Books are a great source of knowledge. But, you need to use the right techniques to read them.
If you read for fun, then don't bother. Whatever sticks is better than nothing.
If you read to memorize, use memory techniques.
If you read to understand (like math), do exercises. All the reading in the world is not going to make you a math expert without tyring it for yourself.
Indeed, that's a nice way to frame my thesis. Or maybe even more directly: what if books were shaped such that "reading a book" meant "doing SQ3R to a book"?
This 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 difficult? Just try again. This is in contrast to such things as talks and lectures, where it is typically one shot. Hope you got it.
To the credit of the argument, this is one of the things that was touted in early Khan Academy points. You can watch the video over and over. Did you get it? No? Try pausing the video and watching again. And again.
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.
> care more about getting "through" the lecture rather than "getting it"
What's the point in attending if you don't intend to learn?
Perhaps I was simply lucky to go to a good uni or perhaps the times have changed but such lecturers were rare when and where I studied (Exeter Uni., '74-'77) and in the worst cases we campaigned to get them removed from the course.
I think he was just getting at how odd/interesting/dissapointing it is that we don't retain more of all the stuff we read (and might even be really interested in). I remember being enthralled while reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus...but then trying to tell others about it and realizing how little I knew... "the americas were much more populated/advanced than people think it was" "the world lost more cultures in the 17th century than all other centuries" etc. little factoids but could not really explain much else or why the book was so COOL
I admit I skimmed this article. I did so because it is long, and because the initial premise doesn't make much sense.
I was looking for something specific. For some discussion of reading and notetaking strategies. Underlining, highlighting, etc. I saw none. Therefore, I can only repeat the tired old form of dismissal: "it didn't work for you because you did it wrong".
You want to actually absorb and learn something, you aren't supposed to just sit down and read 100 pages of it. Likewise, you aren't supposed to attend lecture and just sit there listening.
You want to talk about spaced repetition? Just put the book down and come back later. Read in small chunks, and liberally re-read difficult or important sections.
Obviously, yes, there are tools other than books that can be used for learning to great effect. By all means, use them if you really do find it difficult to learn from books. But you can't say it's hard to learn from the book, if you've never been taught how to learn from book correctly.
Regarding lectures, you won't learn much from a lecture on its own. The best "school strategy" I know of is to skim the material before lecture, so you can attend lecture with some idea of what is going to happen, so you can take more organized notes and not be caught off guard by anything. Then after lecture you go back and read the book more carefully, taking more notes as you go.
Learning is hard work, and it takes a lot of time. There is no shortcut that I'm aware of.
I'm pacing through Thinking, Fast and Slow in 25~35h. Single, linear read, spaced over (sadly) a few weeks. From time to time I'm pausing additionally to just map the concepts I just read in the minutes before against my experiences, in order to integrate them with each other.
I'm not rushing reading speed at all, and while I'm not a native speaker, I'm multiple times faster on e.g. The Hunger Games (I rarely read fiction).
If you want to apply the knowledge in a book, read it slow and literally step aside and e.g. just sit or pace around trying to integrate it with previous knowledge / experience.
I think he was just getting at how odd/interesting/dissapointing it is that we don't retain more of all the stuff we read (and might even be really interested in). I remember being enthralled while reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus...but then trying to tell others about it and realizing how little I knew... "the americas were much more populated/advanced than people think it was" "the world lost more cultures in the 17th century than all other centuries" etc. little factoids but could not really explain much else or why the book was so COOL
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 typing this as I stand in line at a coffee shop in nyc as a kid is listening to music while reading “sapiens”. How can you expect to meaningfully absorb this content in a distracted environment, no pen for annotations and your attention span completely under assault?
I believe humanity’s ascension over the past two hundred years is pretty clear proof that books (or the written word) work well as a form of knowledge transfer but they require you to work for it.
“there’s no such thing as free lunch”
Ps a good primer on this, for those who care, is Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book”
The brain is very good at ignoring some sounds. Personally I'm fond of "white noise" generators - I have my own perfect combination of rain, wind, flowing water and nature noises that cancels everything else.
Maybe compared to silence, but often not net if it's displacing other stimulus.
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.
That's not true. Studies show that many pupils are better able to absorb information while doodling or by other repetitive actions. Many many famous authors have used long walks as a way to help themselves write.
Apparently there are studies where performing tasks was compared: in silence vs with music. Routine tasks were performed the same, but creative tasks suffered with music (i.e. a non-trivial solution to a problem was overlooked).
