The very premise of this article shows how demented Western culture has become. The attitude of,
“I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I’m not a subject matter expert on the book’s topic” is absolutely insane. It takes a decade of serious work to really get a strong handle on a topic. Books aren’t supposed to teach you something to know, they’re meant to teach you how much you don’t know. Hopefully from that impetus one can go into the world and gain skill.
I have been a Software Engineer for over a decade now and I do seriously difficult network and kernel work right now. There has never been another point in my career where I have been so incredibly aware of how much I don’t know about what I work on. If you’re doing your career right you should feel your ignorance more and more. Books offer us something incredibly valuable, the feeling of ignorance. I can’t think of anything our culture could use more of right now than humility.
People also expect too much after reading a book just once. Reading a book once isn't enough to make a lasting impression, if you're able to remember anything at all — especially for a complex book like Thinking, Fast and Slow.
The books I truly love, I've read at least three times, with pages full of highlights and notes. Re-reading a great book is worth more than reading the latest trends. Seneca wrote a bit about this nearly 2000 years ago:
Be careful, however, that there is no element of discursiveness and desultoriness about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind.
I had a very different reading of the article. The author acknowledges that books do work after the reader actively engages with the topic, does the exercises, rereads, etc. The issue is that this process of transmitting knowledge could be more efficient in a different medium. The post is not against books, but pro interactive teaching methods, as the author gives a link to his proposal https://quantum.country/qcvc
I agree. The anti-book sentiment has felt quite strong lately, and this article is another example.
I think people feel subconsciously guilty that they do not read more. It is thus easier to dismiss books than to acknowledge the fact that most attention spans have been reduced the the granularity of a comment thread. We are all victims to this. Reading a book takes more effort than it used to.
I fear that most people have already read the last book they will complete in their lifetime (not that completing a book is necessary in deriving value from it).
I've happily never met a person in real life who both views books as a means to an end like this AND expects them to just dump understanding into their memories like installing an app. This is bizarre, mistaking both what a book should "do" and why you want to read it in the first place. I don't know where this idea comes from, but as far as I can tell it's specific to a niche of software engineers.
Fortunately, they are far outnumbered by people who love books, buy them, read them, share them, put them on bookshelves, and would generally think this article is profoundly silly.
If you want to know what instantaneous knowledge transfer looks like you just have to look at how ideas commute via Twitter/Facebook memes, which is largely a reification of word-of-mouth.
On a certain level, actual learning requires active participation: you have to want to learn. Learning disrupts your entire world and that's kinda the point. The idea of frictionless learning seems fanciful.
You can say you're shortening the feedback look in a multimedia text, but the desire to learn in my experience starts very early in life and is a fragile thing to cultivate. The author is trying to pour water out of a sinking ship with a bucket. You want people to want to learn, get rid of common CORE with basically tells all the kids who don't have STEM proficiencies or can match pace with its demands, "good luck with life"
There are gigantic swathes of people, the people most in need, who'd already be daunted merely opening the author's marketed multimedia text they wrote at the sight of the math equation.
You're already introducing something terribly new and threatening, threatening to the sureness of the reader's ego, which, again, is why people learn easiest from toxic, context-less memes.
I agree with your point wholeheartedly. This makes me think of "knowledge transfers" in software companies where a meeting is set up between the outgoing engineer/team and the new engineer/team where all knowledge about some project is transferred in the duration of that meeting. For the participating engineers, it's usually clear that this doesn't work but management still expects the new team to be able to basically pick up where the old team left off. If we were able to transfer knowledge gained over months or years of work within a few hours, we would revolutionize scientific advancement and the education industry. Maybe one day that will be possible but for now it is ridiculous to think that reading any kind of complex information once is sufficient to not only memorize it but to truly understand it.
Yes, I cannot personally fathom the appeal of things like Blinkist.
"Get explainers of insights from 3,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles. Free 7-day trial. It takes just 15 mins to read or listen to the key insights from bestselling nonfiction. Audio and Text. Insights in 15 minutes."
Personally I recoil in horror at their marketing as an "app for intellectuals". Genuinely, deep diving is frequently required. Summaries by their nature lack nuance.
I want to read the nuance. I want to give the author the chance to get their point across. I want to read all the footnotes, maybe lookup things in the bibliography.
I don't think anyone I know to be what I'd call an intellectual simply listens to summaries of books. It's sort of anti-intillectual to do that indeed.
Thinking of it another way, the author is challenging the efficacy of learning from books, which is actually a pertinent point to make in a post GPT3 world. But, tbf, the author doesn't make that specific point.
So long as I am able, I will always try to find time to read something new. Especially from books. I can't be precise about this point, but I seriously believe that the kind of information that can be conveyed in a book, cannot be communicated any other way.
I think it's fair to discuss what can be gleaned from a single reading of a book, but there can never be any question of just how much can be communicated by a book, and how much can be learnt from one.
The advent of cinema, and even personal computing, has only served to show how essential a technology the written word is.
It's going to take a very radical piece of technology to improve on it. One that we probably won't see in our time.
- By summarizing important/difficult to understand sections in their own words via writing
- By looking up and exploring alternative explanations of complex idea, and following the two aforementioned avenues towards solidifying one's understanding
Rinse & repeat.
Reading != Learning.
