41–50 of 162 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as its not vocal it should not interfere with his ability to read and process information of said reading.
That’s incorrect, any kind of stimulus takes away some attention.
I'm not entirely sure it's even always true compared to silence. Sometimes I feel like other bits of my own brain can be competing for attention and that occupying them can be a win.
I'll spare you the trouble of reading further, either in this article or in my subsequent diatribe. The insight offered here is: "People don't absorb information perfectly, it requires effort and work to learn from reading."
>So let’s reframe the question. Rather than “how might we make books actually work reliably,” we can ask: How might we design mediums which do the job of a non-fiction book—but which actually work reliably?
Hey, how about framing this as "Communication and writing is hard", or "Language is full of ambiguity, human knowledge is always incomplete, human memory is limited, metaphysics fails to accurately model reality, period, so the whole project is fucked," or "people in general lack viable epistemologies", etc.?
Hey, how about writing this article cogently first, before you go shitting on all of literature?
On the other hand, this is a great study in Silicon Valley bullshit. This guy is going to "disrupt" the way we read, by somehow inventing a new way to write that no one has ever tried before. Good luck with that.
OTOH, I think the criticisms in the comments here, are strange (even ignoring comments whose criticisms are dismissed by actually reading the article). So much of the evolution of UI design is moving from 'the user can do all these things,' to 'it is easy for the user to do these things' and 'the user interfaces with the product in the way that we want.' When a reader picks up a book without a vested interest in understanding its contents, they will read it once, cover to cover, rather quickly, without taking many notes, and will then proceed to forget most of what they read (not only the details, but even the concepts). Perhaps it'd be a good idea for authors of popular non-fiction books (i.e., will be read by many such people) to 'trick' readers into learning by augmenting the text with proven learning techniques, which work when the book is picked up and read with the above technique.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as its not vocal it should not interfere with his ability to read and process information of said reading.
That’s incorrect, any kind of stimulus takes away some attention.
I 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…
but would it really? a good way to know is by letting the author teach you the book. do you think it will take 50 hours? think of university courses in which the teacher is teaching their own book. they will not go through every line and details although they must have found the details important enough to be put in the book; yet you will learn key ideas that will help you grasp the subject.Even if you learn the details in depth ,when they are not useful for you, you will eventually forget them.
As for divine comedy, It is a work of art that can be interpreted in many ways , it inspires many people in different ways that even the author would not have imagined.
so if you spend 50 hours reading a non-fiction do you enjoy all of those hours? do you remember all the details you went through? if you are only going to remember some of the key ideas then why bother spending 50 hours on it?
I don't do this as I read, but after reading the book. Or sometimes a couple times while reading the book if it's particularly interesting. If you do it as you read, you may fall into the trap of taking too many notes. And the forced recall after a few days improves retention, rather than a recall after 5 minutes.
Crucially, I connect the ideas to other books and Internet articles I've read. It's surprisingly easy IME to let keep a book in a knowledge silo; only by connecting the information will you actually learn something.
For example, I read both Nate Silver's Signal and the Noise, and Taleb's Black Swan / Antifragile, etc. Both of the books are roughly on drawing conclusions from data with statistics (or really the limitations of statistics in the latter case).
But if you don't actually compare the two books then it's pretty easy to read but not understand. I don't claim that I understood everything, but certainly taking a paragraph of notes is better than nothing.
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Paul Graham has a nice essay about whether you actually remember what you read!
http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html
I also recall reading a NYTimes piece about this. It's good to wonder about your retention, like the author of this blog post is. Although like others, I don't agree with the title. I think it's entirely possible that many people are not good readers. That is a skill that has to be taught -- there's a reason that every child in the states is MANDATED TO DO for ~12 years. And it can be done poorly, or it can be done well.
I think if you don't actually check if you know something, then you don't know it. So I think I agree that many people could improve their retention of books with a few small adjustments to their process.
People are reading and writing more than ever with the Internet, and I generally view that as a good thing. But I suppose it wouldn't be surprising if the retention of long form books suffered due to that development over the last couple decades. People learn to read earlier and "informally" rather than in a more deliberate fashion.
But to tell me that, you just wrote around 2 chapters of a book to tell me that. If your experiences apply to me, and I can only digest things properly via video, I'm not likely to read it.
As a side note, it might also be worth looking into NVLD (Non-Verbal Learning Disorder), which is something that gets confounded with autism and ADHD, but is a distinct disorder.