121–130 of 221 posts
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.”
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 have read that book, I believe I understood its central message, I could probably explain it (not very elegantly) in a couple of sentences, and I can't point to any other particular benefit I drew from reading the book, and yet I'm very glad I read it.
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…
Why shouldn't we have great recall of the details of books we read? All of the things you describe about actively engaging with the works you read are obviously correct (taking notes, summarising main points etc.). But often, I (and I dare say most people) fail to follow up with them effectively. As I see it, the author's question is: can we create a new medium which affords such active engagement with the works we r…
I'm not saying we shouldn't, just pointing out that it's not practical to expect that after one causal read through of a book. At least books as they are today. Which leads to...
As I see it, the author's question is: can we create a new medium which affords such active engagement with the works we read more effectively?
That's fair. That, to me, turns the question into "how can we make books that work better?" instead of "why don't books work?" And I think that's a valid and useful question.
To the author's point that books aren't necessarily built around a theory of cognition / learning, and could be improved by incorporating that, I'd say "sure". I'm not at all opposed to the idea of making books better. I was really responding more to the earlier part of the essay, which seemed focused on hammering on the "books don't work" idea.
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"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.
It's "pop science" in the sense that he's taking academic work and making it palatable to a general audience, minus the rigor and complexity. His sources were books like Fisher's Genetical Theory of Natural Selection and papers by WD Hamilton. It's not that it isn't serious. Pop science doesn't have to be BS. But it often risks conveying to readers that they have a better grounding than they actually have, which The…
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Do you have an alternative book (or list of) which you'd recommend instead?
I always recommend Charles Mann's 1491 as the antidote to Guns, Germs, and Steel. (Although note that this focuses entirely on pre-Columbian America.)
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Now that’s interesting. We used to have the concept of Cliff’s Notes, right? For all these elongated pamphlets we could read, could we instead get a collection of related pamphlet-length core theses? Is there a model to that?
Platforms and Apps like Blinkist offer this. Curated summaries in about 10% of the original length.
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,…
Some books explicitly claim to teach you a specific skill. And some people have that general expectation towards books. This is what the author criticizes, as I understood their points.
Oh, books do work. Take, for example, early reading. No single book will teach a child how to read. One may reinforce letters, or a more advanced one may reinforce words, or later how they are used in sentences, then vocabulary, and so on until a point when the child has developed the skill to read unassisted. One could argue that the entire fiction genre is merely a roundabout way of reinforcing vocabulary (if one i…
The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious ( https://quantum.country/qcvc ) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it shows just what the bottleneck in "learning" from any kind of text is. QCVC periodically inserts spaced repetition exercises that prompt the reader to recall arbitrary facts about what they just read. The authors even seem to be aware that mere mnemonics won't be enough, e.g., when they w…
I think Quantum Country is extremely well made and an interesting idea, but come on: The idea of interspersing text with exercises is hardly revolutionary.
In physics (which is my background) a regular textbook consists of chapters which each present a smaller topic followed by a bunch of exercises you should solve. The way you work through the book is by solving the exercises. Everyone knows that just reading the text is not enough. The author usually writes explicitly in the introduction that "the only way to learn this is to work through the exercises".
A good book will have exercises which require understanding a mixture of the earlier chapters as well. Most of the exercises will focuses on what's new in _this_ chapter, but suddenly you need calculate some "basic" formula that was presented early on. Textbooks don't use spaced-repetition as described by SuperMemo, but they use many similar techniques.
The page you linked to is enormous (91 pages printed it seems; although that's with a pretty big font) and looking through it seems to have 17 "exercises" and that is including some very basic ones as "What's the standard notation for the NOT gate?". How can they claim that it's not "learning from text" when they have a way bigger text-to-exercise ratio than any textbook I've read?
The author cites three mediocre pop science books and is dismayed that after a single reading, he finds himself unable to impress people at parties with his knowledge. He says those books each take "6 to 9 hours" to read. Life changing books are read over the course of...well...an entire life. I have a small handful of books that I have read dozens of times. These are books with very big, and very old, ideas. They ha…
I too am underwhelmed by the article, but I don't think it's fair to call the books he describes "mediocre pop science books". By way of reminder, they're Dawkins's The selfish gene , Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow , and Diamond's Guns, germs and steel . These are definitely pop science books. Like any pop science books, they can reasonably be accused of simplifying their material, favouring a particular interpre…
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Doesn't it has to do with the way you select non-fiction books? I don't mean it as "you are doing it wrong", but more that if you select from certain popular lists you get exactly that, because they are primary written to feel good while you read it and convince you author is right. If you read history written by historians, you get completely different experience. Or if you read "for dummies" series.
You are right, I'm talking about the popular and relatively easy to digest but can still learn you plenty non-fiction books. On Writing from a comment above is a great example of that. A window into the mind of a writing genius. Not a single line in that book is wasted. Light in style, but heavy in insights. The books you mentioned are heavy in style and heavy in insights and facts. Unfortunately, I can't afford to d…
For dummies series are not heavy in insights and facts. You have to put non-zero effort and it takes more time to read, but they do good job as introduction for someone who knows nothing. For writing skill, I liked how "Style Toward Clarity" is written. Each chapter contains a rule. You can read the chapter and then try to incorporate that rule into your writing. Once you feel confident, you can move to another chapter. It is not window into genius, but it is readable and rules are easy to apply.
By history from historians I mean for example "Third Reich Trilogy" by Richard Evans or "The Rebelious life of Mrs. Rosa Parks". Both were quite readable. They contained stories that helped me remember what was written in them. I do not remember all the details from them, but apparently I remember enough to catch quite a lot of myths and untruths that are thrown around in forums. I generally remember how Third Reich functioned as a system. I expected the books by historians to be heavy, but they turned out to not be. I read online reviews before buying.
Another group of books that I think made me learn reasonably well were memoirs of (say Jewish survivors), the narratives of escaped slaves like Frederick Douglass and so on. You do end up remembering how the system functioned, probably because human brain is good at remembering stories. You wont remember exact name of this or that character, but it does not matter.