Bill Gates is a reading toddler

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This article by Dr Piotr Wozniak is part of SuperMemo Guru series on memory, learning, creativity, and problem solving.

I love Bill Gates

I love Bill Gates. He is one of my greatest inspirations. However, I was provoked into an assessment of his reading skills. He is a voracious reader, he is a great reader, and a great mind, and his habits are well-documented. I would like to use his habits to explain the superiority of incremental reading. Naturally, as I write in 2025, my knowledge of Bill's reading might be 3-5 years out of date. He mentions using OneNote. Perhaps he is a secret incremental reader already? We may never know.

Why complain about Bill's methodology?

In a Palace video about the speed of incremental reading, someone mentioned that Woz is wrong because:

Someone like Bill Gates would have learned a lot less through incremental reading. It is an inherently slow method. So someone like Gates, who is likely a skilled learner, would be hamstrung

Bill might be hamstrung for years of his school-like habits. However, the speed of incremental reading is actually as high as you choose it to be within the realm of the speed of thought. A realistic assessment was made in Incremental reading is speed-reading on steroids

Incremental reading imposes virtually no limit on the speed of reading

Incremental reading is optimum

It is easy to prove that incremental reading is as fast as the fastest reading method. After all, one can schedule reading in SuperMemo, and read whichever way she feels is faster outside SuperMemo. That complies with the universal definition of incremental reading. The same can be shown for slow reading with optimum comprehension. Incremental reading can find a golden mean between the two. I will discuss individual tools that Bill Gates uses, and how incremental reading brings them to a new level.

Highlights

When Bill Gates finds an important sentence in a book, he highlights it with a marker. Arguably, an extract can be made faster and can be "customized". In incremental reading, the highlighted "sentence" can be shortened, reworded, enhanced with annotations from a dictionary or with an explanation from ChatGPT, etc. Bill may use a pen to write a few notes on the margin in its limited space. His favorite books are all covered with margin notes. Interestingly, Demis Hassabis also claims that highlights on paper stick better to his memory (Lex Fridman interview, 2:02:04). He is right, but his effect can be reversed by reconditioning.

In incremental reading, a valuable highlight is set onto a journey into your memory with a keystroke

Bookmark

When Bill needs to bookmark a page, he inserts a paper bookmark in the book. A good book will get thick with dozens of bookmarks. In SuperMemo, you just set a priority on an article, or an extract. You can set priorities now or later.

Review

With traditional book reading, there is no way to effectively schedule reviewing a valuable extract. An incremental reader is aware that even the best quotes can disappear from memory in a week, so he may preventively schedule an extract for review in 3 months. Bill prefers handwritten notes. He is unlikely to schedule a review of a golden idea in his Outlook Calendar. In SuperMemo, he would do it with a keystroke.

Priority

There is no good method for prioritizing highlights in a book. In SuperMemo, priority from 0% to 100% may be assigned with a keystroke. It is hard to prioritize paper books. The arrangement on shelves might be helpful, but it is still lame. In SuperMemo, you can set the priority on books, articles, questions, extracts, portions of texts, areas of knowledge, and all imaginable subsets of knowledge.

Priority queue makes sure you always start your reading from the most important text

Cloze

In a book, there is no way to convert a text into questions. You can manually type some notes to your spaced repetition app, or at worst, to note-taking software. That's tedious and this discourages active recall of that you read and learn. In SuperMemo, converting a short text into a meaningful question takes a keystroke. See: Cloze deletion

In incremental reading, any valuable piece of knowledge can be converted into a question for active recall with a keystroke

Bookshelf

After a few years, a book collector may amass a nice library. However, he cannot possibly compete with the volume of quality materials imported from the web. Not only is there a great selection of books for download. There is also an unfathomable plentitude of shorter texts and article, incl. fact-rich encyclopedic material from Wikipedia.

