternating chapters of a chosen book, and I love how get _much_ more out of the book than I would reading alone in a tenth of the time.
I've also found that some books seem written to be read aloud: the sentence structure and punctuation lends itself to easy reading aloud, whereas some books have really convoluted sentences with multiple parenthetical sub-clauses that are a real challenge to read aloud in an a way that's easy to follow. I've ended up so that normally try to write in a way that's easy to read aloud. I think if something's easy to read aloud it's going to be easy to comprehend when read normally. And Yes, I know that the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph probably doesn't match that.
0: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/festina%20lente)
I had, by chance, taken the same approach when reading the Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance years ago.
The title failed to inspire but I heard it was worth the read and stepped through line by line.
It hit with a depth that I know with complete certainty I would not have gotten if I worked through at my usual pace or took it in as an audiobook.
Nassim Taleb’s books are also favorite slow reads of mine.
All this said, I collect books faster than I can read them so there’s always a feeling somewhere that I should be pushing through a little faster.
Ah well, in the end I think that really comprehending a handful of quality books is about as good as a shallow comprehension of many more.
If you are bilingual, with one language being stronger than the other one; try reading something in the language you are least comfortable with. I do this (e.g. reading LoTR in Dutch) and it forces me to pay closer attention to each sentence.
There are words you don't know or know how to use them properly. It will help you learn the second language better, while also helping you to not gloss over whole passages.
> try reading something in the language you are least comfortable with
I did this with Spanish and it was terrible for learning grammar because things tended to be transliterated from English however I found it good for learning vocab.
I chose really trashy romance novels translated from English e.g. Danielle Steel.
I tried some literature but that was a bad idea (too complex for beginner, and faaar too boring). I just don't like the Spanish literature I have tried reading.I also found it screwed up my Spanish pronunciation and had a queer side-effect that it permanently slowed down my English reading.
Personally, I think languages should be learnt by talking and mimicking (as much like a baby as possible). Reading is worthwhile for work but I expect to be more careful for the next language I learn.
> I’ve found reading aloud helpful for staying engaged — limiting myself to mouth-speed rather than eye-speed means I won’t rush, miss important details, and then lose interest, which has always been a problem for me.
This worked for me... for a time. And then what happened surprised me (but maybe shouldn't have): I started zoning out and thinking about other things, missing important details, while reading aloud. Wild that we can even do that.
It's a capability with which having children will make you intimately familiar
I initially thought this was just a function of reading the same thing multiple times, but I’ve since had it happen many times when reading something completely new. Somehow my mind wanders and when I tune back in, not only am I reading clearly, I’m still doing the voicing for different characters. It’s so weird.
I haven't had it happen while reading aloud (since I almost never read aloud), but I've definitely had it happen while reading something new that I hated. I'd end up having to read the same page (or more!) three or four times because I kept zoning out.
By the 3rd week of Goodnight Moon at bedtime, are you still reading the printed words?
No, because the kid has learned to anticipate what's to come, and reading it becomes a game or performance art.
Throw in an occasional Goodnight Opus and learn to depart from the text
I feel like this advice could also somewhat apply to your manner of speaking. I'm a pretty fast speaker, and I've noticed that when I try my best to go slower, I understand what I'm trying to say better, I figure out gaps in logic and errors in the sentence while speaking, instead of after, and I get the message across better. And when I'm giving an impromptu speech of some sort, if I slow down and think about every sentence I say, the sentences stitch themselves together in a better-flowing way, and I enjoy speaking because it sounds better.
I, too, speak ridiculously fast. People laugh at me and some (a lot of) people have problems understanding me. As much as I try, as soon as I am not paying attention I speak at the same pace again. Did you manage to slow down your speech consistently?
I did! It took me a few months though. You just have to work at it a lot and be very conscious of your speech.
Thanks! I will keep trying then. I was starting to assume that was me and that's it.
> When you slow down your eating speed, say to half or a third your default speed, you get much more enjoyment out of a smaller amount of food. The extra attention given to each bite allows more of the “good stuff,” whatever that is exactly, to reach you.
