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Why books don't work (2019)

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Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#101

Post by ihodes »

lthornberry wrote: post #75
trabant00 wrote: post #3

For 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…

I can't comment on the others, but I'm a trained historian, and hating Guns, Germs, and Steel is probably the single thing that unites our field. It's vastly oversimplified, and gives anyone who reads it the idea that they understand the major forces shaping world history while ignoring most of the things that historians agree are more important than environmental determinism in that process.

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

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#102

Post by biophysboy »

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…

I agree with many of your takes, but I do think reading a book like a novel can give you even more than a vague memory.

I think there is a lot more "dark memory" that can be triggered by conversation or the right context.

I also think we translate a lot of the information we read so it integrates with our own understanding or context. For example, I think I better understand why the US responded to COVID like it did after reading US political history from 1970-2020.

Basically, I think humans are very good at detecting, remembering, and applying patterns for our own purposes, and books introduce us to patterns.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#103

Post by radford-neal »

It's an interesting post, and I'll have to have a look at his "Quantum Country" to see if his ideas work in practice.

However, it seems one-sided: He only talks about the difficulties with reading, ignoring the difficulties with writing.

He also thinks of reading a book as a one-off activity. But in reality, one of the things we learn from reading books is how to read books - we ideally get better over time at the "metacognition" skills that he notes are needed to absorb information from books.

If we look at scientific communication in particular (I know, not what most people are reading for...) these two points interact. Researchers typically try to communicate their findings in the "author describes an idea in words on the page" format because that's the easiest way to do it. Researchers also learn how to absorb information presented in this fashion by other researchers. By definition, research ideas have not been worked over for many years by people skilled at presenting them in an easily-absorbed form. And in any case, it would be rare for the researchers to be particularly skilled at sophisticated methods of presentation. (We hope they do get better at this with time, but they will all have had more practice at reading than at writing, so it makes sense that the joint enterprise of communication will rely more on skilled reading than on skilled writing.)

One might wonder in light of this whether the trend in K-12 education away from the traditional lecture / textbook forms is short-sighted. Once students are out of K-12 (going into higher-level academia, or business, or the military, or whatever), lack of practice at reading traditional material may be a problem.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#104

Post by hacknat »

ginko wrote: post #76
hacknat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western culture seems to suffer from collective ADHD. People expect small morsels of information/experience to give them much and people eschew deeper, longer, more meaningful experiences. I could go on.

What is particularly Western about this? And compared to what? Do you just mean modern culture?

It may be more than a Western phenomena, I don't know. My experience is with Western culture though.

I wasn't trying to implicitly compare Western culture to some idealized other culture, I was trying to limit the scope of my critique based on my limited knowledge of the world.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#105

Post by commandlinefan »

henrikeh wrote: post #9

I don’t see how this is an argument for how “books don’t work”. The author’s point seems to be that books don’t support learning, because books are static and can’t adapt to the thinking and working process of the reader/student. Something more is needed to “learn”. This implies that the purpose of books is to “teach”, but is that so? Books at best “inform”. It is up to the reader to bring the framework for learning,…

I kept reading and reading, waiting for him to say what he thought _did_ work, then, and at the very end he finally got to what seems to have been his attempt at a point: he can conceive of some as-of-yet uninvented perfect knowledge transfer device that outperforms books, so hopefully somebody will be inspired by his post to invent one.

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#106

Post by amatic »

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

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#108

Post by commandlinefan »

watwut wrote: post #38

> Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences? Maybe those books are specifically bad? I haven't read them, but I had long monologues about some historical books I read giving people basically lectures on top…

I've only read one of those books: Guns, Germs and Steel, and I learned and retained a _lot_ from it. Now, whether what I learned and retained was accurate and worth retaining is a subject of great dispute - there are a lot of people who really hate this book because they disagree with it, but that's not the author of this post's point. He's saying that books are a bad way of conveying knowledge, not that books contain bad knowledge. Maybe he's just not a great reader?

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#109

Post by mongol »

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.

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

Re: Why books don't work (2019)

#110

Post by aoeusnth1 »

hacknat wrote: post #73
ginko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this have to do with "Western" culture?

Western culture seems to suffer from collective ADHD. People expect small morsels of information/experience to give them much and people eschew deeper, longer, more meaningful experiences. I could go on.

The author is explicitly advocating for a longer, more meaningful experiences. He’s arguing that the way most people consume books leave them with a cursory understanding and a few hours of entertainment.
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