Reading is more of a casual perusal of knowledge, when one isn't actively engaged in the above 3 ways mentioned (or other strategies to absorb the knowledge presented in a book or other compendium of information)
Learning = actively engaging with subject matter with a strong intention to understand and even memorize when necessary.
I don't find this line of thinking to be compelling at all, unless you make certain assumptions that I don't agree with. For one, you'd have to assume that the "big idea" of a book is that you read it once, like a novel, and should have great recall of a large body of details / minutia from said book. IMO, it just "doesn't work like that."
If you want to learn from a book, you have to play a more active role. Personally I find that the process of learning from a book involves A. read it once, straight through like a novel - maybe underlining key passages in pencil, then B. reading again and taking detailed notes as you read, and possibly looking up citations, or related references (the Wikipedia page for a particular term or phrase, for example), then C. re-reading your notes a couple of times as well as reading and re-reading supplemental material that you found, and finally D. writing your own synthesis of the material.
Yes, that's a lot of work and yes it takes a long time and no, not every book justifies doing all that. Sometimes it's OK to just read the book like a novel, and walk away with just a vague memory of the highest level themes and maybe detailed recall or one or two specific points that resonated with you. It all depends on why you're reading the book and what you hope to get out of it.
Edit: and if it's a book with exercises, then add "do the exercises" as another step. That said, I see reading / working through a textbook to really "learn a subject" as being a slightly different thing from reading the typical pop-sci book or business book or whatever, that doesn't generally have exercises. "Learning a subject" to me usually involves using multiple books, videos, articles, maybe writing some code, etc.
> If you want to learn from a book, you have to play a more active role.
I have a mind-blowing insight for you. African tribes have figured this out. The way they teach history is by re-enacting events from myth and history. Those "silly" and noisy dances make a lot of sense.
As Confucius said,
I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
Participation in a tribal ceremony has the potential to teach history best - with highest chance of remembering.
I discovered late in life (high school IIRC) that you don't have to read a book once.
Like you, today, I will dedicate my first read through to exposure, nothing more ("What don't I know that immediately jumps out at me? What do I immediately understand? What am I struggling with?")
In subsequent read throughs,these questions get answered as I reinforce the learning with cross referencing, exercises and deep thought of the subject matter while drinking tea, sitting on the porch bathing in the sun.
To me learning from books remains powerful. It's a shame that how we learn from books is rarely emphasized.
I agree with many of your takes, but I do think reading a book like a novel can give you even more than a vague memory.
I think there is a lot more "dark memory" that can be triggered by conversation or the right context.
I also think we translate a lot of the information we read so it integrates with our own understanding or context. For example, I think I better understand why the US responded to COVID like it did after reading US political history from 1970-2020.
Basically, I think humans are very good at detecting, remembering, and applying patterns for our own purposes, and books introduce us to patterns.
For the given examples: The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel, there is another issue not covered in the article: the books are philosophical interpretations of some facts the author chose to support their theories. Even more so, some of those facts and studies have been since debunked.
So for these examples it is my opinion that it's not a case of books not working, but of very healthy brain garbage collector discarding information that is not actionable and in a lot of cases not even correct. Popular edutainment is not exactly "some serious non-fiction tomes".
Yes, this stood out to me when I read the article. The examples he gives are all pop-science, all take some thesis and making a story from it that'll be interesting to a general audience.
I feel like he's looking at this through the prism of his speciality (producing interactive learning materials), and by doing that has missed the point a little bit. He's looking a genre of books at if they're a different thing to what they actually are, it's the wrong level.
I get reading a book once doesn't translate directly to "facts retained in memory" whereas his idealised new form of media does. But as you say, his examples are edutainment. I feel like what he's suggesting only usefully applies to either textbooks (which he's separated off into a different category anyway) or to a situation where the aim is to memorise as much as possible in a single reading. Which is fine! But it doesn't really need to happen for pop science -- just getting the general gist of an idea across in an entertaining package is okay.
I can't comment on the others, but I'm a trained historian, and hating Guns, Germs, and Steel is probably the single thing that unites our field. It's vastly oversimplified, and gives anyone who reads it the idea that they understand the major forces shaping world history while ignoring most of the things that historians agree are more important than environmental determinism in that process.
I found the examples very surprising - because I think several of those books exist exactly to communicate a very specific, important idea. If you can describe in a few sentences what the central idea of 'The Selfish Gene' is - I would argue that the book has done its job 'transmitting' an idea perfectly. The reason the book takes a hundred or so pages to do that transmission is because the idea is 1. specialized - if you're not a biologist you need to do a lot of work just to understand the questions and the background 2. difficult - even if you're familiar with the biology, you need to think through lots of examples and discussions of what the selfish gene idea implies and 3. controversial - Dawkins spends a lot of time explaining what evidence he has, responding to other views, disclaiming misreadings of his work, and so on.
I have read that book, I believe I understood its central message, I could probably explain it (not very elegantly) in a couple of sentences, and I can't point to any other particular benefit I drew from reading the book, and yet I'm very glad I read it.
I see that this is the author of the excellent "Quantum Country" so perhaps the case being made here is obviously biased, for a good reason.
I get a sense that the author seems to argue that most book authors are not conscious of the working memory of the reader. I don't think that is true. Many "good" non-fiction books I've read actually rely on space-repetitions throughout the text quite heavily. The author, to their credit, does note this for textbooks. Often concepts in long texts are referenced in a non-linear manner, either in expectation of ideas to come or in retrospect to draw parallels & new connections. Unfortunately, the onus here is on the reader to realize and extract the maximum juice out of this non-linear flow.