Dunno, however, if reading qualifies as such a task. Namely, the question is whether the same regions of the brain are engaged (and would be busy listening to music).
A good book that also touches on this subject is: "moonwalking with einstein the art and science of remembering everything". It also covers the subject of priming and why its important.
People used to memorize entire books by studying them for years. In a time before printing presses were a thing it was considered normal to spent long long hours learning the contents of a book by heart.
I disagree with you. People have very different styles when it comes to absorbing information. I fully understand why that kid would choose to listen to music instead of random coffee-shop noises. Music it's repetitive and easy to ignore whereas environmental noises might be more distracting. I often find myself able to concentrate easier with music than with random sounds or even silence in some cases. Silence makes my mind wander and stray away from what I'm trying to pay attention to.
I've also read Adler's "How to Read a Book" and I don't think it's as useful as you make it out to be. Annotating is good but nowadays you can take notes easily on your phone which I found myself doing for each book I read/listen to. Also one of the advice you find in your example is how truly reading a book means reading it more than once. He mentions that the first read should be superficial and fast in order to prepare you for the second, more thorough read.
I use my noise cancelling headphones without any music to block out noise. Sometimes even with normal headphones, not plugged in - socially acceptable earplugs. Some places are so noisy my head hurts. A full Starbucks definitely being one of them.
If I'm interested in the subject nothing breaks my hyperfocus (this is both my superpower and my kryptonite). Well, conversations around me or music with lyrics do disturb my reading but classic music or pos-rock are a very effective way to cancel environmental noise.
> but classic music or pos-rock are a very effective way to cancel environmental noise.
That might not be the case if you are an obsessive classical music listener. Personally, as a fan of the Baroque played on period instruments etc. (the "historically-informed performance" style), the muzak versions of Bach played in public places really grind my gears.
> 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).
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?
It took me about 9 months to read "Thinking fast and slow". But that's because after every paragraph I spent at least 15 minutes pondering about the consequences of each of the new information. Best book I've ever read.
A number of times as a teenager I read several books on a subject and found that the first few were badly written and difficult to understand, while the last one set everything out very plainly and I felt if only I'd read that one first I needn't have wasted my time with the others.
Only, once when I was half-way through that last one I realised that I was re-reading the first one I'd picked up.
So I think books can work pretty well, but expecting a single reading to stick is probably (for most people) not the best way to use them.
You might like Blinkist. It's an app that provides audio and text summaries of non-fiction books. I haven't tried it, but I've been hearing ads for it on some of my favorite podcasts.
Books were a product of their time. Interactive media allows us to leverage techniques such as annotations, in-context model building and testing, building memorization using spaced repetition which should make an immense difference in learning effectiveness.
It's a shame that Google, who wanted to organize all of the world's information, still struggles if you want to find best learning resources (books, videos, podcasts, courses, Q&A forums, cheatsheets etc.) on a topic. It's good at answering specific questions but not so good at suggesting at learning path that makes the best use of amazing resources that exist on the Web.
What would make your project really useful is if a user can choose a level of detail to get a summary of a given resource (book, course etc) in her preferred format. Perhaps, I just want a 5-minute summary to read or a 20-minute audio summary to listen on my commute. This is of-course a hard problem to solve via software, but manual summarization can go a long way.
IMO, I think google was never designed to really drive people to highly detailed resources. Google is more similar to something like wikipedia where it gives you the high-level overview instead. It makes sense as well that it is like this because the vast majority of people want the basic information, not super detailed information, so over time most of the authoritative sites (sites with tons of backlinks) end up just being sites that are "overview" sites, not a comprehensive resource for the subject.
That's why there is still value by going to someone who is an expert in the subject to basically curate the information for you....like in a course. The problem is most of the experts in the subject work for universities and have no interest in giving their services away for free or the people that do are only able to give a basic course in the subject (coursera, udacity etc.) with limited resources that make self-studying the subject difficult.
I think we need something similar to YELP but for online courses that can be used to self-study. There might be 100 online physics courses but no one really knows which one is "best". Some might only have a textbook, others might only have lecture notes and then a few might actually be very comprehensive....but no one knows this unless there is some sort of review/recommendation site to use.
ClassCentral seems to be taking this path. Our approach is different because we wanted to included learning that happens with media besides "courses". Perhaps a GoodReads-equivalent for LearningResources.
And I'd argue that our attention span has been shrinking ever since the scroll arrived with web. We tire out sooner when we are forced to track lines that are always moving (animating vertically)… to the effect that more than half [1] the readers don't scroll at all.
