Books and lectures don't work

Author here; this is a great point and I’m grateful for it. Maybe we shouldn’t expect to absorb such knowledge!

That said, if the theory is that books’ knowledge is absorbed through concrete use, why is the book so uninvolved with facilitating or interleaving with that concrete use? I’d suggest the impetus and regulation of the concrete use (and its relationship to the book) is all on the reader. Does that align with your thinking?

What Shopenhauer is saying is that information and the storage of it in one's brain is not the goal of the lecture per-se. It is only useful as a medium to convey something more meaningful. It is useful in clearing up one's thoughts about the world, changing attitudes, raising up questions. Once you have a new question bugging your mind, it does not really matter who or what started the avalanche but only that it's rolling.

You can look at it from the point of view of modern sports. For me, at least, sport would mean having a good time, making new friends or spending time with old ones, forgetting about one's troubles, smiling and being happy about life. But sport as we know it today seems to have devolved into keeping scores and celebrating winners. That, to my mind, is akin to a information gathering activity without understanding what the purpose of it actually is.

I am working on an edtech related project for a course I am building. My questions to everyone is, based on your experience, what have you found to be a very effective way to learn something new?

For my courses, I do write a textbook for the course but I don't really write the books for the student to learn from. I write it more as a reference book and as a guide for me to teach the course....essentially for me to hash out what is important to teach in each chapter.

I also create the lecture videos and interactive tools to learn the subject. From what I've seen, the preferred method for most people to learn something is essentially by example and then trial and error (doing it on their own with immediate feedback of how they're doing). For my courses, this essentially happens like the following: student watching a 1-10 minute video on a very specific subject/lesson/topic. The video is me explaining the topic, working some example problems possibly etc. After this the student is immediately redirected to an online tool that requires the student to directly apply what they should have learned from the lecture video. For simple factual exercises I just use multiple choice questions. For complex topics (involving calculations or multiple-step procedures) I use simulation type exercises where the student has to work through the problem on their own. If the student gets stuck, they have tips that explain the specific step further. From what I've noticed, people seem to remember stuff better when they are actively thinking about what they've learned and are actively using the newly learned information to solve some sort of problem. When this type of thinking happens, it seems students get more "ah ha" type moments where it suddenly clicks for them. I have also made multiple "learning paths" for students to use. One path, you can just read the textbook and do practice problems, Another path you can do the lecture videos followed by the interactive problem sets and another path where you just get highly summarized study notes followed by the interactive study problems. This allows students to basically use whichever method works best for them without forcing them into a "one size fits all" model.

This is my method of doing effective teaching but my question is always the same: based on your experience, what have you found to be a very effective way to learn something new?

> There might be a fundamentally novel and strictly superior way of learning, but it's hard for me to see which cognitive bases aren't covered by combining these two methods.

(Author here) I agree that methods like the ones you've described are indeed quite effective when executed successfully. I argued in the piece that this kind of process is often blocked on metacognition. That is: the reader has to regulate and monitor the processes you're describing while simultaneously grappling with new concepts. It's a lot to ask. And of course, the medium doesn't even explicitly ask it of the reader: when people do these kinds of methods, they're instigating that independently.

Even if we limit ourselves to just these methods, can't we imagine a medium which is somewhat more involved in the methods we claim are essential to understanding?

And if we accept that, one more provocation: wouldn't we want authorial intent to carry into the use of these methods? Given that the author is already carefully sculpting so much of the rest of the reading experience, why wouldn't we benefit from them extending their authorial direction to the metacognition around the book?

It's been years since I read Guns, Germs and Steel, but I think I remember the one or other thing.

Off the top of my head: north/south axis of the Americas vs East/West of Europe/Axis - same crops can grow everywhere. No big mammals suitable for herding had survived in the Americas, sweetcorn only crop suitable for breeding for agriculture.

Writing may have been discovered in some places for fun, but discarded because it was useless - only became established when it was needed for bookkeeping.

One thing I think about a lot, actually, especially with all the discussion here in Europe about the European union: China didn't conquer the other continents because at some point in time, some emperor simply decided China would abandon sailing the high oceans, and China stuck to the decision for hundreds of years. Same thing couldn't happen in Europe because of competition between all the small kingdoms.

In general I seem to remember things from Jared Diamond's books. For many other books I would have to admit the article has a point.