Incremental Reading: What is of Value?

Imagine you are an archaeologist exploring a cave that potentially has valuable fragments of a lost civilization. As you explore the cave, you find many rocks of little value (If any). However, as you find artifacts that might be relevant to your field of work, you pause, examine the artifacts, place them in bags, label them for future study, etc.

Incremental reading is difficult to describe; like traditional reading with books it involves exploring a line of thought, but unlike traditional, linear reading, you are encouraged to examine and constantly assign value to the material under consideration, much like an archaeologist exploring a cave. What information and articles are valuable can be very subjective, as people have many different motivations, hobbies, fields in which they are ignorant, etc. (After all, to a geologist, the same "valueless" rocks that were discarded by one might potentially be more useful than a valuable artifact at that same site!).

As you examine any text, you need to first ask yourself, "What information is valuable to me?" To do this you must first have a set of core values (Stated or otherwise). To illustrate, consider an article I just finished reading from Time magazine: "Red Truth Blue Truth."

What information is valuable to me? I have no political affiliation, I consider myself neutral when it comes to politics. While one might cut the top part of a weed every few years by electing a new face for the government, the roots of corruption, greed, etc. stay the same. Thus, while one political party might advocate a policy I feel is good, the corruption runs so deep on every level, the decaying institution is either beyond reform or very close to it. I'm not advocating that you adopt this viewpoint, I'm simply stating my core values that came into play when evaluating this article.

If I was a Romney supporter, I might be more inclined to look for knowledge and facts that would be detrimental to Obama's administration and something I could use to win an argument with a co-worker. If I was an Obama supporter, I might be just as inclined to look for things detrimental Romney's policies and track record. Because I don't have a stake in either side, going into the article I was looking for mainly historical tidbits and a more complete picture of the tattered state of political discourse.

(It is also good to remember that many statistics are greatly subject to change. To memorize them would be just as valuable to memorize the stock price of a company on any given day.)

I read the article, one paragraph at a time. If I didn't find anything enlightening, surprising, etc. in one of those paragraphs, I would delete that paragraph and move on to the next one. If I found something interesting in that paragraph, I would analyze what was valuable in that paragraph and try to condense each point into a single sentence (Very important!). After doing this, I would extract that sentence, delete the paragraph and move on. I kept this up until I finished reading the article.

Among the interesting points I found in the article were:

-Lies and mud-slinging is as old as US politics itself; it goes back all the way to the very first election involving John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

-The quote "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers," is telling about politics in general.

-Those that subscribe to a political party are more likely to dismiss or downplay the lies said or endorsed by their own party (Basically "fanboy-ism," which works with technology, movie franchises, etc.).

-I never knew Ronald Reagan claimed that 80% of pollution came from trees and vegetation.

Other than the above points (Along with a few more), the rest of the article contained nothing extremely surprising or enlightening. Still, 6 or 7 good flashcards came from an article that took 10-15 minutes to read, so I'm satisfied with the result.