Completely agree that the biggest benefit from most texts is absorbing new ways to think, and developing familiarity with subjects and ideas.

Most individual facts will evaporate, but it’s likely if I need them in the future I will rember where to look.

> I remember co-workers highlighting large chunks of text, sometimes 40%.

Only quibble, is nobody underlines things they plan on remembering.

It’s a tool for focusing the mind.

In rare, very rare occasions I have benefited as well from being able to review a book in record time since the points my brain works from are all underlined and page corners bent.

That might be one out of a thousand books.

Mostly, creating a physical act, to accompany the mental act, of identifying key points, is the point.

I don’t just underline, but mark things with stars, exclamation points, happy faces, etc. in the margins. Institutionalizes paying attention, lets my hands move so my body doesn’t think I am supposed to be taking a nap, and creates regular but very micro-pauses where I process the words I am decorating.

Reminds me of one of my favorite stories, from Phaedrus:

> Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved. The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

https://www.antiquitatem.com/en/origin-of-writing-memory-pla...

I disagree with the author at a surface level; we can retain much more than 90% of what we read. The curious can look up deep reading strategies, e.g., those summarized by Benjamin Keep.

At a deeper level, though, there’s truth that we have limited time here; we can’t read everything.

For academic papers I find constructing an outline of the introduction distills 80% of the information I need.

I place a post-it note over each paragraph with a few words, motivation: xyz, challenge:xyz, SOTA, approach xyz.

I read to forget because my words are much easier to skim than someone else’s.

This is an engineer perspective.

Reading/studying is only really about learning what knowledge exists so you can find it and employ it later in the service of building something.

Trying to memorize many specific details or formulas or algorithms at the expense of a broader knowledge map is suboptimal.

But for science, medicine etc this may not be the case.

We See from the Periphery, Not the Center: Reflections on Literature in an Age of Crisis, Alfred Kazin:

"How in 1977 can any great book help me to live better, I who am a creature of anxiety, involved against my will in all twentieth-century injustices and cruelties? How can Kafka relieve me of guilt, he who knew as a Jew even before the Nazis murdered his sisters, since powerlessness is a crime that invites exploitation, that "not the murderer but the victim is considered guilty"? How can Proust, who died to the world in order to live again through his great book retracing the past-how can he relieve me of my dread of death, when I can no longer accept the next world, the world of imagination, promised to me by his last-minute discovery of art in the volume Time Recaptured? But these are rhetorical questions whose emptiness I do not wish to conceal.

Because no book has enabled anyone to live better. The influence of any book on my consciousness is necessarily intermittent, a flash, a hope, an illusion, a picture. No more than any other external agent can a book effect a transformation that lasts.

What a great literary work does do for me is to clear my mind, to rearrange the order of my thinking, to show me, in the immortal words of Porgy and Bess, that "it ain't necessarily so." The real power of a literary work consists in presenting us with alternatives. If the work is emotionally effective enough, it can be an antidote to our usual mental confinement. It is the vision of another mind, another way of thinking, not a lasting way out."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40133281

I make 1-2 flash cards on the topic and main advance of papers I read. It’s a nice sweet spot, and I find that I retain much more than what’s on the cards. Without them, I forget the whole thing.

This is a good approach to take when assisted with building knowledge base (with your choice of retrieval system, ex. LLMs). 'Train' your brain like the article suggests, defer mental load to another system.