I wonder if this contributes to a good chunk of the experience of fine dining. When you get served expensive food in micro-portions that are accompanied by long explanations, you don't gobble it down but take as much time as possible to savour it.
For a while I've thought so many of us are afraid to slow down because we might feel sad, as sadness is often one of the slowest emotions.
Yet this quote has me thinking that maybe we fear slowing down because of the consciousness overload. That we get so overwhelmed by our senses. Maybe even that can lead to the tears of being so alive.
I'd argue that the issue isn't that the default is too high, but that we assume the default. Think a math class: Often enough, kids are left behind, because the pace is too high, but others get bored to tears, because for them, that very same pace is far too slow. It can even vary by unit: Maybe someone is fine at standard speed in most of AP physics, and just one unit is just completely off. It's a typical problem when engaging with varied audiences: If you have to give a talk to , say, an all hands of a tech company, getting the pacing and the information density right for everyone is just not going to happen.
So the main learning is to be aware of the speed settings, and then consider putting ourselves in situations where we can alter them. Faster or slower isn't better in a vacuum. Expermiment and find what's right for you, or, in communication, for your audience.
This us why I consider sailing to be the best way of travelling the world: You're slow to begin with and the wind dictates your plans. You really don't want to be motoring. Instead you have time to experience the land, the people and the ocean. Preferably without being online constantly.
This is why I love cycling so much.
I'm wondering if using an electric caravan is a similarly good option for slow travelling on land. It would force you to you stop after less than 300 kilometers, unfold the solar panels on the roof, wait a day or two (perhaps also catch some rain using the roof) and then continue.
Another, less romantic option would be to recharge it somewhere faster ;-)
One of the pleasures of reading literature is noticing how compressed they are.
This is true for Tolkien, Turgenev, Hemingway or Pound. The amount of information per page—per word!—is incredibly high, which permits the conveyance of ideas which simply do not land when spoken more plainly.
You don’t need to go to high literature to find this density, by the way. Political speeches from Republican Rome and America’s Founders have a similar aspect to them.
It's interesting you mention that. Even Obamas detractors admit he spoke well. True, but i find JFKs speeches are on a different level from that. And it's not just him, but the contrast is particularly striking.
Now in the UK all we get are monotonous robots or people who have clearly had intensive coaching in how to speak in a clear. Decisive. Direct. Way, to inspire confidence and project competence. The two qualities entirely absent in most of our politicians.
The less said about the other side of the pond the better.
> Even Obamas detractors admit he spoke well. True, but i find JFKs speeches are on a different level from that. And it's not just him, but the contrast is particularly striking.
My off the cuff observation is that there is a lot less mastery of language than there used to be in America. I'm not really sure why, but compare the grand language used by the early political leaders to, say, Obama, and it's striking. And that's not saying Obama is a bad speaker! He has a ton of charisma and makes you want to like his ideas by the way he presents them. But he's never given something on the level of Lincoln's Gettysburg address (in my opinion at least).
> never given something on the level of Lincoln's Gettysburg address (in my opinion at least)
I’m arguing he couldn’t have. Until America regains a literary tradition, the complexity and imagery gained with heavy words is lost against the conciseness soundbites demand.
> I'm not really sure why, but compare the grand language used by the early political leaders to, say, Obama, and it's striking.
IMO that's a direct consequence of becoming a real democracy: can't just target those rich enough to get a fancy education.
IIRC, the land ownership requirements had already gone by the time of Lincoln's Gettysburg address, but I expect them to have still been writing with such an audience in mind.
Not just America. But it's partly a cultural thing. If someone would imitate the style of a century ago, he would be mocked for it and considered a self indulgent show off. The best example i can bring is Jacob Reese Mogg, otherwise known as The Rt Hon Gentleman from the 18th century.
One thing that is thankfully unique to America is that rudeness as a debating tactic can win elections.
