Thinking & Personal Effectiveness
Getting knowledge out of sources efficiently.
9 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Of Studies
Francis Bacon · 1625
Argues that books demand different depths of attention, some to be tasted, others swallowed, a few chewed and digested, and that reading which is not…
+4 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On Reading and Books
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1851
Argues that constant reading substitutes another person's thoughts for one's own and can leave a well-read mind unable to think independently, so…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Advancement of Learning
Francis Bacon · 1605
Surveys the whole state of learning to argue that knowledge has been held back less by lack of talent than by faulty method, and proposes…
+2 more at this level
12 works
Francis Bacon
Argues that books demand different depths of attention, some to be tasted, others swallowed, a few chewed and digested, and that reading which is not tested against writing and discussion produces only a full, not an exact, mind.
about 5 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Ralph Waldo Emerson
Argues that most of any library is not worth a reader's time, and offers rules, read the best books first, reread rather than merely add, distrust a book's fame, for building a reading life around a small number of books read well.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sarah Blakeslee
Proposes five questions, currency, relevance, authority, accuracy and purpose, as a fixed checklist for deciding whether a source is fit to use, aimed at students who otherwise judge a source by how professional it looks.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Nicholas Carr
Argues that habitual web reading is training the brain toward skimming and away from the sustained linear attention that deep reading requires, drawing on his own experience and early research on how people read hypertext.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Maureen A. Carey, Kevin L. Steiner & William A. Petri
Recommends reading a paper out of section order — abstract, then figures, then methods, then the rest — so you evaluate the evidence before the authors argue you into their conclusion.
5 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Arthur Schopenhauer
Argues that constant reading substitutes another person's thoughts for one's own and can leave a well-read mind unable to think independently, so reading should follow rather than replace time spent thinking.
about 2 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Michele L. Simpson & Sherrie L. Nist
Finds that college students trained to annotate a textbook chapter, marking main ideas and writing marginal notes rather than underlining, outperformed untrained students on exams weeks later, when the benefit of rereading had faded.
National Endowment for the Arts
Documents a steep, broad-based decline in literary reading among American adults between 1982 and 2002 and argues the drop tracks the rise of competing electronic media rather than any single demographic group's habits.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jim Pryor
Recommends reading a philosophy paper twice, once quickly for the overall shape of the argument, then slowly while reconstructing the premises, rather than once carefully from start to finish.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Francis Bacon
Surveys the whole state of learning to argue that knowledge has been held back less by lack of talent than by faulty method, and proposes systematically cataloguing and testing what is known rather than trusting inherited authority.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Eugene Garfield
Proposes indexing papers by who cites whom rather than by subject keyword, arguing that citation links trace the actual association of ideas that a keyword system misses, and lays out the method that became the Science Citation Index.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David Moher, Alessandro Liberati, Jennifer Tetzlaff & Douglas G. Altman
Sets out a 27-item checklist and flow diagram for reporting a systematic review or meta-analysis, so a reader can tell how thoroughly the literature was actually searched rather than taking the search on trust.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.