75: Can you learn from just reading summaries? 🧐
Reading summaries is easier, but is it better?
I have a heuristic that it's better to consume content from the source. Reading classic books rather than commentaries on them (In Search of Lost Time rather than How Proust Can Change Your Life). Not reading the news. Instead, reading long-form deep dives into specific topics of interest.
However, one area where I'm not sure this holds true is academic research papers. The issue with research papers is (1) they're really long, (2) they're full of technical jargon, (3) there are huge loads of them and (4) they're really, really long.
This is one of the things that inspired me to team up with Mustafa and Stu to build ExplainThisPaper.com. The feedback we've had so far has been great. But is the hypothesis valid?
We've decided to test it out, to settle this once and for all. We're running an experiment where you read one (emoji-filled) summary and one full paper and we see which is more effective.
So here's the ask: would you like to be a participant in the study? You'd get to read two medical machine learning papers (before they get published) and four participants will win £50 Amazon vouchers.
The study will be open until the end of the week and shouldn't take too long. If interested, you can take part here: https://explainthispaper.com/study/.
Let's find out together if summaries actually are better - I'll share the results here once we have them.
About Me
👋 Hi, I'm Chris Lovejoy.
I'm a medical doctor 🩺 -> machine learning engineer 👨💻 -> start-up founder 💡
I'm on a mission to improve how we manage our health - and share my learnings and experiences here, on my personal website and on YouTube.
I also throw in my favourite things from the internet, and the occasional joke (humour is work-in-progress).