The key idea of this post is to shift this burden to the "medium" and not the reader. Books can't handle this responsibility in their current form. I certainly agree with this. Distill [1] is pioneering this from the perspective of medium-reader engagement. Unsurprisingly, Michael Nielsen, a collaborator of the author of the post, is a member of the steering committee at Distill. :-)
I love these new directions in dissemination of ideas!
This is beautifully expressed. Knowledge consists of connections across concepts but those connections are rarely shown explicitly in textbooks. Even wikipedia, while allowing you to traverse the connections back and forth easily, does not do a great job of giving you the bird's eye view of a subject or a field. Check out this "map" of mathematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y Every subject needs a similar map.
Besides visualizing the connections, we'd also need interactivity to the topic that helps with forming new mental models - which is the core aspect of learning. Jupyter notebooks, ObservableHQ, Mathigon are some of the good projects working on this aspect.
Disclaimer: I am building the open-source project https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/ which is attempting to build the complete map of knowledge/skills. So I too am biased against books and in favor of digital/interactive tools.
I don’t see how this is an argument for how “books don’t work”. The author’s point seems to be that books don’t support learning, because books are static and can’t adapt to the thinking and working process of the reader/student. Something more is needed to “learn”.
This implies that the purpose of books is to “teach”, but is that so? Books at best “inform”. It is up to the reader to bring the framework for learning, be it the class setting, a study group or just experience enough to self-study.
I kept reading and reading, waiting for him to say what he thought _did_ work, then, and at the very end he finally got to what seems to have been his attempt at a point: he can conceive of some as-of-yet uninvented perfect knowledge transfer device that outperforms books, so hopefully somebody will be inspired by his post to invent one.
Some books explicitly claim to teach you a specific skill. And some people have that general expectation towards books. This is what the author criticizes, as I understood their points.
There's an unstated assumption here that the reason people read books (especially popular non-fiction) is to extract the maximum usable information content from them over the long-term and that anything less than that is a failure. I think that is fundamentally misconceived. The primary goal of popular non-fiction is to entertain. It is read for pleasure and the only reason it happens to be about things that are true is that readers derive a little extra pleasure from prose that they think may have some relevance to the outside world.
If you read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and recall nothing but find it 6-9 hours of time well-spent, the book has completely achieved its goal. If you get a couple of good anecdotes out of it that you can use at parties later, even better. Not to mention the social cachet of being an intellectual who reads non-fiction for fun.
This otherwise very intelligent essay falls into a common failure mode I see. If you look out in the world and see everyone obviously "doing it wrong", the odds of them all being stupid while you have sole insight are very slim. Instead, it is most often the case that they are doing it right for a goal that is different from the one you presume they have.
(There is also the obvious criticism that if the author feels linear narrative is a poor medium... why did they use it for their essay?)
The author cites three mediocre pop science books and is dismayed that after a single reading, he finds himself unable to impress people at parties with his knowledge.
He says those books each take "6 to 9 hours" to read. Life changing books are read over the course of...well...an entire life. I have a small handful of books that I have read dozens of times. These are books with very big, and very old, ideas. They have defined my outlook on life, they give me inspiration and ideas in hard times. I have read them in important life transitions at every step. Real wisdom and knowledge comes from years of contemplation of big picture ideas. It's hard, and it's not the kind of thing that you do to look smart. Reading books is just a way of getting through life and trying to make sense of the world - for yourself.
Books work fine, but reading comprehension is a real skill and very few master it by adulthood, or even by the end of a higher degree. I’ll suggest a simple solution to try. After you read a chapter (or whatever suitable section), spend 10 minutes re-explaining it to yourself. Begin by merely regurgitating: argue what the author argued, but in your own words. If you find gaps or contradictions, go back to the source and correct them. (With time your need to do so will diminish: your brain will learn to pick up more the first time.) After regurgitating, a larger inner discussion is both helpful and fun: what did you agree with? Disagree with? What questions are you left with?
This brief rehearsal and analysis of the contents will greatly aid comprehension and recall, and the value of the time spent.
You could try it on this very post.
This technique works also with video and audio content, conversations, or any other form of information exchange. Early rehearsal and analysis increases comprehension.
And that’s significant because if you think books don’t create lasting comprehension, try measuring the effectiveness of video, audio, lectures, etc. I’m not aware of a medium that outperforms text, properly read.
It's funny, the author has made a decent case for why pop science/non-fiction books are useless (I agree) despite pitching a book on an obvious nonsense subject about imaginary computers unlikely to ever exist (or, if you're an optimist; to exist in our lifetimes). Imagine wanting to master a field less realistic than phlogiston theory or medieval demonology to the extent that it "also means repeating those quick memory tests in expanding intervals over the following days, weeks, and months." I suppose indoctrination is necessary since this form of anti-knowledge is unlikely to ever be actually used -unlike actual knowledge, say, such as linear algebra or obscure tree data structures relating to metric spaces.
Books are mostly not for actually learning a technical subject; they're for reviewing the subject after you already know something, and expanding your knowledge after you have the basics. There are many things I know, and can recall with effort, as they're in long term memory, but can easily recall and apply if I pick up a book and thumb through it for a few minutes. Yeah, I can cook up a nice boeuf bourguignon or pumpernickel bread from memory, but it's gonna go a lot more smoothly if I read the cookbook.