I’m no expert in other country’s politics, but it would be pretty surprising if that was unique to America. Boris Johnson? Nicolas Sarkozy? Silvio Berlusconi?
Not even close. The nearest equivalent is Prime Ministers Questions which is a regular staged event.
Look at the debates from 2015 where Trumps opponents are rendered speechless by his overbearing personality. He makes himself the centre of everything and is completely shameless about it. He's an American phenomenon. BUT, the reason it works is because he means what he says and does what he says he'll do. America has always appreciated straight talkers more then Europe.
Jacob Reese Mogg isn't only mocked for being anachronistic, but also extreme poshness. That he went canvasing with someone he called his nanny is one such noteworthy oddity.
My experience has been the exact opposite. Yes, there's literally a lot of information, but so much of it is irrelevant fluff that could be eliminated or trimmed without losing much. I've seen multiple paragraphs of Tolkien, for example, that narratively boil down to "they walk across the field". To be clear, I don't see that as a flaw. The fluff serves to set the mood. But that's different from saying that the text is especially information-dense.
> so much of it is irrelevant fluff that could be eliminated or trimmed without losing much
Are you sure? Or is that just superfluous for the way you’re reading it?
In some cases, it’s overly verbose. But if you’re taking this away from acclaimed authors, consider picking up some literary criticism (fancy words for fan theories). Chances are, there is meaning embedded in what you’re dismissing as fluff.
The "mood" is the information too.
That's not really "information" in the information-theoretic sense that the other person was using, when it can be rewritten in all manner of different ways while conveying the same overall mood. The densest way to communicate "Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired" is exactly that. All the other words one would write around that core idea would not provide any more specificity to the sentiment, they'd just there to allow the reader to immerse themselves. Unless the information is simply the words themselves, in which case no text is any more entropic than any other.
> Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired.
This does not set a mood and thus does not convey the same information. This removes the information about mood and setting away while keeping only rough plot point in.
The outcome in terms of how reader interpret the situation is massively different. The thing you wrote implies that all they need is to go to sleep an hour sooner and rest, all will be fine.
The thing you're describing that's missing is context, not information. At that point in the plot, the reasons why they couldn't simply take a break wherever they wanted had already been explained, so it didn't need restating. As for mood-setting, I've already addressed that in other replies.
> The densest way to communicate "Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired" is exactly that
Uh, yes. This is press-release speak, optimised for a fourth grader’s reading comprehension.
If, on the other hand, you want to develop the motif of the Unseen—central to Tolkien’s work—the type of tired the characters are and how they’re detecting and addressing it is incredibly germane, interesting and totally lost in your summary.
You’re also describing the first scenes we see through familiar eyes of Mordor. The landscape is an extension of Sauron’s will. The contrast with the developed, organised, albeit crowded cities of men; the arrogance implied in the desolation; et cetera pack information lost in your summary.
The type of tired is "really". What happens is not that there's some additional information that I'm not communicating in that one sentence, but rather that the time it takes you to read "they're both really tired" is not enough for your mind to dwell on the idea and empathize with the characters. Now, if I instead were to write "They're both really tired. They're super tired. Oh man, they're so tired. They're so tired, you've never been this tired in your life", that would be extremely shitty writing, but it would give you time to ruminate on the information.
Extended time is your own proposal, and one you successfully defeated. This is generally called a strawman.
Instead, I propose that the type of tied is informationally and qualitatively distinct. The exhaustion of the weight of the world, internal struggle, amidst a dismal hellscape is different than "really tired".
Great writing can build depth of quality and understanding with the authors intent.
LOTR could be summarized with a sentence. The content is in the detail.
>Extended time is your own proposal, and one you successfully defeated. This is generally called a strawman.
