
Bookshelf
Every time I'm not reading, I'm thinking about reading.
46 entries·8 shelves
46 entries
Title | Category | Medium | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|
Credits to Mason Wang for heavily inspiring this format and initial reads.

Every time I'm not reading, I'm thinking about reading.
Title | Category | Medium | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|
This happens to be one of my favorite essays I've read about history of all time. It changed the way I looked at studying and understanding history.
This has always been the tricky thing about learning from history. History is context dependent.
Learning narrow lessons from history is extremely risky because things that are true in one specific context might not be true in a different context - even a slightly different context.
The person who has read history would know not to overreact to certain events; the person who hasn’t is seeing everything for the very first time.
I think we should read history for concept instantiations, not lessons.
Concepts are represented not as abstract principles in their heads, but a cluster of real world cases that serve as prototypes.
The goal of reading from history, then, is to expand the set of prototypes in your head.