Another thing he misses; if a book makes you feel something, it's going to stick with you a lot more clearly than some recitation of dry facts. Storm of Steel sticks with me better than the official British History of the Great War. Similarly, "Darwinian Fairytales," which is absolutely hilarious in addition to being perfectly correct, sticks with me a lot better than "The Selfish Gene" -which I've paid considerably more attention to.
Couldn't get through the whole article to be honest. Started kicking open doors. That made me scroll to the conclusion. Which was also underwhelming.
Reading the books he mentioned, I'm reading them not to know everything word by word. I'm reading them to get a map of that topic. One that would guide me to a narrower source if needed.
To even get more Meta, let's be honest. Blog like this are not really written for the readers. They are written because the author likes that topic. I remember writing my thesis, how I had to use the books in anger to create structure, internalise it and combine them to extract conclusions.
That is also why I like all those shitty blogs about "what is a monad" or "how to deploy a nodeJS app to Heroku". Not because they are the best reads written by the people who knows most about the subject. It's the opposite, I read it and I'm proud of the writers, because I know they are the people that learned something. I'm only there to check what command-line command I need, or what library combination they use.
Looking at books like "thinking fast and slow" I also couldn't get through that book. Needed to pay too much attention that I would rather put on something else. But I think I did learn something. I've learned about trying to be more conscious about instinct and reasoning. I think that still holds up, even though not everything in that book held up to scrutiny.
With this explosion of access to information, it's become very clear that Information is the not bottleneck. It is the balance between intention, grit, pain and pleasure. Go to any writing class, you will learn to think about the goals of the text and your audience.
I will never forget of an example of someone who did Jiu-Jitsu. He talked about the fact that if you play that sport, you'll end up finding the limits of your bones, how much they can take before breaking. Everyone that does Jiu-Jitsu will see it, but seeing is just seeing. You have to experience it. I think the HN readers like to go broad, but I don't think the amount of theoretical knowledge you'll get from your 10.000 cards thick anki Library. As diving deep and using something in anger day in and day out.
I fear the author, and many others, have treated many books as a thing to get through rather than a thing to make a part of yourself.
There is an excellent book (as it happens) called How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler. The focus is on how to read for improved understanding rather than pleasure. There are many great ideas and tactics in the book but these are the ones that jump out for me:
- Not all books or even pages deserve to be read at the same speed or with the same care. Being able to identify which is which is a mark of a good reader
- If you don't understand a word or passage, continue through it. Perhaps you will understand it with greater context. Even if you don't, if the book as a whole turns out to be great then you should reread it, and if it doesn't you can cast it aside with little harm.
- An "inspectional reading" (a.k.a. skimming) is a useful tool for understanding what a book is about without dedicating a lot of time.
- Write in the margins. This helps to make a book your own.
That last point has really been a game changer for me. I've generally tried to keep my books "clean" but writing in the margins, underling, etc. incredibly improves 2nd, 3rd, and so-on readings.
In general you can tell if you've properly read a book by seeing if you can answer the the following questions:
-What is the book about?
-What is being said in detail?
-Is it true?
-What of it?
I think it's a neat idea to ask how we could improve books, but the assertion that books don't work remains unproven to me after reading this book (and after my own experience).
Lastly, I think of books as a necessary but inadequate component of much learning. I think Montaigne put it well (btw i read this in a book :)):
> To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory. That which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book. A mere bookish learning is a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it...
I'm a physics teacher. I attempted to improve the text book model by adding some web based interactive elements. I mostly added interactive simulations and questions with step by step solutions.
> only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?
This is akin to saying that "F = MA so why do I need a whole series of lectures and chapters in a textbook to explain it!" Understanding the basic idea in physics that F=MA involves building a variety of intuitions about what this really means, what it entails in the real world, and how this influences the ways we think about this powerful idea. You need to see examples, experiments and applications of this idea for it to make sense, even though it can be perfectly reduced to 4 characters. Once the student of physics has all of the information in their head a vast amount of complexity can be reduced to F=MA.
An even more powerful demonstration of this is of course Einstein's famous E = MC^2. A pretty simple assertion, but really unraveling what that means and entails is easily many years of study.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are many books that genuinely defy reduction in this way. Hegel and Derrida are notorious examples of these. Scholars of either would tell you that not being reducible is an essential property of what each of these writers is trying to say. However I suspect the author of this post would very quickly become frustrated with these works and beg them to "get to the point!".
And another perspective outside of these are the "Desert Fathers", the early Christian ascetics, who would spend years meditating on single passages from the bible.
> Adult American college graduates read 24 minutes a day on average [0]
If this is referring to actual books (and not just random articles on the internet), that number seems crazy high to me. I would guess the percentage of college graduates that read any book at all during a given day to be something like 5% (As in, even of the ones that read a book or two per year, most days they're not reading), and the average amount of time spread over all adults in this category would be closer to 1 minute than 24. 24 minutes a day would mean serious readers would have to do a lot of reading to make up for the (probably large) numbers of adults who simply don't read at all.
I think it's much more likely that "reading" includes articles on the internet (the big one) as well as newspapers/magazines (probably still significant among the older crows), and far less actual books. Which would sorta invalidate that particular point.