Uh... Huh? So it's my argument, which I've refuted, and therefore it's a strawman? I think you should go get refreshed on informal fallacies. No, what's happening here is that there's a phenomenon that's being discussed -- namely, mood-setting in fictional writing -- and I'm proposing as its mechanism not additional information, but rather additional time. If you want to participate in the discussion you can't dismiss my argument my incorrectly calling it a strawman. You have to explain why it doesn't work as an explanation, like this:
>Instead, I propose that the type of tied is informationally and qualitatively distinct. The exhaustion of the weight of the world, internal struggle, amidst a dismal hellscape is different than "really tired".
Yet, if we were to replace the particular flavor of tiredness with a completely different, equally intense one, it would evoke the exact same empathic feeling on the reader, because the imagination is not precise enough to reproduce other people's feelings with such granularity. Someone can't precisely imagine the difference between the tiredness felt by Conan after 12 hours of turning a mill for the sixth day in a row, and that felt by Frodo. The reader is going to reach that passage and feel that the characters are really tired. That's why such long descriptions don't contain any more meaning; because they can be replaced with something completely different and put the same idea in the reader's mind: "Sam and Frodo are really tired".
>LOTR could be summarized with a sentence. The content is in the detail.
I've already addressed that. If the information is the words themselves and not their meaning, then any English text is equally information-dense. "It's raining" contains a third as much information as "it's raining, it's raining, it's raining", since it contains a third as many words.
> * if I instead were to write "They're both really tired. They're super tired. Oh man, they're so tired. They're so tired, you've never been this tired in your life", that would be extremely shitty writing, but it would give you time to ruminate on the information*
You’ve set up a great question. Why is what you wrote shitty writing while what Tolkien wrote not?
The answer isn’t just variation. If you look at what’s been conveyed in his writing that wasn’t with your repetition, you’ll start unlocking what I suspect you know is there but are having trouble describing.
>The answer isn’t just variation.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
And presumably political speeches from Republican America combines the best of those two?
> presumably political speeches from Republican America combines the best of those two?
Why?
After I finished reviewing the CS textbook "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" in the mid 1990s during a vacation (looking for errors before publication), I found that my brain had been permanently reconfigured for speed reading. For years afterwards, I would automatically read entire sentences at a time, to go as fast as possible. I think I have now recovered sufficiently so that I can read books one word at a time.
This window refused to load until I allowed it to load Facebook. Somewhere, somehow, the content in this page will not display if the browser cannot connect to Facebook servers (I'm using Harmonic HN client on Android; it has built-in adblock for the webviews, but I use Tracker Control to block even more trackers; in this case whitelisting connect.facebook.net allowed the page to load)
It’s impossible to know if the content itself is worth the extra time and effort. Opportunity Cost is especially high in fiction. I agree that LotR should be on that list though.
When you start thinking about books in terms of opportunity cost, you’re the kind who needs to slow down the most.
Oh no
(Would elaborate, but, y'know. Opportunity cost)
I slowed myself down to savour this comment for a full 20s. Enough time to linger on each word for a long moment. Just like parent was asking for.
I pictured it spoken with a heavy Californian surfer accent. He wanted elaborate but a huge wave was breaking and he really didn’t want to miss the next one. Was in far too much of a rush to even leave punctuation behind.
So long, dude, I hope the waves keep coming for you.
sick
I partially agree, but it depends on your objective function. If you’re optimising for the enjoyment of the experience of reading, you don’t need to know if the content is “worth it”; just read it slowly and if you’re not enjoying it, stop.
When learning to play a musical instrument and practicing a new song, some common advice is to play it as slowly as you can stand, to learn the motions well.
Right, but then you need to learn the right motions well, motions that will make sense at the final speed. I suppose it's one of those things that are made easier by having a teacher.
Or, never play it faster than you can play it perfectly.
Skimmed through it; mostly reading the paragraphs above each picture. The irony of which is not lost on me :)
Really enjoyed the part talking about Tolkien. It reminds me of my own LOTR experience: I finished the trilogy in three consecutive summers in the hilly countryside of Italy near Rome. The first summer I made it through the fellowship of the ring with a lot of patience and trying for the slower moving parts. The summer after that I started over and read book 1 and 2, and in year three I felt I was finally in sync with the pace of the book and enjoyed reading through book 1, 2, and 3 in a few weeks.
