The Nonlinear Library LW - Dual Wielding Kindle Scribes by mesaoptimizer
Feb 21, 2024
08:50
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Dual Wielding Kindle Scribes, published by mesaoptimizer on February 21, 2024 on LessWrong.
This is an informal post intended to describe a workflow / setup that I found very useful, so that others might consider adopting or experimenting with facets of it that they find useful.
In August 2023, I was a part of MATS 4.0 and had begun learning the skill of deconfusion, with an aim of disentangling my conflicting intuitions between my belief that shard theory seemed to be at least directionally pointing at some issues with the MIRI model of AGI takeoff and alignment difficulty, and my belief that Nate Soares was obviously correct that reflection will break Alex Turner's diamond alignment scheme. A friend lent me his Kindle Scribe to try out as part of my workflow.
I started using it for note-taking, and found it incredibly useful and bought it from him. A month later, I bought a second Kindle Scribe to add to my workflow.
It has been about six months since, and I've sold both my Kindle Scribes. Here's why I found this workflow useful (and therefore why you might find it useful), and why I moved on from it.
The Display
The Kindle Scribe is a marvelous piece of hardware. With a 300 PPI e-ink 10.3 inch screen, reading books on it was a delight in comparison to any other device I've used to read content on. The stats I just mentioned matter:
300 PPI on a 10.3 inch display means the displayed text is incredibly crisp, almost indistinguishable from normal laptop and smartphone screens. This is not the case for most e-ink readers.
E-ink screens seem to reduce eye strain by a non-trivial amount. I've looked into some studies, but the sample sizes and effect sizes were not enough to make me unilaterally recommend people switch to e-ink screens for reading. However, it does seem like the biggest benefit of using e-ink screens seems to be that you aren't staring into a display that is constantly shining light into your eyeballs, which is the equivalent of staring into a lightbulb.
Anecdotally, it did seem like I was able to read and write for longer hours when I only used e-ink screens: I went from, about 8 to 10 hours a day (with some visceral eye fatigue symptoms like discomfort at the end of the day) to about 12 to 14 hours a day, without these symptoms, based on my informal tracking during September 2023.
10.3 inch screens (with a high PPI) just feel better to use in comparison to smaller (say, 6 to 7 inch screens) for reading. This seems to me to be due to a greater amount of text displayed on the screen at any given time, which seems to somehow limit the feeling of comprehensibility of the text.
I assume this is somehow related to chunking of concepts in working memory, where if you have a part of a 'chunk' on one page, and another part on another page, you may have a subtle difficulty with comprehending what you are reading (if it is new to you), and the more the text you have in front of you, the more you can externalize the effort of comprehension. (I used a Kobo Libra 2 (7 inch e-ink screen) for a bit to compare how it felt to read on, to get this data.)
Also, you can write notes in the Kindle Scribe. This was a big deal for me, since before this, I used to write notes on my laptop, and my laptop was a multi-purpose device.
Sidenote: My current philosophy of note-taking is that I think 'on paper' using these notes, and don't usually refer to it later on.
The aim is to augment my working memory with an external tool, and the way I write notes usually reflects this -- I either write down most of my relevant and conscious thoughts as I think them (organized as a sequence of trees, where each node is a string representing a 'thought'), or I usually write 'waypoints' for my thoughts, where each waypoint is a marker for a conclusion of a sequence / tree of thoughts, or an inte...
This is an informal post intended to describe a workflow / setup that I found very useful, so that others might consider adopting or experimenting with facets of it that they find useful.
In August 2023, I was a part of MATS 4.0 and had begun learning the skill of deconfusion, with an aim of disentangling my conflicting intuitions between my belief that shard theory seemed to be at least directionally pointing at some issues with the MIRI model of AGI takeoff and alignment difficulty, and my belief that Nate Soares was obviously correct that reflection will break Alex Turner's diamond alignment scheme. A friend lent me his Kindle Scribe to try out as part of my workflow.
I started using it for note-taking, and found it incredibly useful and bought it from him. A month later, I bought a second Kindle Scribe to add to my workflow.
It has been about six months since, and I've sold both my Kindle Scribes. Here's why I found this workflow useful (and therefore why you might find it useful), and why I moved on from it.
The Display
The Kindle Scribe is a marvelous piece of hardware. With a 300 PPI e-ink 10.3 inch screen, reading books on it was a delight in comparison to any other device I've used to read content on. The stats I just mentioned matter:
300 PPI on a 10.3 inch display means the displayed text is incredibly crisp, almost indistinguishable from normal laptop and smartphone screens. This is not the case for most e-ink readers.
E-ink screens seem to reduce eye strain by a non-trivial amount. I've looked into some studies, but the sample sizes and effect sizes were not enough to make me unilaterally recommend people switch to e-ink screens for reading. However, it does seem like the biggest benefit of using e-ink screens seems to be that you aren't staring into a display that is constantly shining light into your eyeballs, which is the equivalent of staring into a lightbulb.
Anecdotally, it did seem like I was able to read and write for longer hours when I only used e-ink screens: I went from, about 8 to 10 hours a day (with some visceral eye fatigue symptoms like discomfort at the end of the day) to about 12 to 14 hours a day, without these symptoms, based on my informal tracking during September 2023.
10.3 inch screens (with a high PPI) just feel better to use in comparison to smaller (say, 6 to 7 inch screens) for reading. This seems to me to be due to a greater amount of text displayed on the screen at any given time, which seems to somehow limit the feeling of comprehensibility of the text.
I assume this is somehow related to chunking of concepts in working memory, where if you have a part of a 'chunk' on one page, and another part on another page, you may have a subtle difficulty with comprehending what you are reading (if it is new to you), and the more the text you have in front of you, the more you can externalize the effort of comprehension. (I used a Kobo Libra 2 (7 inch e-ink screen) for a bit to compare how it felt to read on, to get this data.)
Also, you can write notes in the Kindle Scribe. This was a big deal for me, since before this, I used to write notes on my laptop, and my laptop was a multi-purpose device.
Sidenote: My current philosophy of note-taking is that I think 'on paper' using these notes, and don't usually refer to it later on.
The aim is to augment my working memory with an external tool, and the way I write notes usually reflects this -- I either write down most of my relevant and conscious thoughts as I think them (organized as a sequence of trees, where each node is a string representing a 'thought'), or I usually write 'waypoints' for my thoughts, where each waypoint is a marker for a conclusion of a sequence / tree of thoughts, or an inte...