I just noticed a very weird thing that atleast happens to me. I had known for long that this effect applied to me subconsciously, but recently, I just got note of a very concrete example rather than the previous abstract ones.

So, that thing is to read a kind of principle or advice or hack, then absolutely forget it, like you don’t even have the foggiest of notion about it. Then, the scenario where that advice is applicable comes up. You do exactly as said in advice. You are asked why you did that. You give some very sound explanation of why you felt you should have done that, but you have absolutely no idea that this was some advice you had read, and had you not read that thing, the chances of you doing that, would have been low. Well, I don’t have any evidence for what I would have done had I not read that thing would be not according to the advice, but it seems to me that the thing I did in that scenario is niche enough that it must have been influenced by some degree by the thing I had read.

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Much Later Edit: I think the following tweet by Anu Atluru explains this phenomenon:

the purpose of reading a book isn’t to retain information, it’s to refine your worldview just a little bit with each one

— anu (@anuatluru) January 2, 2024

While reading, we are subconsciously modifying our worldview or internal model in view of new areas of thought extended by the author, if they seem to be true. But from the tweet, it seems not all people do this.

 An interesting phenomenon I observed while I was updating list of books I’ve read on Goodreads, is that humans discount the rating of books they read later in their life. The reason is not so complicated. When a person develops a habit of reading, the marginal learning of each book is high, but as he gets on reading and has accumulated some concepts over time, the marginal learning starts plummeting. The problem is that this trend is not consistent. For instance, if a person ventures into a new domain, the marginal learning will once again be high, and if he returns to a field he has already explored, it will be low. Due to that, we cannot use a formula to discount the earlier ratings of books.

The phenomenon I described earlier applies when ratings are made at the time of reading. However, if you ask a person at any point in time, to rate all books he has read, he now might rate earlier read books lower than what he would had he rated it on time of reading. This is because when a reader rates a book in retrospect, the book’s learnings seem smaller relative to the accumulated learnings at the time of rating.

This leads to some interesting questions:-

• What is a more appropriate way of getting rating for books
• Does this phenomenon also applies to other things like grading. e.g. a teacher starts grading papers, and the earlier papers get graded higher than the last ones, given same quality of paper attempted?