Does Dostoyevsky really need the slow treatment? Some parts of crime and punishment merited rereading but, at least in English translation, I didn't find much in the style to savor. Really it was more thematically interesting and suspenseful.
In the original Russian, Dostoyevsky requires the slow treatment. He loves the sort of 1/3 page long sentences that perplex the fast-path parser and force the reader's brain to swap; as if he wants to drive you mad so that you can better understand the madmen whom he writes about.
Were you reading it in the original Russian?
Haven’t gotten around to re-reading Dostoyevsky. But Turgenev’s English translations absolutely benefit from slow reading.
Fathers and Sons were absolute masterpiece.
Yes, in the English translation
Wait until you get to The Brothers Karamazov.
There is so much to unpack, which requires very slow treatment.
One of the things is savour so much is the time I read Idiot, we were on a cruise completely disconnected from the rest of the world. No distractions and just the sound on waves.
Good to know!
Being able to truly tap into boredom is a superpower
I don’t know any specific name for it, but it is fairly common reading technique used in literary analysis. If you ready any kind of poetry more refined (say [1] or [2]) in its internal structure, it is an absolute necessity.
It is quite amazing how many people do not know that there is a multitude of reading techniques to be used with various kinds of texts. You need to use a right tool for the job. Tolkien’s passages describing the Middle Earths ecological landscape are particularly rich calling for careful reading and lingual analysis. I believe he uses almost sole old Celtic words in those passages, avoiding any newer latin-based words more familiar to a modern reader, which cannot be a coincidence.
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46452/to-an-athlete-d... [2] https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you
The best books improve with rereading and slower reading. Tolkien fits this. I had an English teacher who reread LOTR every summer. I’m not there, but I am on a 5ish year cycle.
Most books are the other way. Zoom through and you can get most of the value. This is especially true of non-fiction, where most have a message that can be gleaned in 15 minutes. (The exceptions are the great ones)
Podcasts are similar. Most give you 80% of the value at 2X speed. Even my favorites - I’d rather speed listen to get 80% the value rather than get 100% of half the backlog. The best podcasts defy this too.
So in the end it’s a bit of a skill to both choose the right things to slow down on, and then a discipline to force the appropriate speed.
I've always taken issue with youtube clips content creators automatically (?) cutting pauses between words or people listening to podcasts in 1.5x or 2x speed or even clips already being sped up. Folks, your brain can't keep up. It may feel great to rush through 10 hours of audio book in 5 hours, or dopamine-pushing even higher if you don't have pauses in that triggering tiktok clip, but it just makes you more and more superficial. Your brain needs time to process and reflect. The best speakers out there have a calm pace, not a rushing one. That's for a reason, and it's an excellent one.
LotR is a product of a slower era. I wonder how a modern/recent example would compare
There's certainly slow books still being written but most fantasy books in specific assume a certain amount of knowledge about a tolkien-esque world. You can do entirely new worlds, and some people do, but most stories are about people and the choices they make.
Maybe Robert Jordan or James SA Corey?
I've not read enough Corey to form a judgement, but I don't think Jordan has nearly enough literary "heft" to satisfy close reading. Don't get me wrong: the story is fun - I enjoyed every bit of Wheel of Time - and would recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing, but the deeper stuff (characters, prosidy, world-building, thematic "meaning") don't bear much examination.
In fantasy / sci-fi, I'd unreservedly recommend:
- Ursula K LeGuin
- Steven Erickson
- Gene Wolfe
With reservations, I'd recommend:
- Patrick Rothfuss (unfinished)
- George RR Martin (unfinished; sometimes dodgy prose, but occasionally transcendent character and theme)
- Dune (just know it goes downhill fast after the first book)
Elsewhere, but still genre (ie: meant to be entertaining, not uber-serious, self-conscious "literature"):
- Patrick O'Brian
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Dorothy Dunnet
I'd recommend Rudyard Kipling's short stories, but they're hit and miss, and sometimes out of step with modern mores. Maybe stick with the Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, and if you like those make sure you read Without Benefit of Clergy, They (short stories), and Kim (a masterpiece of a novel).
