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.”
Why books don't work (2019)
11–20 of 221 posts
Re: Why books don't work (2019)
#12I see that this is the author of the excellent "Quantum Country" so perhaps the case being made here is obviously biased, for a good reason.
I get a sense that the author seems to argue that most book authors are not conscious of the working memory of the reader. I don't think that is true. Many "good" non-fiction books I've read actually rely on space-repetitions throughout the text quite heavily. The author, to their credit, does note this for textbooks. Often concepts in long texts are referenced in a non-linear manner, either in expectation of ideas to come or in retrospect to draw parallels & new connections. Unfortunately, the onus here is on the reader to realize and extract the maximum juice out of this non-linear flow.
The key idea of this post is to shift this burden to the "medium" and not the reader. Books can't handle this responsibility in their current form. I certainly agree with this. Distill [1] is pioneering this from the perspective of medium-reader engagement. Unsurprisingly, Michael Nielsen, a collaborator of the author of the post, is a member of the steering committee at Distill. :-)
I love these new directions in dissemination of ideas!
[1]: https://distill.pub
Re: Why books don't work (2019)
#13For 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…
Agree. I found Thinking, Fast and Slow painfully biased
Re: Why books don't work (2019)
#14Most knowledge isn't about replaying sentences. It is about influencing your sub-conscious decision making.
Sure, I don't recall any sentence of 'Thinking Fast and Slow', but every (ok, most) moment I'm aware of human biases that are in play.
That is the point of book reading, to accumulate sub-conscious knowledge(model of the world) and (near optimal) decision making
Re: Why books don't work (2019)
#15I feel like expecting to remember all arguments and examples in a book is missing the point. You can only summarize it that way because you have already internalized all background knowledge, right? When you can reduce the core take-away from a book to a paragraph or something you assume a lot of context and pre-existing knowledge. An author can't exactly know what the knowledge-level and amount of surrounding facts the reader has available so these have to be provided to support the main point. You could of course provide only one example per point, but then it's sometimes hard to know if the reader takes away the 'right' conclusion from your example so if you provide multiply it's easier to get the through line of the provided examples.
When you have built up enough ground to place your main point into the readers brain, the supporting facts become less important to remember (barring one or two evocative examples) so they fade away, but you still have the meta knowledge of your brain having read and vetted the supporting arguments/examples, which you wouldn't have if the whole book was just the main point without all the surrounding detail.
Re: Why books don't work (2019)
#16Why does it have to be a long book with a million anecdotes? Just give me the idea.
Most longform (like this post) are not to educate but to convince. To learn, one has to do.
I don't disagree with your point. However, for a lot of authors, the book's length/form factor is actually heavily influenced by their publisher and potentially even set in contract (prior to actually writing anything).
Re: Why books don't work (2019)
#17... for me
Re: Why books don't work (2019)
#18Endless blog posts don't work either.
Oh thank you.
I was looking for the point that someone who wants to learn needs to engage with the topic in some way, e.g. by teaching others about it, using their own words to summarize the content, etc. Did the author mention something like this at all? I’m sorry if he did, I really love books and I read technical books with a highlighter to mark stuff that is more important than other things. But without typing code from books into the computer, I wouldn’t remember much.
Re: Why books don't work (2019)
#19"All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it."
My edu friends tell me all the time, "different students best learn differ ways." That is, this isn't a books issue per se. It's that there's a difference between (casual) reading and focused repetitive studying.
That said, I find I do better with reading than say video. In fact, I was watching a course on LinkedIn Learning yesterday and I reminded myself how much such videos are not my medium of choice. In addition, I find audio books aren't for me either.
Conclusion: At least with traditional books I can re-read, highlight, photography and so on. Yes, I miss stuff. But learning is hard. We're not wired to absorb _everything_. We're not. That's a good thing.
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While we're on the subject, what's your goto for finding non-fiction books?
Re: Why books don't work (2019)
#20I often feel like writing comments is pointless and contributes to the sea of noise below top level posts, which I none the less often feel compelled to read. But what is a comment box but not an invitation to perform a free form exercise? If I read a whole blog post and don't have anything to say about it, what was the point?