Selfish gene is a popular science book, not a text book. You want to learn something? Get a dense, highly-regarded text book with lots of problems and work through the problems. Supplement it with lectures, or more importantly, office hours at a prof or grad student who knows the subject cold. Maybe even get a mentor to give you a real problem and struggle through it for several years (aka go to graduate school). That's how its been done for centuries because it works. Why else do you think there are so few self-taught (real) engineers and (real) scientists out in the wild making an impact.
Books and lectures don't work
121–130 of 162 posts
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#122I have many hours experience learning from books (though I don’t disagree with the authors reasons books don’t work). However quantum.country did not work for me. I think I prefer more organic spaced repetition. Like read an article/attend a lecture/read a book/watch a YouTube video about a subject and then do it again about the same subject later. Perhaps the “scientific” spaced repetition can be more efficient if I really work hard at it, but I just don’t know.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#123I disagree with the central conceit of this piece. >as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it. I posit it is not that books are bad at conveying knowledge, it is that people are bad at absorbing abstract knowledge they don't put to concrete use, and that people often read non-fiction books which have no practical application in their lives. A teenager in Afric…
Author here; this is a great point and I’m grateful for it. Maybe we shouldn’t expect to absorb such knowledge! That said, if the theory is that books’ knowledge is absorbed through concrete use, why is the book so uninvolved with facilitating or interleaving with that concrete use? I’d suggest the impetus and regulation of the concrete use (and its relationship to the book) is all on the reader. Does that align with…
Certainly, and the same applies to other types of media. I can tell you that approaching a classroom lecture that doesn't involve homework or testing, like a free online lecture, with the same casual attitude as one reads a mildly interesting book will give you the same failure to retain the information. I know this because I've done it many times myself.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#124I went into this article thinking I would hate it, but as I read it over, each point that came up in my mind ("obviously there's a difference between passive and active learning," "spaced repetition would make a big difference," etc.) was addressed soon after (a sign of a well-organized article). OTOH, I think the criticisms in the comments here, are strange (even ignoring comments whose criticisms are dismissed by a…
yup, super bizarre comments here. I thought the work of Bret Victor was liked in HN community and this is along the same lines. Very well written article that hits on all important points.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that having a disciplined focus on learning as an exercise...there is more work on your part as a reader. I think the point from the article is that we have richer ways to convey information. I feel like that is fair. I mean we type out our thoughts, the most ineffective way to share our passion around a topic. I'd be interested in a seeming statement you are making; the book vs video (or possibly the attempt…
In my (anecdotal) experience in both attending and teaching classes (/presentations), richer ways to convey information incite the audience to switch off and undergo/experience the "class". You whip out a blackboard & chalk, and the difference is palpable. I'm not saying is impossible to teach with "richer" methods, but i am saying that there is more to teaching than conveying information.
> You whip out a blackboard & chalk, and the difference is palpable.
I don't quite understand what you're implying. Using the blackboard is a richer (more "multimedia", more "live") way to teach than just a plain lecture/presentation, right? Is it your experience that students phase out during such sections? Because my experience is quite the contrary.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#126This 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).
> a teacher can see that a class "gets it" and they can move on
Wow, I don't think I ever had a teacher who did this; definitely not in University. My experience is that lecturers are mostly oblivious and indifferent to student understanding. And most students, in my experience (self included), generally care more about getting "through" the lecture rather than "getting it". And I personally, similar to the OP, believe that real understanding of a lecture can usually only arise following active engagement after the lecture.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
So true! I think the problem is particularly bad in high-school and first-year undergraduate textbooks, which are "padded" with useless extras, non-sense boxes, and lots of blah blah to the point of being literally 5x thicker than they need to be. Let's face it, nobody is going to read a 1000+ page PHYS 101 textbook. Textbooks for graduate level courses are usually much better, as are textbooks outside the North Amer…
BTW, whoever wants a really concise "zero-to-hero" level PHYS 101 book read "No bullshit guide to math and physics" by Ivan Savov.
I would strongly recommend Feynman's lectures as an amazing intro to undergrad physics.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#128Try only learning things with books for 4 months and then tell me it doesn't work. I tend to notice that learning from books get a lot harder if I allow my brain to be flooded with whatever chemicals are released when I watch youtube or game of thrones. If I avoid those for a while, and avoid sugar etc, and if I work out every day and get enough nutrients etc, then my ability to learn via books is no trouble at all.…
I agree with this. I recently implemented similar changes in my daily routine. I am at least twice as capable and productive.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#129Passive vs. active.
Passive reading of non-fiction isn't going to teach you much. If you, instead, take reading notes, write a report, cross-reference, or otherwise engage with the material, well, you'll learn something.
There's nothing revolutionary here. College classes aren't just "go read some books"; they involve writing for a reason. This is really basic pedagogy.
Re: Books and lectures don't work
#130I, too, thought this piece took a strange position. It would be better titled "Books and lectures don't work if all you do is passively consume them in a single pass", which I don't think anyone argues or believes or prescribes.
The piece touched on the importance of metalearning strategies, but stopped short at simply designing experiences that lighten the cognitive load on learners by doing much of the heavy lifting for them. This is valuable but misses what the true goal should be.
We should be teaching learners how to take some information source (e.g., a book, lecture series, etc.) and apply those metalearning techniques (e.g., spaced repetition, distillation, etc.) in a self-directed manner. Otherwise, you only have learners capable of learning those things that already have great experiences built by skilled learners and are otherwise still not capable of self-directed learning.