Once you've got through those, Hemingway is approachable, and the true modernist master. Fiesta / The Sun Also Rises (same book, known by different names in different parts of the world) is ironic and beautiful; A Farewell to Arms is beautiful and almost unbearably sad; his short stories are impeccable.
Love the idea that speed reshapes taste. When you slow down, a lot of "content" reveals itself as empty, and better stuff suddenly becomes accessible instead of intimidating
I think of this when I brush my teeth and realize I'm trying to be fast. I am tense and rapid, just rushing ahead to nowhere. I'm not really in a hurry.
It is also possible to walk at incredible low speeds. Some times, I try to force myself to walk as slowly as I dear. It is hard to walk slow in a city full of people. It feels silly. However, it feels great once you've actually slowed down.
My default reading speed has always been slow AF. I've always wished I could read faster. But now I'm going to look at it more as a feature, not a bug. Thanks!! If only I could eat as slowly as I read...
The base material needs to be of a minimum quality for that experience to be enjoyable, I presume. I totally see the value of that, which is one of the reasons to sometimes reduce playback speed below what my default would be. Writings from Tolkien are maybe some of the best suited for that, but I'm not 100% convinced it would work for what I'm reading currently, so I might just try it anyway - the Foundation series from Asimov.
> When you slow down your eating speed, say to half or a third your default speed, you get much more enjoyment out of a smaller amount of food.
That's not always the case. With certain types of food, it's much more enjoyable to have your mouth full than to eat a small amount, for example. It's a trade-off.
It's the same with a story. Taking too long can make it boring, for example.
That doesn't mean we always choose the optimal balance, though.
LoTR isn’t for me, so reading it slowly wouldn’t be an enjoyable experience. There are other books for me where I found myself reading and re-reading, moving through the book slowly, marveling at text wondering how the author managed to pick perfect word after perfect word.
For some books, faster is better. Neuromancer, for example, has a lot of sentences and paragraphs that if I go slowly, I can’t figure out what it is that Gibson is talking about. But if I go fast, I pick up the vibe and things start to make sense.
This was the same epiphany I had in college when I learned how to actually study. Previously I would try to go fast and cram as much as possible into my head and hope my decent memory could save me. That only got me so far. I eventually realized that slowing down to fully comprehend what I was learning before allowing myself to move on yielded much better results and saved a lot more time in the long run. And as a result my grades shot up.
This is why I re-read books. I’ve read the Lord of the Rings probably like 10 times. When I already know what’s going to happen it’s easier for me to slow down and appreciate the scenery along the way. Even later readings might reveal choices the author made; I can start to see how the story was constructed.
I find this approach rewarding across most forms of media. There plenty of movies and music I’ve revisited over and over again.
When I was younger I also re-read The Lord of the Rings perhaps a dozen times. Each reading did seem to land differently—small details I had not noticed the first n times.
For some reason the first half of the first book appealed to me the most. I liked the leaving, the setting out on an adventure that you know not where it will lead you.
After Rivendell the hobbits no longer seemed to be driving.
In one of his essays, Philip Pullman suggested reading Paradise Lost out loud which was a revelation for me. I never considered reading anything out loud for myself but it changes the nature of the experience entirely.
Tolkien recorded some passages of LoTR on a friend's tape recorder while it was still unpublished, I'd highly recommend checking them outz particularly the Ride of the Rohirrim.
Great article. Living and enjoying life is a skill that needs conscious practice and intentionality.
The title would make more sense as the default settings being "too low" since Low is the setting where when we trade off fidelity for speed, but "too high" has a nice ring to it.
Tangential but when reading books like Lord of the Rings with songs periodically written in the text, I’ve always enjoyed trying to sing the songs out loud and set a melody for them that feels appropriate for the universe. It really makes the songs come alive.