Innovative ways to improve learning are always exciting, but leading with a hypothesis contrary to my personal experience[1] is unlikely to convince me the conclusion be valid.
Jonathan Blow recently streamed a talk called 'Video Games and the Future of Education'[0] that makes similar arguments.
He discusses various tools we have to transmit knowledge from teacher to student and argues that games really shine as away to trick people into 'learning by doing'. He's sharply critical of existing educational games and really lays into 'gamification' as a concept.
The talk certainly left me hearing that echo that the author alludes to.
Scrolled through to see if anyone mentioned video games before writing up my own comment, and pleasantly surprised to see Jonathan Blow explicitly mentioned!
As a counterpoint to the article which is arguing that Books and lectures don't have a theory of learning and assimilation of information, I think that Video Games as a medium often do. Most games have tutorials or instructions on how to play the game, often introducing novel or complex concepts to the audience that are required to be understood before the work can be enjoyed.
More specifically, I find that exploration and puzzle games tend to exemplify this more than most. They introduce one concept at a time, demonstrate it, allow exploration and 'play' of the concept and perhaps even test the understanding of it before progression is allowed. They also allow for more interesting corollaries and combinations of rules to be presented to the player which may be intriguing, surprising or, appropriately, puzzling.
And of all the puzzle games, it is Jonathan Blow's game 'The Witness' that I feel exemplifies this the best. Having also listened to his commentaries and watched his talks I know that this isn't an accident. In many ways the game itself is a contemplation on knowledge transfer, information assimilation and wordless communication of ideas. This early video [0] shows him talking through the first 10 minutes of the game and how these principles apply to the first two sets of puzzle and the first 'boss' puzzle.
His talk from your comment is also excellent, but I think it's worth highlighting that Blow very much says that video games are a complement to current resources rather than a replacement (as the title might suggest). Video Games allow for a different way to play with certain types of idea that allows for them to be understood on a deeper or more nuanced level. This doesn't necessarily apply to all types of knowledge.
I would also suggest the work of Bret Victor [1], who has some excellent essays and talks on the subject of learning, especially around Maths.
Also honorary mentions to Acko [2] and NCase [3] who create excellent explorables, which I think hint at what a fusion of classroom learning and video games might look like.
[+] [-] hacknat|5 years ago|reply
I have been a Software Engineer for over a decade now and I do seriously difficult network and kernel work right now. There has never been another point in my career where I have been so incredibly aware of how much I don’t know about what I work on. If you’re doing your career right you should feel your ignorance more and more. Books offer us something incredibly valuable, the feeling of ignorance. I can’t think of anything our culture could use more of right now than humility.
[+] [-] austinl|5 years ago|reply
The books I truly love, I've read at least three times, with pages full of highlights and notes. Re-reading a great book is worth more than reading the latest trends. Seneca wrote a bit about this nearly 2000 years ago:
Be careful, however, that there is no element of discursiveness and desultoriness about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind.
[+] [-] amatic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheUndead96|5 years ago|reply
I think people feel subconsciously guilty that they do not read more. It is thus easier to dismiss books than to acknowledge the fact that most attention spans have been reduced the the granularity of a comment thread. We are all victims to this. Reading a book takes more effort than it used to.
I fear that most people have already read the last book they will complete in their lifetime (not that completing a book is necessary in deriving value from it).
[+] [-] coffeefirst|5 years ago|reply
Fortunately, they are far outnumbered by people who love books, buy them, read them, share them, put them on bookshelves, and would generally think this article is profoundly silly.
[+] [-] acephal|5 years ago|reply
If you want to know what instantaneous knowledge transfer looks like you just have to look at how ideas commute via Twitter/Facebook memes, which is largely a reification of word-of-mouth.
On a certain level, actual learning requires active participation: you have to want to learn. Learning disrupts your entire world and that's kinda the point. The idea of frictionless learning seems fanciful.
You can say you're shortening the feedback look in a multimedia text, but the desire to learn in my experience starts very early in life and is a fragile thing to cultivate. The author is trying to pour water out of a sinking ship with a bucket. You want people to want to learn, get rid of common CORE with basically tells all the kids who don't have STEM proficiencies or can match pace with its demands, "good luck with life"
There are gigantic swathes of people, the people most in need, who'd already be daunted merely opening the author's marketed multimedia text they wrote at the sight of the math equation.
You're already introducing something terribly new and threatening, threatening to the sureness of the reader's ego, which, again, is why people learn easiest from toxic, context-less memes.
[+] [-] SftwrSvior81|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sammorrowdrums|5 years ago|reply
"Get explainers of insights from 3,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles. Free 7-day trial. It takes just 15 mins to read or listen to the key insights from bestselling nonfiction. Audio and Text. Insights in 15 minutes."
Personally I recoil in horror at their marketing as an "app for intellectuals". Genuinely, deep diving is frequently required. Summaries by their nature lack nuance.
I want to read the nuance. I want to give the author the chance to get their point across. I want to read all the footnotes, maybe lookup things in the bibliography.
I don't think anyone I know to be what I'd call an intellectual simply listens to summaries of books. It's sort of anti-intillectual to do that indeed.
[+] [-] bla3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dynamite-ready|5 years ago|reply
So long as I am able, I will always try to find time to read something new. Especially from books. I can't be precise about this point, but I seriously believe that the kind of information that can be conveyed in a book, cannot be communicated any other way.
