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Why books don't work (2019)

andymatuschak.org

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Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#141

Post by coffeefirst »

hacknat wrote: post #66

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…

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.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#142

Post by acephal »

hacknat wrote: post #66

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…

This.

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.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#143

Post by disqard »

It's important to realize that "reading a book" is no guarantee of learning any more than (say) "watching a Khan Academy video". Knowledge isn't "downloaded" into one's head by passively consuming sequences of symbols on paper (or a screen).

Schopenhauer wrote a compelling essay on this topic. I'll link to this article (not by me) which breaks down and discusses that essay.

"It’s important to take time to think about what we’re reading and not merely assume the thoughts of the author. We need to digest, synthesize, and organize the thoughts of others if we are to understand. This is the grunt work of thinking. It’s how we acquire wisdom."

Source: https://fs.blog/2015/08/schopenhauer-on-reading/

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#144

Post by marcosdumay »

activatedgeek wrote: post #55
mathnmusic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shift this burden to the medium 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…

> Check out this "map" of mathematics: ... Every subject needs a similar map. I often find this sort of approach to be rather counter-productive. If I am learning something, I'd be happy with my local part of the graph, the things that I specifically care about. It is much easier to make multi-hop connections in knowledge when one is really familiar with their local knowledge cluster. I, for one, find an absolute kno…

An actual map (navigable, instead of a presentation) would be kinda of as useful as a world map. You can look at it and say "This time I'll travel here!", and get an idea of what the travel would require.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#145

Post by liability »

TheUndead96 wrote: post #71
hacknat wrote: post #66

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…

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…

> Reading a book takes more effort than it used to.

I agree with most of your points but not this one. The proliferation of audio books and text-to-speech (TTS) has made reading books easier than ever. Particularly TTS in my case; I can read an eBook visually for a few hours, then switch to TTS for a while to give my eyes a break, and in this way easily marathon books. Once you are accustomed to TTS you can turn the speed up very fast. I tune the speed on the fly to compensate for mental fatigue to maintain a consistent level of comprehension; when I'm 'in the groove' I can comfortably set TTS to around 750wpm. I can read visually faster than that, but only in a 'sprint', not with endurance. (I find that for finishing a book quick, it's better to be a tortoise than a hare.)

I read nonfiction and fiction like this. Math heavy texts aren't well suited for it, nor books with many charts and tables, but except for a few cases like that it's very adaptable. Modern TTS even handles weird names in fantasy novels surprisingly well.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#146

Post by b0rsuk »

A book is an inherently introverted medium. I think that's the crux of the issue. Please leave books alone. Extroverts have other options: social media, movies, telephones. I'd rate TV and radio as neutral.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#147

Post by lilgreenland »

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.

https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html Having this website ready before we all had to start teaching online was very lucky.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#148

Post by grawprog »

amatic wrote: post #106
hacknat wrote: post #66

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…

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 with this. I read the top comments before the article and went in totally expecting someone just dismissing books as useless, by the end though, I got the same takeaway as you, the author was stating the need to immerse yourself in a subject to truly learn it and that hastily reading through a single book on a subject is not something you should expect to give you full understanding of it.

Not that books are useless or you shouldn't read them.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#149

Post by NewFireStudios »

Struggle with things, and then attempt to build on them. You don’t need to publicly build, but the act of applying something on top of what you just consumed is how you get the most out of the consumption. In my experience, if something was easily consumed, it end up being a waste of time.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#150

Post by b0rsuk »

mindcrime wrote: post #74

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…

> 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.

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