This almost reads like the beginning of a mathematical proof of Zen: As the speed with which you pursue satisfaction asymptotically approaches zero, your state of mind asymptotically approaches enlightenment.
When I was meditating regularly I found this easier to do. I had the presence of mind to notice I was rushing and slow down and focus on the details. I need to start meditating again.
I can only read at mouth speed. I'm pronouncing each word in my head. I wished I could go fast sometimes. Finishing books takes me at least twice as long as it does for my wife.
When I use Claude Code and Codex for development, I've had some similar experiences. Claude Code always completes tasks very quickly, but leaves behind a mess that makes me anxious. Codex, on the other hand, is always slow—it slowly reads through the entire project's code, then makes changes very cautiously, testing and verifying after every small modification, and even calls codex review --uncommitted once more before committing.
At first, I found writing code with Claude Code to be enjoyable, while Codex seemed boring. But over time, I've discovered that I actually prefer Codex. Perhaps slowing down really is the key to writing high-quality code.
https://youtu.be/V4TXg69kfo8?t=977
Reminds me of this speech by Leon Wieseltier.
I think this is reading using System 2 instead of System 1. And as System 2 is much more detail oriented, it makes sense that you would notice a lot more.
Reading aloud is for me the surefire way to not retaining a single word after done.
I watched game of thrones at 2x speed. I feel I watched it but have no concrete memories of events outside the big hit makers.
What were you expecting, when all al the system forced you to buy more, consume fast and die hard ?
The author just scratches the surface.
Stories don’t exist on paper or even on screen. They exist in the space in between words in your mind.
I wish the AI tech giants would adopt the same thinking and let us breathe for a change.
Zooming in on the 4th dimension
I've tried reading fast, I've tried reading slow, The text escapes my mind, As soon as I let it go.
I'm sympathetic to the general point, but with food, you can always just eat more! Best of both worlds!
????
If you read the lord of the rings faster, you run out of lord or the rings sooner — there's no away around this. But if you eat faster, you can just eat more food. You can eat just as long, and end up feeling just as full. There is no need to eat slower to prolong the enjoyment of flavor.
Alright let’s put that article into eleven labs to hear it as an ai audiobook on 2x speed while doing chores. Gotta optimize bro
tldr; I found something similar when I forced myself to slow down on "The Wheel of Time" series recently.
I've been reading the Wheel of Time (started by Robert Jordan, ended by Brandon Sanderson). I'm on book 11 currently. I've found something similar in that the Jordan's later books in the WOT are basically just incredible slogs if you read for completion (which, I myself did around 20 years ago at around book 10, where I stopped). Around book 6 or so I purposely slowed down and started really imagine the scenes in my minds eye. I also keep the map open on my phone and just kind of keep note of where they are at different points in the series.
Obvious, but it is really striking how much better his books are when you try to "live in the moment" of your imagination as you read, rather than reading to move the plot and action forward. I was kind of confused with myself when I reflected on it. That I somehow thought it made more sense to skim through an entire series and take reduced pleasure from something, when I could just take 50% longer and actually enjoy it.
Made me wonder about where else I am doing this in my life.
I still thinks these books are radically overpadded. He was clearly in love with his characters and his setting. He needed the guidance of a strong armed editor imho. With all that said, if you are going to commit to reading a massive series like this, you might as well appreciate it in the moment, you are going to be here a while.
What worked for us professionally, voraciously taking in information, might be less effective going forward. Being more judicious in consuming fewer, high-quality sources of content is likely to work better in the age of AI slop.
Is it just me, but seeing the general layout of the site, I feel a powerful sense of nostalgia - as if its something straight out of the mid 2000s to early 10s era of internet.
I see that some others have suggested getting an Audio book version for you to listen to at your pleasure.
I came here to say "I hope that you are recording yourself so that you create your OWN audiobook"
what is the real casing
Seriously, we're just posting self-help grifters now?
There was nothing grifter-ish about this article that I could detect - what are you seeing that I’m missing?
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