Whereas with physical book transitions (page turn) happen only 'in between', line tracking is much easier and we don't have to turn the page until ready to consume the next chop of text.
It’s true! I tried to evoke that paradox with the Sagan quote. On a relative basis, it’s remarkable what they’ve achieved. On an absolute basis, thought, it’s surprising how unreliable the medium is (and hence all the more spectacular that they’ve achieved the results we enjoy!). If the medium achieved these results while as unreliable as it appears to be, how much more could readily be achieved?
I do believe it would be possible and advisable to create an interactive medium on the web that leverages spaced repetition and maybe integrates with other apps to periodically remind you or quiz you on facts you should know. It's an intriguing idea.
I agree as well. The kicker here is that the resource has to be well developed, comprehensive and use effective ways to teach the subject. Most online courses I've seen aren't comprehensive, don't really have any effective tools and are sloppily created overall.
Anecdotally I think most people read too fast and see it as some badge of pride. Read slow, reflect or reread important passages, and you will take a lot away from a book.
For both the main problem is that there comes a point where you lose track of what's happening.
I think that the main problem with lectures is that each feels very simple during the intro and very complicated towards the end. Generally there's some steps that you just missed. It's hard to pause the lecture and go back. Each additional minute of being lost then feels like a waste of time. The audience is generally at different wavelengths (some are advanced in some ways, some advanced in others).
I think that lectures are the worse medium, I personally prefer books.
With book, you need to make a difference whether you picked up the book because you have a concrete question or if you want to read it and memorize it.
The way I read is that I read a book in 5 passes (each time with different speed and for different purpose).
Pass 1 (10 minutes): Develop a lattice on which to put information. What is the book really about? Try to memorize the Table of Content, read the index (there should be some words you are curious about, you've been seeing them a lot but if prompted you'd draw blank. If there are no such words, why are you reading this book?). After this pass, your comprehension might be like 5%.
Pass 2 (2 hours): Casually skim the book. You won't remember much but you'll start seeing some connections. After this reading you should be able to tell what are the things the book say that you already know, and what things are new to you. Expected comprehension 15%. You should be familiar with the vocabulary of the book, but you might not know the exact meanings.
Pass 3: (n hours): The longest part. You might realize that some chapters are actually not as great as you thought and vice versa. You should understand like 60% after this.
Pass 4: (m hours where m < n): Solidify what you missed. You should be able to follow and reproduce authors reasoning. Maybe 80% understanding.
Pass 5: Again, go through and pick up what you missed.
Reading this way, is way more engaging than reading things linearly. The structure of the book will imprint on your brain. You will skip around a lot (that's a good things). The worst part about learning is that you don't know what to do when you are stuck. Sometimes, doing your best and coming back later (maybe once you've read the other chapters) is surprisingly productive. Hard things become trivial. Maybe you can even do more than one solution to each problem.
This is an excellent example of what the author wrote as "taxing but skillful metacognition" and it's great! You hit the nail on the head that it's really easy to lose track of what's happening and where you are.
I absolutely agree about lectures, _when they try to teach a textbook_.
If the lecturer discusses a topic on the premise that their audience has already read <whatever>, it's a much better experience for all involved, in my experience.
A good thing to keep in mind is that you will have access to any newly derived conclusions you made during the reading of the book. The brain likes to repeat itself and when you read you are training yourselves to repeat the thoughts of the author on the subject, you might not exactly be able to recreate said thoughts but does this really matter?
"most ... readers don’t absorb the intended knowledge. Failure is the default here."
All I could think while reading the article is, "If this medium is so ineffective, why is the author using it to transmit his information?" But then, maybe I didn't absorb the material well enough to get the point, which strengthens his argument! Genius!
I find this fascinating. Maybe it's because I can read books, have been doing that since I was 4, and it never crossed my mind that my books weren't working. Apparently something must have happened with education or attention spans in the last 20 years, as pretty much all my peers could read books and had similar feelings about them as well before that.
Sort of a PEBCAK issue. I can't use this resource (that people have been using and praising profusely since the Gutenberg revolution of the 15th century until circa 1994), hence this resource is broken.
The author’s premise is faulty. Most deep learning requires spaced repetition and practice. One unmotivated reading without study is not enough. That’s why we go to university instead of merely queuing up a list of books. Most people understand this I believe.
Exactly. Skimming through a book is not reading a book. Reading a book is not studying what's in a book. That's what I'd assume it's common knowledge about books.
