the fragility of my own memory has bothered me many times. Countless hours spent on studying something to then end up not being able to present core theses of a text. I wonder whether I should behave like the protagonist in the movie Memento. Live with the certainty that anything I don't write down and review every day will be lost within 24 hours.
Books and lectures don't work
141–150 of 162 posts
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you feel like this is ultimately related to the medium or to the content as well? Intuitively new media won't have as much (good quality) content as books, so that might be the main issue here.
> Intuitively new media won't have as much (good quality) content as books care to share that intuition? this doesn't seem obvious to me unfortunately
Books have been around for thousands of years, websites like YouTube for just over a decade.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#143.....huh? I admit I skimmed this article. I did so because it is long, and because the initial premise doesn't make much sense. I was looking for something specific. For some discussion of reading and notetaking strategies. Underlining, highlighting, etc. I saw none. Therefore, I can only repeat the tired old form of dismissal: "it didn't work for you because you did it wrong". You want to actually absorb and learn s…
Yeah... if he read Guns, Germs and Steel in 9 hours, I’m not surprised he didn’t retain much of it.
I'm pacing through Thinking, Fast and Slow in 25~35h. Single, linear read, spaced over (sadly) a few weeks. From time to time I'm pausing additionally to just map the concepts I just read in the minutes before against my experiences, in order to integrate them with each other.
I'm not rushing reading speed at all, and while I'm not a native speaker, I'm multiple times faster on e.g. The Hunger Games (I rarely read fiction).
If you want to apply the knowledge in a book, read it slow and literally step aside and e.g. just sit or pace around trying to integrate it with previous knowledge / experience.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#144My college roommate always had an impressive recall of the (many) academic sociology/philosophy books he'd read. Some of this is down to him having a gifted memory, but also some is due to his use of a generally applicable technique where he summarized each book he read into a single page, forcing re-engagement and consolidation.
Inspired by this, I'm experimenting with writing and posting online reviews of books I've read.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#145Yet entire civilisations were built by people who learned only from books and lectures.
Come on, we know you are trying to promote your flashcard idea but there’s nothing new about it, and if you cast your mind back to your university days you’ll probably remember that you don’t simply read a book or listen to a lecture, you also need to reinforce and apply your learnings with numerous exercises.
That’s why all textbooks are full of exercises...
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#146I think you might be reading books wrong if that's what you're hoping to take out of them, that is, remember this or that specific quote out of it. For me, at least, the value of a book is changing your way of thinking, or better yet, present new questions that you did not even dare to ask. I would recommend Darwin's own Origin of Species instead of Dawkins' Selfish Gene. I've read both. They can't even begin to comp…
Why would reading be better at conveying this info then video
Because it requires more concentration, and you have complete control over the pace.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#147Popular science books are not meant to be purely educational, it's a type of books designed for entertainment where the learning is just a byproduct.
This article make so many generalizations and assumptions that I can hardly take it seriously. Lectures do work if they are made to reinforce the textbook materials, though by itself it simply isn't enough and you need to have other forms of learning - active ones where the students solve the puzzles, work in group on problem solving, building toy projects, etc.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#148 The title is definitely click-baity although the author is a bit more charitable towards books in content. I feel he is too harsh on books by judging them against unrealistic expectations. We can't remember everything we read from a book, much less explain it like a domain expert, but that is not the point of book reading. To me, books (at least the pop-sci books) are never about transfer of exact mental models, they function like a chisel to shape one's intuitions and understanding according to one's own disposition. Even though the aggregate effect on public tend to converge (for e.g, acceptance of evolution), it is hardly a case that everyone will have exact mental representation of a theory. Only place where the knowledge transfer can be (and should be) exact, is research and knowledge work domains (such as tech documentation). In such environments there is an incentive for the reader to engage with the material and the mental model of majority of the readers tends to be sufficiently homogeneous due to prior training. So the said shortcomings don't take place there.
Earlier, I too carried that feeling that I didn't remember much after reading and wondered whether there was any benefit from spending time on books. This turned out to be a cold-start problem because as more I read, cognitive structures started to form and I was more receptive to fresh ideas. New ideas, by means of comparing and juxtaposing against each existing ones, had a better chance of settling down in a proper cognitive framework and consequently a better chance of recall. For example reading Harari, Dawkins and Haidt roughly around the same period, strengthened my understanding of each's ideas as if they were all part of one giant discussion, although they were books on different topics and sometimes they contradicted each other.
Also it is important to engage in dialogue with a book, be it by participating in book clubs, online reviews or even simple note taking. Recently I switched to reading books on my mobile, I can't describe how much it has transformed my whole reading experience. My ebooks are littered with notes, questions and pointers which I know I will never let anyone see. Just an act of trying to compare or contradict an author in your personal note, can make you internalize the concepts and restructure your existing understanding. It is like solving a problem on blackboard. Now I prefer to buy books from Google Playstore even if I can get the same book for free from a local library. And I plan to post reviews on the books I read, by pouring through my notes and re-reading the important points from the books. In my experience, the second read is often more rewarding than the first.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#149It'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 becaus…
I haven’t read the book, but the axis argument needs a ton of support since it’s absolutely not true that the same crops were or could be cultivated at the same latitudes in Eurasia, in part because the same latitude still has a lot of different climates. For most of history, any given crop was confined to a pretty small area in Eurasia.
It’s also certainly not true that there were no large mammals in the Americas suitable for herding, nor that sweet corn was the only crop suitable for breeding for agriculture.
Everything I have come across of Diamond’s ideas suggest to me it’s not worth reading the book - which is one benefit of short-form low attention span mediums like the Internet. :)
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Intuitively new media won't have as much (good quality) content as books care to share that intuition? this doesn't seem obvious to me unfortunately
Books have been around for thousands of years, websites like YouTube for just over a decade.
I don't see the argument line here. Because books have been around for thousands of years we have perfected the creation of books (at least compared to videos)? In terms of raw quantities I suppose most books written in 2018 and most videos produced in 2019 were rubbish