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now if your longtime visitor after quirky inquiry you should become very very familiar with the idea or with this sort of overall concept overall rationale for the quirky inquiry of introducing a new way of learning of
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introducing this form of non memorization not exactly non memorization but to veer learning away from pure memorization but instead to introduce techniques mindsets and tools
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for holistic learning how can we piece together something that it's both conducive to the growth of the individual to view education as an activity to better the soul whilst at
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the same time have fun during the process so that's the entire thing that's the entire rationale behind a quirky inquiry and that's some what I personally hope to achieve to reach that point where I could perfectly become
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perfectly happy with the information that I learned when I can become a master of all these learning techniques and become a very good auto deed act become a very good self learner so I can learn at everything on my own using the
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set of techniques that I'm currently researching and today is one of the techniques that I'm gonna be sharing with you people in terms of reading books today we're gonna especially focus on this concept
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of reading books because one of the main forms of the information ingestion if you watched the last week's video I talked about the importance of digging through source documents the importance of reading the actual accounts of the
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author's themselves letting the cat out of the bath the original cameo so to speak and so to speak the original canon of the author instead of some incentive some supplementary material the
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importance of going back to the source and reading or tackling some of the harder reading materials to gain original insights that's the topic of last week's episode if you want to check that out I'll go back to last week's episode and check it out
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but one of the major challenges when we try to tackle difficult books is that simply we don't know what the what the heck okay we don't know what the hell the author is talking about sure you can
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understand the words for example if I give you a work of Hegel you can understand the words but when you put those words together sentences stop making sense to all
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together okay it's just not merely a wordplay thing its sentences stop making sense all together well grammatically they make sense but you cannot seem to get out the meaning that
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the author is advocating because it's written in such a funny way because it's written in such a complex and convoluted manner so what do we do for example you're reading a history book and
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history book has to reputation of if you don't know what context is history this piece of history belongs in all you are doing is that you're reading people doing random things you're reading all this person did this but you don't
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exactly know where the significance comes from you don't exactly know what all the dates mean you don't exactly know what are all these people doing you don't exactly know the significance of certain individuals throughout history
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and you don't exactly get the sort of full in-depth understanding all you have are a bunch of people running around doing random things without a context right so history simply turns into if
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you try to understand history it can't just be purely about memorization same with philosophy without a general map without a general context it is impossible to understand a philosopher
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without a big backbone of something it is impossible to understand a piece of history without a backbone understanding of a specific scientific subject it is impossible for example if you want to go learn about Einstein Einstein's
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relativity have you not encountered the views of Newtonian mechanics it's just that simple context is the king or is king when it comes down to reading you
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think a book stands alone by itself not really if you think about it every book is infinitely connected to every other books out there and if you want to understand a book it's gonna make a lot of sense for you to dig through some of
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the context so here I'm gonna introduce one of the secret techniques or one of the techniques that's just crucial for understanding a book properly and this technique is what I would describe as
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sort of an inspection or reading inspectional reading or pseudo scammy of the book or pseudo scanning of the book so will you do instead of reading the book cover-to-cover when you first got it depend on what
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John or a book if it's a piece of fiction well you can read that fiction probably cover to cover no problem but I'm specifically talking about difficult technical books for example a history book for example a philosophy book for
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example a book on some scientific concept a scientific treatise I'm talking about these sorts of books to properly understand to probably understand these books you need context first unique context before anything
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else without context you will be losting layers of fancy language layers of confusion and layers of I don't know what I'm doing and layers of just pure
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pure madness and pure suffering try reading critique of pure reason for the first time without knowing a thing about can't without knowing a thing about the progression of Western intellectual
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traditions well I'll try it hat you're gonna be on a verge of contemplating suicide if you try to recruit take a pure reasoning in that fashion so context is king and a processing and the processing which we gain that context is
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through doing a vast inspection or inspection or reading this is a concept that I got from don't don't exactly remember the author's name this is a concept that I got from a book called how to read a book in which the author
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talked about how it is really hard for you to go read a difficult book cover-to-cover thinking that will powers all you need but in reality without a proper context it is just impossible the book is going
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to remain impenetrable to you so the way that we combat that is twofold using two ways to combat this sort of impenetrability of books that we tend to experience first if the book is
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relatively isolated if the book is relatively on its own for example take cards meditation of First Philosophy that book is relatively isolated
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relatively it's not completely isolated but a relatively stand-alone concept there's not a lot of references to other authors there's not a lot of background reading required and there's not a lot of
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shenanigans involved that requires to read extra requires to read some other authors out there that they cars trying to refute but there's not a lot of that happening but so if the work is relatively isolated then you do the
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inspection on the book itself so what does it look like in real life so for example you go purchase a copy of a copy of the car it's meditation on First Philosophy I would first of all read
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through the table of content the table of content read through the table of content don't bother with the entire book cover-to-cover unique context before you read the entire thing so read the table of content first well for
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meditation of First Philosophy the conne table of content probably wouldn't give you much information about what each chapter is all about so then the second step have you read through the table of
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content is to go through a vast inspection of the entire book in for example less than an hour so that's the speed that we're talking about here so go through each chapter read three four sentences and is sort of pick out a