That and the usual study techniques: you read the material once, read it again and underline the key material, maybe you write down a summary with that and/or a scheme, you memorise that a few times —possibly reading it aloud— and then you write it down in your own words.
> It’s about explanatory non-fiction like the books I mentioned above, which aim to convey detailed knowledge.
Source (for the last half of that sentence)?
I don't think writers like Richard Dawkins or Nassim Nicholas Taleb write books "to convey detailed knowledge".
I read books like this primarily because I enjoy them, but also to broaden the mind. I'm not expecting to be tested on my understanding of the content!
Pseudo-intellectual clickbait. I hate that I know this will get bazillion upvotes here simply because of phrases like "carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation".
> but the medium does have an implicit model
No, it does not. There is no such thing as universal cognitive model "for books". Every writer has his own. That's why there are so many different structures and styles of presentation. That's why some books are much easier to absorb than others.
Fuck, I don't write books (yet), just articles, and there are tons of different ways to handle this "mental modeling" even for short texts. It's not even always a good thing to pay too much attention to such models. Most writing is not propaganda where the only point is to imprint someone's brain with the desired information and opinions. It's a conversation. Accurately capturing your own mental model of the subject is usually far more valuable than overthinking the mental model of the reader - because you will have many different readers and (unless you're doing propaganda/marketing) you don't want to create something that appeals to a kind of faceless "average consumer".
The fact that modern books (even educational non-fiction) are a "lossy format" is usually by design, even if people don't think about it too much. It is not always the case and it was not always the case. For example, religious texts were designed to be "lossless". Epic poems were designed to be lossless as a verbal form and that continued to shape them when they were captured in writing. You can make a pretty good argument that deliberately lossy writing was a far more recent invention than writing in general.
> Instead, I propose: we don’t necessarily have to make books work. We can make new forms instead. This doesn’t have to mean abandoning narrative prose; it doesn’t even necessarily mean abandoning paper—rather, we can free our thinking by abandoning our preconceptions of what a book is. Maybe once we’ve done all this, we’ll have arrived at something which does indeed look much like a book. We’ll have found a gentle path around the back of that intimidating slope. Or maybe we’ll end up in different terrain altogether.
Try 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.
Sounds like I'm telling you to just eat your vegetables, to do what your parental archetype is already screaming in the back of your head to do, and hence might you feel like not doing it in rebellion, but it's totally true based on my experience. I used to be the biggest youtube nerd/"I only learn with video"-type around. But now I only learn via books and I feel a lot healthier as a consequence. I finally feel like my brain is functioning like it's supposed to.
Do you feel like this is ultimately related to the medium or to the content as well? Intuitively new media won't have as much (good quality) content as books, so that might be the main issue here.
Quality schmality. Many books I read do little more than just enumerate facts (e.g. history books, especially the dry ones). The reason I remember the facts I read in books and don't remember a lot of the random bits of knowledge I've seen on "history of ancient rome" twitter accounts, or whatever, is because I set aside large blocks of undistracted time to read, where I allow myself to imagine the scenarios described (without feeling pressure to get back to work, nor have some "hey I wonder what casey neistat is doing"-type voice distracting me from really absorbing what I'm reading) and think a lot about how what I'm learning connects to what I've learned before.
Another kinda big reason I can find it harder to learn via the internet vs books is because there's so much deception online. You get primed to always think and try to figure out "ok, how much of this is marketing, or signalling, or the author just spewing BS, and how much is something I can rely on", which takes away cognitive resources from what otherwise could have been spent on building a rich and secure knowledge-base.
I don't see the argument line here. Because books have been around for thousands of years we have perfected the creation of books (at least compared to videos)? In terms of raw quantities I suppose most books written in 2018 and most videos produced in 2019 were rubbish
I'm not the parent but if I had to guess, I'd say it's the way new media seems to erode our ability to concentrate for long periods of time. YouTube et al provide us with endless stimulation such that we never allow ourselves to get bored anymore. Then, if we're doing something we may find tedious and difficult (say, grinding problems from a math textbook) then we can't handle the lack of stimulation and get restless as a consequence.
Taking a break from all of that stimulation is a good way to quiet our minds and relearn how to focus.
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 of mixing and matching).
Ask me again after I try reading their book Quantum Country to tackle this richer repetitive approach.
I work with a lot of those folks that burn through the book a day and exercise their WPM speed to the 6 and 7 hundreds....they talk about the book after but its lost a month later and only fragments remain.
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.