I think it's fair to discuss what can be gleaned from a single reading of a book, but there can never be any question of just how much can be communicated by a book, and how much can be learnt from one.
The advent of cinema, and even personal computing, has only served to show how essential a technology the written word is.
It's going to take a very radical piece of technology to improve on it. One that we probably won't see in our time.
[+] [-] wakawaka1|5 years ago|reply
A person must learn actively while reading:
- By taking notes
- By summarizing important/difficult to understand sections in their own words via writing
- By looking up and exploring alternative explanations of complex idea, and following the two aforementioned avenues towards solidifying one's understanding
Rinse & repeat.
Reading != Learning.
Reading is more of a casual perusal of knowledge, when one isn't actively engaged in the above 3 ways mentioned (or other strategies to absorb the knowledge presented in a book or other compendium of information)
Learning = actively engaging with subject matter with a strong intention to understand and even memorize when necessary.
[+] [-] systemvoltage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtx|5 years ago|reply
I read about a similar concept few years ago. https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/
[+] [-] haakonhr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|5 years ago|reply
If you want to learn from a book, you have to play a more active role. Personally I find that the process of learning from a book involves A. read it once, straight through like a novel - maybe underlining key passages in pencil, then B. reading again and taking detailed notes as you read, and possibly looking up citations, or related references (the Wikipedia page for a particular term or phrase, for example), then C. re-reading your notes a couple of times as well as reading and re-reading supplemental material that you found, and finally D. writing your own synthesis of the material.
Yes, that's a lot of work and yes it takes a long time and no, not every book justifies doing all that. Sometimes it's OK to just read the book like a novel, and walk away with just a vague memory of the highest level themes and maybe detailed recall or one or two specific points that resonated with you. It all depends on why you're reading the book and what you hope to get out of it.
Edit: and if it's a book with exercises, then add "do the exercises" as another step. That said, I see reading / working through a textbook to really "learn a subject" as being a slightly different thing from reading the typical pop-sci book or business book or whatever, that doesn't generally have exercises. "Learning a subject" to me usually involves using multiple books, videos, articles, maybe writing some code, etc.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|5 years ago|reply
I have a mind-blowing insight for you. African tribes have figured this out. The way they teach history is by re-enacting events from myth and history. Those "silly" and noisy dances make a lot of sense.
As Confucius said,
I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
Participation in a tribal ceremony has the potential to teach history best - with highest chance of remembering.
[+] [-] ArcMex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biophysboy|5 years ago|reply
I think there is a lot more "dark memory" that can be triggered by conversation or the right context.
I also think we translate a lot of the information we read so it integrates with our own understanding or context. For example, I think I better understand why the US responded to COVID like it did after reading US political history from 1970-2020.
Basically, I think humans are very good at detecting, remembering, and applying patterns for our own purposes, and books introduce us to patterns.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|5 years ago|reply
The whole point of TFA is precisely this, combined with questions about how books might be better structured to facilitate a more active role.
[+] [-] trabant00|5 years ago|reply
So for these examples it is my opinion that it's not a case of books not working, but of very healthy brain garbage collector discarding information that is not actionable and in a lot of cases not even correct. Popular edutainment is not exactly "some serious non-fiction tomes".
[+] [-] RobertKerans|5 years ago|reply
I feel like he's looking at this through the prism of his speciality (producing interactive learning materials), and by doing that has missed the point a little bit. He's looking a genre of books at if they're a different thing to what they actually are, it's the wrong level.
I get reading a book once doesn't translate directly to "facts retained in memory" whereas his idealised new form of media does. But as you say, his examples are edutainment. I feel like what he's suggesting only usefully applies to either textbooks (which he's separated off into a different category anyway) or to a situation where the aim is to memorise as much as possible in a single reading. Which is fine! But it doesn't really need to happen for pop science -- just getting the general gist of an idea across in an entertaining package is okay.
[+] [-] lthornberry|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] banach_d|5 years ago|reply
I have read that book, I believe I understood its central message, I could probably explain it (not very elegantly) in a couple of sentences, and I can't point to any other particular benefit I drew from reading the book, and yet I'm very glad I read it.
[+] [-] reubens|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] activatedgeek|5 years ago|reply
I get a sense that the author seems to argue that most book authors are not conscious of the working memory of the reader. I don't think that is true. Many "good" non-fiction books I've read actually rely on space-repetitions throughout the text quite heavily. The author, to their credit, does note this for textbooks. Often concepts in long texts are referenced in a non-linear manner, either in expectation of ideas to come or in retrospect to draw parallels & new connections. Unfortunately, the onus here is on the reader to realize and extract the maximum juice out of this non-linear flow.
The key idea of this post is to shift this burden to the "medium" and not the reader. Books can't handle this responsibility in their current form. I certainly agree with this. Distill [1] is pioneering this from the perspective of medium-reader engagement. Unsurprisingly, Michael Nielsen, a collaborator of the author of the post, is a member of the steering committee at Distill. :-)
I love these new directions in dissemination of ideas!
[1]: https://distill.pub
[+] [-] mathnmusic|5 years ago|reply
This is beautifully expressed. Knowledge consists of connections across concepts but those connections are rarely shown explicitly in textbooks. Even wikipedia, while allowing you to traverse the connections back and forth easily, does not do a great job of giving you the bird's eye view of a subject or a field. Check out this "map" of mathematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y Every subject needs a similar map.
