Chase Your Reading

Robin Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, wrote a compelling and concise essay in 2010 titled “Chase Your Reading.”

In this essay, Hanson argues that readers are more intellectually productive when they adopt a goal-oriented, critical approach (chasing) rather than a passive, exploratory one (searching). By focusi... See more

There are two modes of information discovery: foraging and hunting. Foraging is passive. You don’t have a clear goal; you just wander and scroll until something catches your interest. Hunting is active and purposeful. You know what you’re looking for and are consciously searching for it. A good information diet needs both: Foraging helps us decide

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There are two ways people obtain info online: fishing and hunting.

Fishing is passive. You don’t know what you want to know and just casually scan the screen till something catches your interest. Examples include scrolling social media, browsing news websites, and idly refreshing the YouTube home page.

Hunting, on the other hand, is an active proces... See more

So I advocate reading books in cluster – the author can be the clustering factor, it can be the topic, it can be the historical period – but you really get into a person’s mind if you re-read everything they’ve done within the span of a few weeks or months, and then watch them on YouTube, and just try to think about and write out notes, “What am I ... See more

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns whi

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