Selection

Bill has a great habit of never starting a book he would not finish. This means he is very meticulous in researching the book before he even starts. However, from an incremental reading point of view, it is horribly inefficient. The optimum strategy is to start reading and stop when bored or tired. At this point, you can optimally decide when to resume reading, and at what priority. All pieces of reading live in a priority queue. Deleting entire books is not a frequent thing in SuperMemo. Delete also requires a bit of research. As a result, hundreds of books may linger at low priorities awaiting serendipitous rediscovery. They may never be visited in the course of mainstream reading. They may still be encountered by chance. You may have no patience for Feynman lectures, but while researching curiosity, you may find a fantastic passage explaining why curiosity is the foundation of intelligence. That’s serendipity by design.

In Google you search the entire web. In incremental reading, you search only through your curated knowledge collection within the domain of your interests.

In incremental reading, book selection is nearly cost free. The entire cost is equal to the cost of a bit of reading

Spaced repetition

Paper books are useless for systematic and effective review of knowledge learned. The only sensible tool is spaced repetition which is integrated into the entire process of incremental reading. Many users read and type their notes into any SRS (e.g. Anki), but that's annoyingly slow.

The power of incremental reading rests on spaced repetition activated with a keystroke

Speed of reading

Bill Gates is a proficient and efficient reader. He reads 50 books per year. His (allegedly) autistic brain soaks knowledge like a sponge. That makes reading fun. However, he would use the same strengths in incremental reading, while having no speed limit to consider. In incremental reading, long term, skimming does not undermine comprehension nor coherence. This is why you can read many more books within the same allocation of time. Moreover, reading dozens or hundreds of books in parallel allows for connecting the dots among remote areas of science or engineering. Monothematic reading provides for an in-depth study, but this is efficient in case of a perfect match between authors intent and reader's needs. Gaps in knowledge, paradoxically, make reading books more efficient. For an incremental reader with extensive knowledge, rapid switching between different subjects makes it easier to acquire new knowledge, create new associations and consolidate old knowledge with some assistance from the spacing effect.

Incremental reading is unmatched in the speed of reading, but even more so, it cannot be beat in the speed of learning due to the spacing effect (even without spaced repetition).

Incremental reading maximizes the speed of learning

My own baby years

To those who think I never lived the "paper life", let me tell you about my own baby steps in book reading.

Personal anecdote. Why use anecdotes?
Reading books can be an incredibly efficient way to build great knowledge. I read a lot in primary school only to be discouraged entirely in secondary school. Compulsory reading in Polish literature made me stop reading fiction for life. Luckily, I developed a love for reading science book. I would approach them in a different way: reading slowly and meticulously while making copious notes. Books in biochemistry and human physiology were my favorite. The peak of that reading must have occurred in 1990-1991 when I was free from time-wasting classes at the university (and before getting involved in commercial activities in SuperMemo World). My passion was magnified by the fact that having mastered fluent reading in English, I could swap old outdated Polish books from the university library for high quality books from the British Library and the US Consulate Library in Poznan. In those years I would read anything of significance from cancer, through nutrition to baby care. I think I know what Bill feels when he carries bags of thick books for his reading week. I think I know what he feels when he speeds through pages packed with fascinating knowledge. In the late 1980s, I also started squirreling golden knowledge in SuperMemo. Due to the cost of writing down the notes, I was far more selective. You could say that my today's collection contains a lot of junk in comparison. But junk is cheap. Once identified as an obstacle to progress, it can be chucked from the "library" with the Delete key with no regrets

Bill's blunders

Hundreds of books read do not prevent ignorance or naivete in a subset of areas. Everyone's guilty. This Ted Talk aged horribly. I will spare it my comment and leave here an older, and more generous text: Bill Gates is wrong about education. For clarity, even a hundred years of incremental reading will not prevent straying here and there! To err is human.

Cognitive perspective

In the present text I outlined the weaknesses of traditional reading from the point of view of traditional reading. For a cognitive analysis from the point of view of the technology, see: Bill Gates and his non-incremental reading. In conclusion:

If you look at the list of advantages of incremental reading, Bill loses on nearly all fronts. His genius mind may not be able to compensate for the loss. His best chances for solid compensation come in the areas of consistency, coherence, stresslessness, attention, prioritization, speed, meticulousness, and some metacognitive skills (e.g. operating on semantics, speedreading), etc.

See also


For more texts on memory, learning, sleep, creativity, and problem solving, see Super Memory Guru
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