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general structure of the book what you're hunting for isn't understanding yet you're hunting for a general skeletal structure you're hunting for this overarching theme of the author's work how is this book organized what are
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some of the sections that combined together to make this treatise what are some of the moving pieces what is the author trying to argue in this specific chapter so something that I like to do is to read the first sentence of every
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paragraph and had be done with that entire chapter and then move on to the next chapter and next chapter and next chapter what you're gonna do is that you can work through the entire book really quickly you can work through the entire book very quickly and very fast I would
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say under an hour or two two hours you can gain an overall understanding of this text you can gain a skeletal structure of what the author is talking about you can gain this overarching view
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of the author's contentions well on second floor what if the book requires a lot of background reading what if you reading something like you're reading something like Foucault and Foucault is referencing to all these 17th to 18th
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century the psychopathology and all these very specialized medical terms what what then there are ways to combat that the direct ways to do your background reading which is I which is gonna take a long time but
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there's an alternative way of combating this sort of background reading fallacy the way that you come back combat background reading is through using secondary resources if you couldn't be
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bothered to do background reading then go on great courses plus then go on YouTube going whatever go on study guides calm even though that website probably don't exist go on whichever website that you want
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encyclopedia of philosophy to dig out as fast as possible all the background you need in simple terms so you know exactly what the author's talking about all the background reading that you were doing
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are sort of building you up to reading this author so you don't need to spend hours upon hours and hours upon hours digging through the Foundation's you can sort of do a quick inspection of the Foundation's so you have a very good
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understanding of where the author's coming at and then return to the work itself and then as you're reading the work itself repeat inspection or reading process on that work itself we through a table of
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content and then read through the first sentence of each paragraph and then work through that entire thing in less than two hours to get a general skeletal structure of the entire thing so now you
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might be wondering what is the point of getting a Scalia Scalia structure why don't I just work through the entire book with my sheer iron will you know I'm gonna search off every definition as I go wouldn't that be a better way to
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read it so I can read this book for once and never come back to it isn't that a better strategy overall well actually no because the amount of information that you're gonna be over came with and the
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amount of things that you have to consider as you read this book cover to cover for the first time is so there's too much information for you to process at once there's just too much input and without this general
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skelita structure you have no context to attach all of these complex terms upon it is analogous to history if you read a history book cover-to-cover you ain't got to remember all the dates you ain't got to remember all the people chances
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are you you just kind of have a bunch of scattered stuff floating around in your head without a sense of cohesion in fact with no cohesion at all so what you literally have to do is to read through
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the entire history book in less than two hours read for read the bolded titles read the index read a table of content to get a general sense of what the heck is happening for example throughout the French
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Revolution what did the French people do what are some that reach what are some of the resentment or what are some of the causes of resentment of the lower classes toward a Third Estate that eventually caused a revolution to to to
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unfold how did King how did the king of France eventually lost these power so look for general themes and look for these very overarching cielito structures what's gonna start to happen is that once
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you've finished your inspection or reading and then you start to read the entire book in its entirety from the beginning to end now this time you read forward a very subtle details now you read every word in a book second time
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around reading or third time around reading if it's a really difficult book now you look for the very detailed analysis now you look for everything in a very pedantic manner because if you
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have that skelita structure in place then the rest of the work becomes quite easy to read because what you can do is that you can start to attach different terminologies to this already existing backbone so it's less about memorization
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now it's all about constructing a mental map and this mental map it's impossible for you to forget it because one node in this mental map is gonna trigger a series of memories for example I tell you for example I tell you a specific
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dating history if you do it in the inspectional reading manner when dating history is gonna trigger a network of events it's gonna in your brain you know schematically it's going to trigger a
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network of a and then those network of events are gonna be effortless to recall you can recall quotes you can attach quotes to this memory memory backbone you can attach events pictures people whatever
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you want and then this is sort of the holistic map that we're looking for so there's no point memorizing individual things you won't memorize them you remember that difference between elaborative rehearsal and maintenance
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rehearsal a very good psychology concept maintenance rehearsal is sort of repetitively trying to get it in your head but elaborate rehearsal is trying to map it out in your brain and trying to get gained a sort of overhaul of the
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entire thing first and then you start to attach individual little bits upon this already pre-existing memory backbone and what you're gonna realize is that these things are so much easier to recall so much easier to construct a sense of
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cohesion and it is so much more enjoyable so much more enjoyable to attach these memories upon this pre-existing backbone you feel like you're discovering things instead of getting so confused by everything
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instead of gaming instead of feeling so lost by every word in the book well you feel at ease you can just attach different things to your memory memory backbone and arrest is history so I
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think that is a foundation for inspectional reading give it a go if it doesn't work reject it the thing with learning strategy is that it probably won't work for a lot of people I knew I know a lot of people that are great at
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great at memorization to have a really great rote memory and the rote memory is the thing that they rely upon to recall the dates well I have no objection against that but for me I have a terrible rough memory I almost couldn't
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remember anything through rote at all so that's why I have to resort to this sort of dynamic holistic learning and this is something that is just fine a found out to be very useful throughout my learning career throughout my journey of becoming
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an autodidact so yep Robin here from the quirky inquiry happy learning and I shall see you in the next video
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