It’s tempting to judge what you read:

I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those.

However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements.

Instead, you can say:

I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent.

And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don’t have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it’s needed.

Like Mindstorms, I had to give up on extracting key quotes because I found myself transcribing the entire paper.

Our zeal may have us mistaken for retrograde fundamentalists. We are zealots. We are students of a forgotten past. And we are ever-concerned with the foundational units of our new world-to-be. But we are pragmatic prototypes at heart, and we will submit to great pains to catch a glimpse of what might lie beyond.

[Replying to Maestro Kay ] The most important thing, I think, is decoupling “solver time” from “UI time”. Just because the solver iterates through a series of steps over (computer) time doesn’t mean that the appropriate representation is an animation over (human) time. In this case, it’s best to show all the steps simultaneously. This allows you to see the convergence, as well as skim your mouse over a chart to “pick out” particular steps and study them.