91–100 of 221 posts
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 br…
I often find myself really bad at remembering what I read in a book or blog post or heard in a lecture on youtube or Coursera beyond the larger point, so I'd agree with the author at least that far. However, when a question is raised relating to something I read, eor a point is stated that conflicts with something that I read, I usually find I can remember where I read about it. Even if I didn't internalize the idea…
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the author of the comment. There was a time when I was reading and trying to read many non-fiction books. After some time I started noticing that many of them are padded with mantras and useless fluff. Most of them would make great 20-page essays and nothing more.
Doesn't it has to do with the way you select non-fiction books? I don't mean it as "you are doing it wrong", but more that if you select from certain popular lists you get exactly that, because they are primary written to feel good while you read it and convince you author is right. If you read history written by historians, you get completely different experience. Or if you read "for dummies" series.
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 f…
The attitude in this post is “I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I don't really remember what I read”.
If we were in situation where many people rarely learn from books then conclusion would make sense. But authors examples are all fairly in same category - pop famous edutainment. Maybe selfish gene sux at teaching. But it is apparently good entertainment and did a lot to popularize that part of biology and evolution. It worked in that sense for many people.
Oh, books do work. Take, for example, early reading. No single book will teach a child how to read. One may reinforce letters, or a more advanced one may reinforce words, or later how they are used in sentences, then vocabulary, and so on until a point when the child has developed the skill to read unassisted. One could argue that the entire fiction genre is merely a roundabout way of reinforcing vocabulary (if one i…
QCVC periodically inserts spaced repetition exercises that prompt the reader to recall arbitrary facts about what they just read. The authors even seem to be aware that mere mnemonics won't be enough, e.g., when they write:
> I am, by the way, somewhat uncomfortable with some of the questions just asked. My personal experience is that spaced-repetition learning works well when learning facts I have a lot of context for, and care a lot about. It’s a rare person who finds the detailed entries in a unitary matrix fascinating! That’s not to say they aren’t – actually, they are, but you need a lot more context than I’ve provided to see why (for instance) that -i−i in the YY is just so darn interesting.
Is lack of recall the problem or a symptom of the problem? If we want to learn about ants, should we start by drilling a million ant facts? Focus on building recall around all the categories of ants and their geography?
Sorry, why do we care about Hadamard gates?
All the "fixes" to this are squarely in the domain of books-as-books: better organization, better scaffolding, better sequencing of concepts, etc.
I started off thinking he had a good point, but when he came to textbooks, I realized that it doesn't match reality. If what he claims were true, then books like Selfish Gene; Guns, Germs, and Steel, etc. should leave me with LESS knowledge than a typical textbook, which at least has questions, tests, etc. associated with it. But, in fact, I'm pretty sure that most textbooks have taught me precisely nothing, or at le…
Pretty much every textbook (especially introductory ones) is a fact book. They are structured summaries of a field of knowledge, and the goal is to convey as much information as possible. There is no room for extended personal commentary.
An idea book on the other hand does not simply present facts, but fits them in a narrative designed by the author. You don't necessarily obtain the overview of a body of knowledge. It is more like having a long chat with the author, who is preferably an expert in said body of knowledge.
For the learning part, idea books are more effective at getting the "big picture" across, while textbooks require more effort by the reader to either memorize the concepts or see how they fit together at a higher level.
In the end I don't think one can be classifies as more effective than the other since they correspond to different needs.
Consider two AI books, the "Modern Approach" textbook by Norvig and Russell, and "Human Compatible" by the same Russell. A student who wants to do AI research should read the textbook, and spend a lot of time studying it. A layperson who wants to get an overview of the AI field as it stands today, and see what are the possible problems that interest a layperson like himself, should read the latter book, spending much less time than the student.
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. Persona…
"... one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences....as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken." Delicious irony. Tell me about this in your text-only blog post.