161–170 of 221 posts
Just looking at the spine or the cover of a book that I really enjoyed gives me a feeling of connection and strength. That is recall - it’s just not total recall.
Total recall is nice too. That’s why I keep the books I read on the shelves in my house.
Does the author of TFA not have bookshelves? They are an excellent companion product to books.
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 is akin to saying that "F = MA so why do I need a whole series of lectures and chapters in a textbook to explain it!" Understanding the basic idea in physics that F=MA involves building a variety of intuitions about what this really means, what it entails in the real world, and how this influences the ways we think about this powerful idea. You need to see examples, experiments and applications of this idea for it to make sense, even though it can be perfectly reduced to 4 characters. Once the student of physics has all of the information in their head a vast amount of complexity can be reduced to F=MA.
An even more powerful demonstration of this is of course Einstein's famous E = MC^2. A pretty simple assertion, but really unraveling what that means and entails is easily many years of study.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are many books that genuinely defy reduction in this way. Hegel and Derrida are notorious examples of these. Scholars of either would tell you that not being reducible is an essential property of what each of these writers is trying to say. However I suspect the author of this post would very quickly become frustrated with these works and beg them to "get to the point!".
And another perspective outside of these are the "Desert Fathers", the early Christian ascetics, who would spend years meditating on single passages from the bible.
If you read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and recall nothing but find it 6-9 hours of time well-spent, the book has completely achieved its goal. If you get a couple of good anecdotes out of it that you can use at parties later, even better. Not to mention the social cachet of being an intellectual who reads non-fiction for fun.
This otherwise very intelligent essay falls into a common failure mode I see. If you look out in the world and see everyone obviously "doing it wrong", the odds of them all being stupid while you have sole insight are very slim. Instead, it is most often the case that they are doing it right for a goal that is different from the one you presume they have.
(There is also the obvious criticism that if the author feels linear narrative is a poor medium... why did they use it for their essay?)
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.”
I see your (apocryphal) quote about eating books and raise you another: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." -Francis Bacon
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.
I feel author should have also explained how did he read those books.
Without knowing that, it's hard to see how exactly things didn't work.
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
It's both. The proposal is at the very, very end, after a boring, long-winded screed about how everything else doesn't work.
> the author gives a link to his proposal
I took a look. I don't see any significant difference between this and a traditional textbook.