It's interesting how the author compares and contrasts learning from books and learning from lectures. I don't entirely disagree, but I think there's an implicit caveat here: these methods are often used inefficiently. They may be intrinsically inefficient, but I think there might be diminishing returns to designing an entirely new medium instead of encouraging a few comparatively simple - but significant - improvements to how we use what we have.
I'll use math as an example since it's what I'm most familiar with. Sheldon Axler, the author of Linear Algebra Done Right, recently released a new textbook on measure theory and integration[1]. He makes the following comment in his preface to the student:
> If you zip through a page in less than an hour, you are probably going too fast.
I loved reading that because it's true, but also because most authors of math textbooks don't spell that out for students. I don't think Guns, Germs and Steel should take an hour per page, but my point is that nonfiction material should be actively engaged with, rather than passively "absorbed." When you passively read a chapter of a math textbook you'll almost certainly fail the exercises. On the other hand if you actively read the material, attempt proofs before reading the author's, investigate how many and which definitions can be removed before a proof fails, come up with your own questions, etc. then you will master the material.
I don't know how you'd do that for a non-technical nonfiction domain, but at it's core I suspect it would dramatically improve the efficiency of learning from books. Likewise, I consider it bad technique to take notes during a lecture. If your professor is implicitly encouraging this by making it so that you have no choice but to do so in order to learn the material (i.e. some material is not in the book or easily found elsewhere, or there is idiosyncratic style), then I also consider that poor form. In my opinion you can significantly improve the efficiency of lectures as a transmission medium by having students lightly read through the relevant sections before the lecture, then actively listen with their entire attention while sitting the lecture.
I also think it would be worthwhile to have lectures recorded and uploaded for a course so students can review material without needing to rely on the book. If you combine these two mediums in the way I've suggested, I really think there is not a whole lot of improvement left to do. There might be a fundamentally novel and strictly superior way of learning, but it's hard for me to see which cognitive bases aren't covered by combining these two methods.
> There might be a fundamentally novel and strictly superior way of learning, but it's hard for me to see which cognitive bases aren't covered by combining these two methods.
(Author here) I agree that methods like the ones you've described are indeed quite effective when executed successfully. I argued in the piece that this kind of process is often blocked on metacognition. That is: the reader has to regulate and monitor the processes you're describing while simultaneously grappling with new concepts. It's a lot to ask. And of course, the medium doesn't even explicitly ask it of the reader: when people do these kinds of methods, they're instigating that independently.
Even if we limit ourselves to just these methods, can't we imagine a medium which is somewhat more involved in the methods we claim are essential to understanding?
And if we accept that, one more provocation: wouldn't we want authorial intent to carry into the use of these methods? Given that the author is already carefully sculpting so much of the rest of the reading experience, why wouldn't we benefit from them extending their authorial direction to the metacognition around the book?
Almost all the books and blog posts can be made at least 10 times shorter without loss in educational value. People just include too much of irrelevant stuff when writing. Schools should teach brevity and search engines should encourage it instead of requiring people to inflate their writings as much as they can.
For many books you can just find summaries online, read/watch them and hardly loose anything compared to reading the whole book.
I agree. I had to critique fellow classmates writing in a business writing course once. I am older and had been in the business world for a while. My one often used critique was brevity. I didn't have all day for then to get to the point.
Yet every school/college assignment includes a minimum length requirement, web copywriters are paid for length and a 1000-page book is easier to market than a concise brochure.
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 American educational system, and best of all are old math textbooks from like 100+ years ago...
That's partly because people write for several audiences simultaneously. Once you say, "Oh, but some of my readers won't know X, I can't assume that..." It's an endless question, so at some point you have to admit that you can't write the most accessible book in the universe.
But if you begin to even think "Oh, but some of my readers won't understand X" and you write a little supplemental chapter or section, the book starts to engorge. Then you go to one of those condensed books for math and you think about what kinds of people meaningfully consume these books.
I 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 Africa can read a book on electronics and build a generator. He learned, because he employed what he read. A man can read a book a book about building a cabin and build a cabin.
Effete upper-middle-class desk-jockeys will happily read a treatise on particle physics or ethnography but are helpless to recall it a month later because the knowledge had no real impact on their lives and thus the brain cleaned house and threw it out.
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 your thinking?
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.
Jesus. All of the classic hallmarks of a shitpost. 1) Pick an ancient piece of human wisdom to shit on. 2) Make up some phony criticism. 3) Don't actually offer any solutions to your phony problem.
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.
I 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 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.
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.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadThe read is interesting, and it has an interesting premise. But, it is one well known.