Besides visualizing the connections, we'd also need interactivity to the topic that helps with forming new mental models - which is the core aspect of learning. Jupyter notebooks, ObservableHQ, Mathigon are some of the good projects working on this aspect.
Disclaimer: I am building the open-source project https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/ which is attempting to build the complete map of knowledge/skills. So I too am biased against books and in favor of digital/interactive tools.
[+] [-] henrikeh|5 years ago|reply
This implies that the purpose of books is to “teach”, but is that so? Books at best “inform”. It is up to the reader to bring the framework for learning, be it the class setting, a study group or just experience enough to self-study.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doubletgl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
If you read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and recall nothing but find it 6-9 hours of time well-spent, the book has completely achieved its goal. If you get a couple of good anecdotes out of it that you can use at parties later, even better. Not to mention the social cachet of being an intellectual who reads non-fiction for fun.
This otherwise very intelligent essay falls into a common failure mode I see. If you look out in the world and see everyone obviously "doing it wrong", the odds of them all being stupid while you have sole insight are very slim. Instead, it is most often the case that they are doing it right for a goal that is different from the one you presume they have.
(There is also the obvious criticism that if the author feels linear narrative is a poor medium... why did they use it for their essay?)
[+] [-] dawg-|5 years ago|reply
He says those books each take "6 to 9 hours" to read. Life changing books are read over the course of...well...an entire life. I have a small handful of books that I have read dozens of times. These are books with very big, and very old, ideas. They have defined my outlook on life, they give me inspiration and ideas in hard times. I have read them in important life transitions at every step. Real wisdom and knowledge comes from years of contemplation of big picture ideas. It's hard, and it's not the kind of thing that you do to look smart. Reading books is just a way of getting through life and trying to make sense of the world - for yourself.
[+] [-] putzdown|5 years ago|reply
This brief rehearsal and analysis of the contents will greatly aid comprehension and recall, and the value of the time spent.
You could try it on this very post.
This technique works also with video and audio content, conversations, or any other form of information exchange. Early rehearsal and analysis increases comprehension.
And that’s significant because if you think books don’t create lasting comprehension, try measuring the effectiveness of video, audio, lectures, etc. I’m not aware of a medium that outperforms text, properly read.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottlocklin|5 years ago|reply
Books are mostly not for actually learning a technical subject; they're for reviewing the subject after you already know something, and expanding your knowledge after you have the basics. There are many things I know, and can recall with effort, as they're in long term memory, but can easily recall and apply if I pick up a book and thumb through it for a few minutes. Yeah, I can cook up a nice boeuf bourguignon or pumpernickel bread from memory, but it's gonna go a lot more smoothly if I read the cookbook.
Another thing he misses; if a book makes you feel something, it's going to stick with you a lot more clearly than some recitation of dry facts. Storm of Steel sticks with me better than the official British History of the Great War. Similarly, "Darwinian Fairytales," which is absolutely hilarious in addition to being perfectly correct, sticks with me a lot better than "The Selfish Gene" -which I've paid considerably more attention to.
[+] [-] book-sandworm|5 years ago|reply
Reading the books he mentioned, I'm reading them not to know everything word by word. I'm reading them to get a map of that topic. One that would guide me to a narrower source if needed.
To even get more Meta, let's be honest. Blog like this are not really written for the readers. They are written because the author likes that topic. I remember writing my thesis, how I had to use the books in anger to create structure, internalise it and combine them to extract conclusions.
That is also why I like all those shitty blogs about "what is a monad" or "how to deploy a nodeJS app to Heroku". Not because they are the best reads written by the people who knows most about the subject. It's the opposite, I read it and I'm proud of the writers, because I know they are the people that learned something. I'm only there to check what command-line command I need, or what library combination they use.
Looking at books like "thinking fast and slow" I also couldn't get through that book. Needed to pay too much attention that I would rather put on something else. But I think I did learn something. I've learned about trying to be more conscious about instinct and reasoning. I think that still holds up, even though not everything in that book held up to scrutiny.
With this explosion of access to information, it's become very clear that Information is the not bottleneck. It is the balance between intention, grit, pain and pleasure. Go to any writing class, you will learn to think about the goals of the text and your audience.
I will never forget of an example of someone who did Jiu-Jitsu. He talked about the fact that if you play that sport, you'll end up finding the limits of your bones, how much they can take before breaking. Everyone that does Jiu-Jitsu will see it, but seeing is just seeing. You have to experience it. I think the HN readers like to go broad, but I don't think the amount of theoretical knowledge you'll get from your 10.000 cards thick anki Library. As diving deep and using something in anger day in and day out.
[+] [-] e_tm_|5 years ago|reply
Delicious irony. Tell me about this in your text-only blog post.
[+] [-] heisenbit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marban|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loughnane|5 years ago|reply
There is an excellent book (as it happens) called How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler. The focus is on how to read for improved understanding rather than pleasure. There are many great ideas and tactics in the book but these are the ones that jump out for me:
- Not all books or even pages deserve to be read at the same speed or with the same care. Being able to identify which is which is a mark of a good reader
- If you don't understand a word or passage, continue through it. Perhaps you will understand it with greater context. Even if you don't, if the book as a whole turns out to be great then you should reread it, and if it doesn't you can cast it aside with little harm.
