A while back
from wrote the following article. I thought it was brilliant, so I also wanted to explore the idea of vibes.For a long time, I believed that the more books you read, the more knowledge you will gain, the smarter you become. Therefore, reading a book and forgetting the knowledge is a waste of time because you’ll have spent many hours reading a book and you’ll have nothing to show for it.
The problem is that we’re in a constant state of forgetting. The knowledge we gain from books quickly fades from our memory, with some of it failing to even register in our minds.
I made a list of 51 non-fiction books I’ve read over the last 5 years, and it turns out that I cannot recall a single piece of information from 35% of them. Even for the books where I do remember some bits of information, it’s not a lot. After taking a random sample of 5 books and assessing how much I remembered from them, I found it averaged at about one piece of information per 101 pages.1
Well, isn’t this a huge waste of time? Shouldn’t I have been revising the book contents? Shouldn’t I have created Anki flashcards for every book?
Not necessarily because I still have something to show for it, and those are what Adam calls vibes. I may not remember details from the books I’ve read but I remember how they made me feel. I remember whether they were challenging. I remember general sentiments. I remember certain values that a book has portrayed.
For 96% of the 51 non-fiction books I mentioned earlier I still remember vibes. Sometimes vibes are quite concrete like for Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman: Humans are irrational. And sometimes they’re more abstract and indescribable, like for example Maxims by François de la Rochefoucauld. I cannot recall a single maxim of the 600+ maxims, but I remember that they were absolutely incredible. But who cares about vibes and feelings? Aren’t feelings useless when compared to facts?
It isn’t just easier to remember vibes, but I would argue that vibes are also more transferable and difficult to obtain. Let’s compare the information I recall to the vibes I gained from a book I read approximately 2 years ago, Early Greek Philosophy by Jonathan Barnes.
One piece of information I can remember is: “Democritus came up with atomic theory.” I can attend a lot of pub quizzes or hope that one day someone will ask me: Hey dude do you know by any chance who came up with Atomic Theory?
(Ironically, I may have misremembered that Democritus came up with atomic theory because upon a quick glance at the Ancient Atomism page of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, suggests it’s complicated.)
But I can do a lot more with vibes like, “ancient sources are fragile.” Very few sources survive from that long ago, whatever “fragments” remain are usually pieced together from the references of several other sources. On one hand it’s fascinating that we even have sources from back then. On the other hand, it’s wild to think about how many sources we have lost and how much of that responsibility lies on individual people. In today's world it would be close to impossible for the Harry Potter books to disappear because millions of people own a physical copy. Two thousand years ago there might have only been a handful of copies for a source. Also, a lot of the sources back then weren’t even written by the people themselves but rather by someone who knew the person and remembers what they had said which leaves a lot of room for biases.
“Ancient sources are fragile” is transferable. It’s a vibe that helps me keep a healthy dose of scepticism towards primary sources. Something that helped me with reading some of Napoleon’s Letters to Josephine.
If someone asks you who Democritus was, you can just Google his name. Within seconds, you have as much knowledge on Democritus as I do, even though I read his fragments two years ago. You can go one step further and read Democritus’ Wikipedia page and within minutes you’re miles ahead.
But if you want to catch up on my vibe that’s more difficult. You can also open up Wikipedia and read about ancient texts but that does not necessarily elicit a vibe that you still remember two years later.
Similarly, reading book summaries can leave you with the most important information but you’re unlikely to gain vibes from them. That’s not necessarily because they’re shorter than the book but rather because they aren’t optimising for the vibes but more so for the knowledge. And as a result, a couple months after reading a book summary you have nothing left.
Some aphorisms trigger a profound vibe while there are whole books that don’t.
So, considering vibes are useful and we recall them effortlessly, what is actually the point of remembering the information you read?
Reason 1: You need the information.
You may need the information for something specific, for example, your job. I sincerely hope doctors are going off their knowledge rather than the vibes they gained in their years of training. Or you may need to remember the information because when you need it you won’t have access to it. If you’re stuck on a deserted island, it would be a lifesaver if you remember any information about accessing safe drinking water. Or slightly less life-or-death, you’re sitting a closed-book exam. However, most of the books you’re reading in your free time; do not directly concern your profession, wouldn’t save you in a survival situation, or help you in an exam. The information is usually a Google search away and if not, you can just flick through the book again. Most of the time you just need to know where to find the information.
Reason 2: You enjoy learning the information.
There is some knowledge we effortlessly pick up because we are interested in it. A friend of mine has deep passion and knowledge about planes. He’s not thinking about remembering the information because he’s not worried about forgetting it in the first place.
Reason 3: We want to impress others.
We tend to view people who know things as smart which may be true to a degree.2 Therefore we also want to regurgitate information and be considered smart. But trying to remember the content from every book you read isn’t actually going to make you smarter. It’s only going to make your reading experience gruelling and anxiety-inducing. If you feel the need to remember everything you read, every book you read is one additional homework assignment. Every page you turn; one new Anki flashcard. Reading is naturally disincentivised.
In school remembering everything you read might have been a viable but really inefficient strategy since you may actually be able to make use of the information on a test. But exams are artificial environments. Nobody is going to test you after you finish reading Atomic Habits.
Contexts in which this kind of information may actually come in useful is when you’re playing Trivia, which is a game that is literally named after useless information. And even then, you’re going to get quite far with vibes since a lot of trivia games have a multiple-choice question format. Vibes don’t necessarily provide you with the right answer, but they do help you rule out options.3
At the end of the day anyone can learn off a long list of trivial facts if you give them enough time. Anyone can learn off 3.1415926535 or all the capitals of the world. I don’t think that’s impressive. It just shows you have a lot of time on your hand (which might be the real flex). I think the desire to impress others is the biggest reason for why people actually want to remember the information they read. We want credit for the hours we spent reading books.
Some of the most annoying people are what I consider fun fact machines. They are constantly spitting out fun facts in the hope of impressing the people they are with. They are not interested in engaging in a conversation about the topic they force onto others. They merely want to bring it up, collect the admiration, and move on.
Yes, there are valid reasons to remember knowledge from the books you’ve read. Maybe you love turning your book notes into Anki flashcards and revising them. But if you don't, that's cool too. Reading a book and forgetting the details is inevitable but not really a concern because you’ll still have the vibes.
Thanks Isabel and Tom for giving feedback.
Median: one piece of information per 88 pages. Range: one piece of information from 60-192 pages.
Studies that examine the link between intelligence and general knowledge, generally measure general knowledge in a multiple-choice style which means that it’s more of a vibe test than a memory test. Although some theories of crystallised intelligence include knowledge, intelligence tests usually measure verbal ability instead.
The vibes I gained from Early Greek Philosophy by Jonathan Barnes actually helped me correctly answer a bunch of Trivial Pursuit questions on two pre-Socratic philosophers whose names I no longer remember.