Techniques like SQ3R (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R) have existed for decades.
Books are a great source of knowledge. But, you need to use the right techniques to read them.
If you read for fun, then don't bother. Whatever sticks is better than nothing.
If you read to memorize, use memory techniques.
If you read to understand (like math), do exercises. All the reading in the world is not going to make you a math expert without tyring it for yourself.
Should be the perfect tool for deep reading and techniques like SQ3R... but it sure ain’t.
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 difficult? Just try again. This is in contrast to such things as talks and lectures, where it is typically one shot. Hope you got it.
To the credit of the argument, this is one of the things that was touted in early Khan Academy points. You can watch the video over and over. Did you get it? No? Try pausing the video and watching again. And again.
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).
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.
What's the point in attending if you don't intend to learn?
Perhaps I was simply lucky to go to a good uni or perhaps the times have changed but such lecturers were rare when and where I studied (Exeter Uni., '74-'77) and in the worst cases we campaigned to get them removed from the course.
I admit I skimmed this article. I did so because it is long, and because the initial premise doesn't make much sense.
I was looking for something specific. For some discussion of reading and notetaking strategies. Underlining, highlighting, etc. I saw none. Therefore, I can only repeat the tired old form of dismissal: "it didn't work for you because you did it wrong".
You want to actually absorb and learn something, you aren't supposed to just sit down and read 100 pages of it. Likewise, you aren't supposed to attend lecture and just sit there listening.
You want to talk about spaced repetition? Just put the book down and come back later. Read in small chunks, and liberally re-read difficult or important sections.
Obviously, yes, there are tools other than books that can be used for learning to great effect. By all means, use them if you really do find it difficult to learn from books. But you can't say it's hard to learn from the book, if you've never been taught how to learn from book correctly.
Regarding lectures, you won't learn much from a lecture on its own. The best "school strategy" I know of is to skim the material before lecture, so you can attend lecture with some idea of what is going to happen, so you can take more organized notes and not be caught off guard by anything. Then after lecture you go back and read the book more carefully, taking more notes as you go.
Learning is hard work, and it takes a lot of time. There is no shortcut that I'm aware of.
I'm not rushing reading speed at all, and while I'm not a native speaker, I'm multiple times faster on e.g. The Hunger Games (I rarely read fiction).
If you want to apply the knowledge in a book, read it slow and literally step aside and e.g. just sit or pace around trying to integrate it with previous knowledge / experience.
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 typing this as I stand in line at a coffee shop in nyc as a kid is listening to music while reading “sapiens”. How can you expect to meaningfully absorb this content in a distracted environment, no pen for annotations and your attention span completely under assault?
I believe humanity’s ascension over the past two hundred years is pretty clear proof that books (or the written word) work well as a form of knowledge transfer but they require you to work for it.
“there’s no such thing as free lunch”
Ps a good primer on this, for those who care, is Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book”
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.
Dunno, however, if reading qualifies as such a task. Namely, the question is whether the same regions of the brain are engaged (and would be busy listening to music).
People used to memorize entire books by studying them for years. In a time before printing presses were a thing it was considered normal to spent long long hours learning the contents of a book by heart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafiz_(Quran)
I've also read Adler's "How to Read a Book" and I don't think it's as useful as you make it out to be. Annotating is good but nowadays you can take notes easily on your phone which I found myself doing for each book I read/listen to. Also one of the advice you find in your example is how truly reading a book means reading it more than once. He mentions that the first read should be superficial and fast in order to prepare you for the second, more thorough read.
That might not be the case if you are an obsessive classical music listener. Personally, as a fan of the Baroque played on period instruments etc. (the "historically-informed performance" style), the muzak versions of Bach played in public places really grind my gears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
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?
Only, once when I was half-way through that last one I realised that I was re-reading the first one I'd picked up.
So I think books can work pretty well, but expecting a single reading to stick is probably (for most people) not the best way to use them.
My new plan is to read a summary of the book’s ideas first, perhaps read the summary twice. Then see if this increases the initial immersion.
https://www.blinkist.com/
It's a shame that Google, who wanted to organize all of the world's information, still struggles if you want to find best learning resources (books, videos, podcasts, courses, Q&A forums, cheatsheets etc.) on a topic. It's good at answering specific questions but not so good at suggesting at learning path that makes the best use of amazing resources that exist on the Web.
