Books and lectures don't work
andymatuschak.org
Books and lectures don't work
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Re: Books and lectures don't work
#2> How might we make books actually work reliably?
The read is interesting, and it has an interesting premise. But, it is one well known.
Techniques like SQ3R (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R) have existed for decades.
Books are a great source of knowledge. But, you need to use the right techniques to read them.
If you read for fun, then don't bother. Whatever sticks is better than nothing.
If you read to memorize, use memory techniques.
If you read to understand (like math), do exercises. All the reading in the world is not going to make you a math expert without tyring it for yourself.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#3This feels like it is just trying to throw out the baby with the bath water. A simple rephrasing from "Why Books Don't Work" to "Ways in Which Books Falter" would go a long way to helping the argument, as it leaves the rhetorical opening for "Ways in Which Books Excel".
And the ways are myriad. To name just one exciting one, I can go back to books. Over and over and over. Do I feel like a passage or a program were difficult? Just try again. This is in contrast to such things as talks and lectures, where it is typically one shot. Hope you got it.
To the credit of the argument, this is one of the things that was touted in early Khan Academy points. You can watch the video over and over. Did you get it? No? Try pausing the video and watching again. And again.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#4.....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 something, you aren't supposed to just sit down and read 100 pages of it. Likewise, you aren't supposed to attend lecture and just sit there listening.
You want to talk about spaced repetition? Just put the book down and come back later. Read in small chunks, and liberally re-read difficult or important sections.
Obviously, yes, there are tools other than books that can be used for learning to great effect. By all means, use them if you really do find it difficult to learn from books. But you can't say it's hard to learn from the book, if you've never been taught how to learn from book correctly.
Regarding lectures, you won't learn much from a lecture on its own. The best "school strategy" I know of is to skim the material before lecture, so you can attend lecture with some idea of what is going to happen, so you can take more organized notes and not be caught off guard by anything. Then after lecture you go back and read the book more carefully, taking more notes as you go.
Learning is hard work, and it takes a lot of time. There is no shortcut that I'm aware of.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#5I used to believe this too until I was taught how to read a book, a skill that unfortunately is taken for granted and hasn’t made its way into curriculums.
Reading “thinking fast thinking slow” should not take 8-9 hours... it could easily take 50 (after all, it represents many years and thousands of hours of work by the preeminent thinker on the subject). Scholars have spent a lifetime studying the Inferno.
I am typing this as I stand in line at a coffee shop in nyc as a kid is listening to music while reading “sapiens”. How can you expect to meaningfully absorb this content in a distracted environment, no pen for annotations and your attention span completely under assault?
I believe humanity’s ascension over the past two hundred years is pretty clear proof that books (or the written word) work well as a form of knowledge transfer but they require you to work for it.
“there’s no such thing as free lunch”
Ps a good primer on this, for those who care, is Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book”
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#6A number of times as a teenager I read several books on a subject and found that the first few were badly written and difficult to understand, while the last one set everything out very plainly and I felt if only I'd read that one first I needn't have wasted my time with the others.
Only, once when I was half-way through that last one I realised that I was re-reading the first one I'd picked up.
So I think books can work pretty well, but expecting a single reading to stick is probably (for most people) not the best way to use them.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#7I used to believe this too until I was taught how to read a book, a skill that unfortunately is taken for granted and hasn’t made its way into curriculums. Reading “thinking fast thinking slow” should not take 8-9 hours... it could easily take 50 (after all, it represents many years and thousands of hours of work by the preeminent thinker on the subject). Scholars have spent a lifetime studying the Inferno. I am typi…
What if the the kid is listening to the audio version of Sapiens while reading the book?
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#8This feels like it is just trying to throw out the baby with the bath water. A simple rephrasing from "Why Books Don't Work" to "Ways in Which Books Falter" would go a long way to helping the argument, as it leaves the rhetorical opening for "Ways in Which Books Excel". And the ways are myriad. To name just one exciting one, I can go back to books. Over and over and over. Do I feel like a passage or a program were di…
I'm sorry the author is experiencing problems in retention, but this reads as yet another wordy exposition of idle musings on Medium (see: weekly "SQL is terrible" posts).
For me the distinction is between synchronous and asynchronous learning: a 30min howto is always going to be 30min long, but a book can be scanned, and a teacher can see that a class "gets it" and they can move on (which is a hybrid, I guess).
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#9Books were a product of their time. Interactive media allows us to leverage techniques such as annotations, in-context model building and testing, building memorization using spaced repetition which should make an immense difference in learning effectiveness.
It's a shame that Google, who wanted to organize all of the world's information, still struggles if you want to find best learning resources (books, videos, podcasts, courses, Q&A forums, cheatsheets etc.) on a topic. It's good at answering specific questions but not so good at suggesting at learning path that makes the best use of amazing resources that exist on the Web.
This is the problem we have set out to solve. I'd love to see more participation from HN users: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#10I used to believe this too until I was taught how to read a book, a skill that unfortunately is taken for granted and hasn’t made its way into curriculums. Reading “thinking fast thinking slow” should not take 8-9 hours... it could easily take 50 (after all, it represents many years and thousands of hours of work by the preeminent thinker on the subject). Scholars have spent a lifetime studying the Inferno. I am typi…
What if the kid is listening to white noise to block out the sound of the coffee shop? Or the audiobook?