- An "inspectional reading" (a.k.a. skimming) is a useful tool for understanding what a book is about without dedicating a lot of time.
- Write in the margins. This helps to make a book your own.
That last point has really been a game changer for me. I've generally tried to keep my books "clean" but writing in the margins, underling, etc. incredibly improves 2nd, 3rd, and so-on readings.
In general you can tell if you've properly read a book by seeing if you can answer the the following questions:
-What is the book about?
-What is being said in detail?
-Is it true?
-What of it?
I think it's a neat idea to ask how we could improve books, but the assertion that books don't work remains unproven to me after reading this book (and after my own experience).
Lastly, I think of books as a necessary but inadequate component of much learning. I think Montaigne put it well (btw i read this in a book :)):
> To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory. That which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book. A mere bookish learning is a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it...
[+] [-] lilgreenland|5 years ago|reply
https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html Having this website ready before we all had to start teaching online was very lucky.
[+] [-] Gooblebrai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baron_harkonnen|5 years ago|reply
This is akin to saying that "F = MA so why do I need a whole series of lectures and chapters in a textbook to explain it!" Understanding the basic idea in physics that F=MA involves building a variety of intuitions about what this really means, what it entails in the real world, and how this influences the ways we think about this powerful idea. You need to see examples, experiments and applications of this idea for it to make sense, even though it can be perfectly reduced to 4 characters. Once the student of physics has all of the information in their head a vast amount of complexity can be reduced to F=MA.
An even more powerful demonstration of this is of course Einstein's famous E = MC^2. A pretty simple assertion, but really unraveling what that means and entails is easily many years of study.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are many books that genuinely defy reduction in this way. Hegel and Derrida are notorious examples of these. Scholars of either would tell you that not being reducible is an essential property of what each of these writers is trying to say. However I suspect the author of this post would very quickly become frustrated with these works and beg them to "get to the point!".
And another perspective outside of these are the "Desert Fathers", the early Christian ascetics, who would spend years meditating on single passages from the bible.
[+] [-] ninkendo|5 years ago|reply
> Adult American college graduates read 24 minutes a day on average [0]
If this is referring to actual books (and not just random articles on the internet), that number seems crazy high to me. I would guess the percentage of college graduates that read any book at all during a given day to be something like 5% (As in, even of the ones that read a book or two per year, most days they're not reading), and the average amount of time spread over all adults in this category would be closer to 1 minute than 24. 24 minutes a day would mean serious readers would have to do a lot of reading to make up for the (probably large) numbers of adults who simply don't read at all.
I think it's much more likely that "reading" includes articles on the internet (the big one) as well as newspapers/magazines (probably still significant among the older crows), and far less actual books. Which would sorta invalidate that particular point.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11a.htm
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/the-secret-of-aca...
> "The temptation is to write papers proclaiming the superiority of your work and the pathetic inadequacy of the contributions of A, B, C, …"
[1] in particular, working memory is not an issue with books: rereading is a thing.
[+] [-] vansul|5 years ago|reply
He discusses various tools we have to transmit knowledge from teacher to student and argues that games really shine as away to trick people into 'learning by doing'. He's sharply critical of existing educational games and really lays into 'gamification' as a concept.
The talk certainly left me hearing that echo that the author alludes to.
Books are great.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWFScmtiC44
[+] [-] Zhyl|5 years ago|reply
As a counterpoint to the article which is arguing that Books and lectures don't have a theory of learning and assimilation of information, I think that Video Games as a medium often do. Most games have tutorials or instructions on how to play the game, often introducing novel or complex concepts to the audience that are required to be understood before the work can be enjoyed.
More specifically, I find that exploration and puzzle games tend to exemplify this more than most. They introduce one concept at a time, demonstrate it, allow exploration and 'play' of the concept and perhaps even test the understanding of it before progression is allowed. They also allow for more interesting corollaries and combinations of rules to be presented to the player which may be intriguing, surprising or, appropriately, puzzling.
And of all the puzzle games, it is Jonathan Blow's game 'The Witness' that I feel exemplifies this the best. Having also listened to his commentaries and watched his talks I know that this isn't an accident. In many ways the game itself is a contemplation on knowledge transfer, information assimilation and wordless communication of ideas. This early video [0] shows him talking through the first 10 minutes of the game and how these principles apply to the first two sets of puzzle and the first 'boss' puzzle.
His talk from your comment is also excellent, but I think it's worth highlighting that Blow very much says that video games are a complement to current resources rather than a replacement (as the title might suggest). Video Games allow for a different way to play with certain types of idea that allows for them to be understood on a deeper or more nuanced level. This doesn't necessarily apply to all types of knowledge.
I would also suggest the work of Bret Victor [1], who has some excellent essays and talks on the subject of learning, especially around Maths.
Also honorary mentions to Acko [2] and NCase [3] who create excellent explorables, which I think hint at what a fusion of classroom learning and video games might look like.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDSrYiheVow
[1] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
[2] https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/
[3] https://ncase.me/trust/
[+] [-] teraku|5 years ago|reply
1. Take notes while reading, which usually also has the side-effect that you have to re-read passage around your note taking
2. Convert notes to Flashcards utilising SRS (spaced repetition systems like Anki)
Thus all the info you noted and found interesting will go into your long(er)-term memory.
But that's not why we read most books now, is it?