This is the problem we have set out to solve. I'd love to see more participation from HN users: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome
That's why there is still value by going to someone who is an expert in the subject to basically curate the information for you....like in a course. The problem is most of the experts in the subject work for universities and have no interest in giving their services away for free or the people that do are only able to give a basic course in the subject (coursera, udacity etc.) with limited resources that make self-studying the subject difficult.
I think we need something similar to YELP but for online courses that can be used to self-study. There might be 100 online physics courses but no one really knows which one is "best". Some might only have a textbook, others might only have lecture notes and then a few might actually be very comprehensive....but no one knows this unless there is some sort of review/recommendation site to use.
And I'd argue that our attention span has been shrinking ever since the scroll arrived with web. We tire out sooner when we are forced to track lines that are always moving (animating vertically)… to the effect that more than half [1] the readers don't scroll at all.
Whereas with physical book transitions (page turn) happen only 'in between', line tracking is much easier and we don't have to turn the page until ready to consume the next chop of text.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-...
I think that the main problem with lectures is that each feels very simple during the intro and very complicated towards the end. Generally there's some steps that you just missed. It's hard to pause the lecture and go back. Each additional minute of being lost then feels like a waste of time. The audience is generally at different wavelengths (some are advanced in some ways, some advanced in others). I think that lectures are the worse medium, I personally prefer books.
With book, you need to make a difference whether you picked up the book because you have a concrete question or if you want to read it and memorize it.
The way I read is that I read a book in 5 passes (each time with different speed and for different purpose).
Pass 1 (10 minutes): Develop a lattice on which to put information. What is the book really about? Try to memorize the Table of Content, read the index (there should be some words you are curious about, you've been seeing them a lot but if prompted you'd draw blank. If there are no such words, why are you reading this book?). After this pass, your comprehension might be like 5%.
Pass 2 (2 hours): Casually skim the book. You won't remember much but you'll start seeing some connections. After this reading you should be able to tell what are the things the book say that you already know, and what things are new to you. Expected comprehension 15%. You should be familiar with the vocabulary of the book, but you might not know the exact meanings.
Pass 3: (n hours): The longest part. You might realize that some chapters are actually not as great as you thought and vice versa. You should understand like 60% after this.
Pass 4: (m hours where m < n): Solidify what you missed. You should be able to follow and reproduce authors reasoning. Maybe 80% understanding.
Pass 5: Again, go through and pick up what you missed.
Reading this way, is way more engaging than reading things linearly. The structure of the book will imprint on your brain. You will skip around a lot (that's a good things). The worst part about learning is that you don't know what to do when you are stuck. Sometimes, doing your best and coming back later (maybe once you've read the other chapters) is surprisingly productive. Hard things become trivial. Maybe you can even do more than one solution to each problem.
If the lecturer discusses a topic on the premise that their audience has already read <whatever>, it's a much better experience for all involved, in my experience.
Books may work better for some people for some purposes, but books do work.
All I could think while reading the article is, "If this medium is so ineffective, why is the author using it to transmit his information?" But then, maybe I didn't absorb the material well enough to get the point, which strengthens his argument! Genius!
Sort of a PEBCAK issue. I can't use this resource (that people have been using and praising profusely since the Gutenberg revolution of the 15th century until circa 1994), hence this resource is broken.
That and the usual study techniques: you read the material once, read it again and underline the key material, maybe you write down a summary with that and/or a scheme, you memorise that a few times —possibly reading it aloud— and then you write it down in your own words.
Source (for the last half of that sentence)?
I don't think writers like Richard Dawkins or Nassim Nicholas Taleb write books "to convey detailed knowledge". I read books like this primarily because I enjoy them, but also to broaden the mind. I'm not expecting to be tested on my understanding of the content!
> but the medium does have an implicit model
No, it does not. There is no such thing as universal cognitive model "for books". Every writer has his own. That's why there are so many different structures and styles of presentation. That's why some books are much easier to absorb than others.
Fuck, I don't write books (yet), just articles, and there are tons of different ways to handle this "mental modeling" even for short texts. It's not even always a good thing to pay too much attention to such models. Most writing is not propaganda where the only point is to imprint someone's brain with the desired information and opinions. It's a conversation. Accurately capturing your own mental model of the subject is usually far more valuable than overthinking the mental model of the reader - because you will have many different readers and (unless you're doing propaganda/marketing) you don't want to create something that appeals to a kind of faceless "average consumer".
The fact that modern books (even educational non-fiction) are a "lossy format" is usually by design, even if people don't think about it too much. It is not always the case and it was not always the case. For example, religious texts were designed to be "lossless". Epic poems were designed to be lossless as a verbal form and that continued to shape them when they were captured in writing. You can make a pretty good argument that deliberately lossy writing was a far more recent invention than writing in general.
