Rao Reading Algorithm
October 2024
Who, What, Where, How, and Why Do I Read - Why Reading Matters
Reading means my total consumption of ideas and media, learning via seeing or listening to symbols versus pure action. Reading involves books at the core, but also journal articles, news, blogs, music, video, maps, engineering and architectural drawings, code, patents, walking in cities, conversations with people, and viewing art. If it’s compressed info encoded into my brain and world models, I count it. The line between a reading algo and a learning algo is unclear. Reading is compressed learning, but obviously there are other ways to learn (direct trial and error, apprentice mentor teaching, Socratic dialectic, etc).
More subtly, reading is practice directing attention, causing your awareness to curate what comes into that awareness, for a purpose.
My reading goal is to use what I read, integrate it into a multidisciplinary whole in my world models, and connect it to problems I care about and am working on. It means updating my web of knowledge.
But mere usefulness is too strict a criterion. An equal goal is pleasure. I’ve rewired my brain so reading to learn is highly pleasurable. Often I learn fun and useless material that my curiosity takes me to. This material may be useful later (linear algebra, graph theory, topology, thermodynamics, contemporary classical music, minimalist art). Steve Jobs learning about calligraphy and fonts, and then later created the first great GUI and desktop publishing suite. He is an inspiration. Trivia can be world-changing. Curiosity is a blazing, angelic guide.
Generally I’m trying to become a learning machine - to get the best of compressed learning from many humans so I'm not limited to my own experience (like interactive fleet learning for robots and AI, who are early on this steep learning curve).
I'm guided by the wisdom of Charlie Munger:
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero. . . You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads – at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out. Poor Charlie's Almanack (1st edition, 2005; 2nd edition, 2008).
Reading is highly personal. I don’t write about my reading algorithm to recommend it to you or for didactic purposes. Rather, this is descriptive, if my goal for sharing it is to get you to think deeper about your own reading, epistemology, and weltanshauung.
Core of the Algorithm
I’m looking to build semantic trees of knowledge. A semantic tree is an ordering of information that starts with fundamental principles and branches out into increasingly less fundamental details. For me, it's the most important compressed knowledge that I can act and build on: math, physics, and the core of humanities.