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Why books don't work (2019)

andymatuschak.org

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Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#151

Post by mindcrime »

grawprog wrote: post #148
amatic wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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,

I think part of the problem is that the author of TFA sorta "buried the lede" and didn't really get to the point until very near the end. I suspect a lot of people got bored and quit reading before that point. Honestly, I did, and it wasn't until my second reading that I got what he was saying near the end, which is admittedly a somewhat different take.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#152

Post by liability »

mongol wrote: post #109
radford-neal wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The examples he gives are all pop-science" I don't think that's true of The Selfish Gene (and even more so for its successor, The Extended Phenotype, as one can tell just from the title). It seems to me to be a serious work on evolutionary biology.

Agreed. Was it not The Selfish Gene that coined "meme"? Or was that word used before by Dawkins in research papers or similar?

'Meme' came about when Dawkins modified the word 'mimeme' to sound like 'gene'. AFAIK that was first done in that book.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#153

Post by RobertKerans »

radford-neal wrote: post #83
RobertKerans wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

"The examples he gives are all pop-science" I don't think that's true of The Selfish Gene (and even more so for its successor, The Extended Phenotype, as one can tell just from the title). It seems to me to be a serious work on evolutionary biology.

He's a populariser of science though. No criticism intended by that. His books are still serious works, but the serious intent is to educate a general audience, not be an important document for a specialist audience. It's a story about his theory. And good popularisers of science, which I think he definitely is (or was?) are good storytellers. He takes a basic thesis then uses multiple lyrical examples to illustrate it. As a layman, I loved that book and read it several times, it made me feel like I had an understanding of genetics, and many of its ideas have informed how I think about things now (the additional, if somewhat vague, stuff he added re memetics in particular). But I'd also say that book is an epitome of pop science, and that feeling of understanding of genetics was just the basic concepts clicking. Which is also fine, that's a really good thing!

Edit: to go back to original article: memorising the stuff in detail isn't hugely useful -- it's a useful jumping off point to investigate in more detail, but the books basic ideas are easily understood, that's the point

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#154

Post by b0rsuk »

putzdown wrote: post #37

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…

Older books, especially novels, often had illustrations. An illustration naturally causes the reader to pause and consider a situation.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#155

Post by solinent »

I think the author misses a big point, and takes a lot of words to miss it.

A book exists as a subset of a language--it itself can be considered a language itself--the way the words interact and how they relate is more important than any particular within. Taking something out of a book doesn't meaning learning some particular order of symbols contained within--it's about learning the language and how all the symbols relate. You could even extend that to identifying that language in the future and generating it themselves as well.

So you get content where the information density is very low, which happen to be some books. I hate to compare this article to, but essentially it's identified the idea of information entropy and still misses the fact that knowledge and understanding are not a bucket of facts but rather a model. The author spits this out verbatim but it's obvious given the language the author is using his understanding of this topic is very low. The author seems to be quantifying knowledge, but really it's quite hard to quantify knowledge in and of itself but rather it's important to judge knowledge in relation to other knowledge--hence information density. I think a lot of people simply read a book for the journey and not to take something out--and just because there's no conscious summary in their head doesn't mean they've not learned or that it's not changed their entire lives, in fact, since understanding by definition is an unconscious process.

If learning well is simply absorbing knowledge quickly and retaining it then count me out--I don't want to absorb random facts and symbols which have no practical use in relation to the objects and symbols and things I use in this world.

So the author misses the point of learning, and constructs a giant strawman (using a long-form argument, strangely) about how books don't "work" in the sense that they don't necessarily give you any knowledge at all! I agree, but I'll definitely still be reading them.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#156

Post by sixstringtheory »

Books work exactly the way the way they’re intended to work; he’s trying to solve a different problem. The problem of conveying information about a topic is solved by books. The problem he has been unable to solve is conveying all that information in a highly compressed way with no loss of information. Not possible.

The answer to “what was that book about” can be a sentence. The answer to “teach me the concepts in that book” can also be one sentence, but it’s the same sentence for every book: “go read the book.”

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#158

Post by loughnane »

goostavos wrote: post #139
loughnane wrote: post #57

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 eve…

How To Read A Book is just crazy good. It's on the very small list of books that had a distinct "before and after" effect on my thinking. I read it in my early 20s and it is still at the top of my mind while I read a decade later. Only update I'd make to those suggestions is moving writing from the margins to external notes. I'd lose so many notes, interesting quotes, or "to look into" things to the margins once I cl…

I go back and forth on external notes. It's nice to have them be searchable but I like the context of having them in the book.

I do try to do a quick writeup for most books I read (using the questions above). Sometimes they're very detailed... sometimes they're not.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#159

Post by adolph »

teraku wrote: post #45

If the author (or anybody) really wants to absorb knowledge from books, it's simple and only takes two steps: 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 n…

The author is right there with you on this. If we consider books a knowledge transfer tool then the basic literacy training provided by most education systems lacks the information pipeline and tooling you describe, see Matuschak on transformative tools for thought [0]. The basic problem space is summarized as "books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it." [1]

0. https://numinous.productions/ttft/

1. https://andymatuschak.org/books/

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#160

Post by wombatmobile »

jcranmer wrote: post #113
ihodes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an alternative book (or list of) which you'd recommend instead?

I always recommend Charles Mann's 1491 as the antidote to Guns, Germs, and Steel. (Although note that this focuses entirely on pre-Columbian America.)

What does 1491 teach us?
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