This sounds really intriguing.
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.
Sounds like I'm telling you to just eat your vegetables, to do what your parental archetype is already screaming in the back of your head to do, and hence might you feel like not doing it in rebellion, but it's totally true based on my experience. I used to be the biggest youtube nerd/"I only learn with video"-type around. But now I only learn via books and I feel a lot healthier as a consequence. I finally feel like my brain is functioning like it's supposed to.
Another kinda big reason I can find it harder to learn via the internet vs books is because there's so much deception online. You get primed to always think and try to figure out "ok, how much of this is marketing, or signalling, or the author just spewing BS, and how much is something I can rely on", which takes away cognitive resources from what otherwise could have been spent on building a rich and secure knowledge-base.
care to share that intuition? this doesn't seem obvious to me unfortunately
Taking a break from all of that stimulation is a good way to quiet our minds and relearn how to focus.
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 of mixing and matching).
Ask me again after I try reading their book Quantum Country to tackle this richer repetitive approach.
I work with a lot of those folks that burn through the book a day and exercise their WPM speed to the 6 and 7 hundreds....they talk about the book after but its lost a month later and only fragments remain.
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.
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.
I'll use math as an example since it's what I'm most familiar with. Sheldon Axler, the author of Linear Algebra Done Right, recently released a new textbook on measure theory and integration[1]. He makes the following comment in his preface to the student:
> If you zip through a page in less than an hour, you are probably going too fast.
I loved reading that because it's true, but also because most authors of math textbooks don't spell that out for students. I don't think Guns, Germs and Steel should take an hour per page, but my point is that nonfiction material should be actively engaged with, rather than passively "absorbed." When you passively read a chapter of a math textbook you'll almost certainly fail the exercises. On the other hand if you actively read the material, attempt proofs before reading the author's, investigate how many and which definitions can be removed before a proof fails, come up with your own questions, etc. then you will master the material.
I don't know how you'd do that for a non-technical nonfiction domain, but at it's core I suspect it would dramatically improve the efficiency of learning from books. Likewise, I consider it bad technique to take notes during a lecture. If your professor is implicitly encouraging this by making it so that you have no choice but to do so in order to learn the material (i.e. some material is not in the book or easily found elsewhere, or there is idiosyncratic style), then I also consider that poor form. In my opinion you can significantly improve the efficiency of lectures as a transmission medium by having students lightly read through the relevant sections before the lecture, then actively listen with their entire attention while sitting the lecture.
I also think it would be worthwhile to have lectures recorded and uploaded for a course so students can review material without needing to rely on the book. If you combine these two mediums in the way I've suggested, I really think there is not a whole lot of improvement left to do. There might be a fundamentally novel and strictly superior way of learning, but it's hard for me to see which cognitive bases aren't covered by combining these two methods.
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1. http://measure.axler.net/MIRA10May2019.pdf
(Author here) I agree that methods like the ones you've described are indeed quite effective when executed successfully. I argued in the piece that this kind of process is often blocked on metacognition. That is: the reader has to regulate and monitor the processes you're describing while simultaneously grappling with new concepts. It's a lot to ask. And of course, the medium doesn't even explicitly ask it of the reader: when people do these kinds of methods, they're instigating that independently.
Even if we limit ourselves to just these methods, can't we imagine a medium which is somewhat more involved in the methods we claim are essential to understanding?
And if we accept that, one more provocation: wouldn't we want authorial intent to carry into the use of these methods? Given that the author is already carefully sculpting so much of the rest of the reading experience, why wouldn't we benefit from them extending their authorial direction to the metacognition around the book?
For many books you can just find summaries online, read/watch them and hardly loose anything compared to reading the whole book.
Textbooks for graduate level courses are usually much better, as are textbooks outside the North American educational system, and best of all are old math textbooks from like 100+ years ago...
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
But if you begin to even think "Oh, but some of my readers won't understand X" and you write a little supplemental chapter or section, the book starts to engorge. Then you go to one of those condensed books for math and you think about what kinds of people meaningfully consume these books.
>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 Africa can read a book on electronics and build a generator. He learned, because he employed what he read. A man can read a book a book about building a cabin and build a cabin.
Effete upper-middle-class desk-jockeys will happily read a treatise on particle physics or ethnography but are helpless to recall it a month later because the knowledge had no real impact on their lives and thus the brain cleaned house and threw it out.
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 your thinking?
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.