I don't disagree with your point. However, for a lot of authors, the book's length/form factor is actually heavily influenced by their publisher and potentially even set in contract (prior to actually writing anything).
IMX it's safe to pass by those long books with millions of anecdotes, and more enlightening to attempt to untangle the cultural trends behind the specific products (and their visual and textual presentations) in the duty-free catalogue.
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 brain garbage collector discarding information that is not actionable and in a lot of cases not even correct. Popular edutainment is not exactly "some serious non-fiction tomes".
Interesting, can you add some depth to that statement? I enjoyed the book, and found it useful in illustrating many cognitive biases.
I've gone on to read more of his work and agree the data is from, "WEIRD societies: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic." (i.e. a lot of small study groups from ivy league schools) -- but nevertheless found the book enjoyable and useful
I really enjoyed it to but agree with GP that it falls down. Initially, he sets up a system around our pattern matching, biasing, etc. but as the book progresses I felt it got more and more hand wavy. Lots of the examples didn't really fit the plot of his system but he implies that the system still holds. Also, lots of the studies like the marshmallow test have failed to stand up. We take a single study of proof when it is usually no more than an indication. The conclusions are really just a data point. Perform the same test 100 times with different scientists and participants and look at the data again. Instead we take one test and cut the data to fit and then publish.
I became excited with Jordan Peterson's first videos and bought his book "12 rules" when it came out. I skimmed it and... I'm literally using it as a footrest. Peterson is a powerful speaker but has little content.
Older books:
(a) Have stood the test of time.
(b) Typically arose in a time where intellectual celebrity fermented in core intellectual circles first, and only then popularized.
Kahneman and Tversky have their share of technical contributions but were catapulted to thought leaders (and Nobel-Sveriges Bank prize winners) due to classic tokenism: someone from psychology or behavioral science had to win. The same just happen to someone two rungs below their level, Esther Duflo.
If she comes out with a popular book, don't buy it. Read Polanyi's "The Great Transformation", if inclined to left-ish ideas, or Richard Powers' novel "Gain", otherwise.
I too was enamored by Peterson when he first came to prominence, but he quickly lost steam for me. I've read some of his influences, and they're much more interesting.
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 what they actually are, it's the wrong level.
I get reading a book once doesn't translate directly to "facts retained in memory" whereas his idealised new form of media does. But as you say, his examples are edutainment. I feel like what he's suggesting only usefully applies to either textbooks (which he's separated off into a different category anyway) or to a situation where the aim is to memorise as much as possible in a single reading. Which is fine! But it doesn't really need to happen for pop science -- just getting the general gist of an idea across in an entertaining package is okay.
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 Selfish Gene has also done. Pop science books are good ways to attract young readers to the sciences and to keep older readers engaged in it, but they are not in and of themselves contributions to the field.
I'm not really up on the history of these ideas, but my impression is that The Selfish Gene was a contribution in the same sense that Einstein's paper on special relativity was a contribution. Neither really changed what one would predict the result of any experiment to be (the Lorentz transformation had already been produced before Einstein, by, err, Lorentz...), but rather in the perspective by which one views the field, which does affect future research.
He's a populariser of science though. No criticism intended by that. His books are still serious works, but the serious intent is to educate a general audience, not be an important document for a specialist audience. It's a story about his theory. And good popularisers of science, which I think he definitely is (or was?) are good storytellers. He takes a basic thesis then uses multiple lyrical examples to illustrate it. As a layman, I loved that book and read it several times, it made me feel like I had an understanding of genetics, and many of its ideas have informed how I think about things now (the additional, if somewhat vague, stuff he added re memetics in particular). But I'd also say that book is an epitome of pop science, and that feeling of understanding of genetics was just the basic concepts clicking. Which is also fine, that's a really good thing!
Edit: to go back to original article: memorising the stuff in detail isn't hugely useful -- it's a useful jumping off point to investigate in more detail, but the books basic ideas are easily understood, that's the point
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.
Interesting choice, since I did not feel as if 1491 contained any information that contradicted the basic theses of GG&S, and if anything reinforced it.
Not a historian, but _Why the West Rules - For Now_ by Ian Morris was a good read. Covers the sweep of world history with the audacious goal of quantifying human development at all moments in history. It mainly focuses on the west (starting in the Mesopotamian region) and the east (starting in the area surrounding the Yellow river) and addresses questions like "why didn't China discover America" (basically - too far away). You might also find it interesting!
I found the examples very surprising - because I think several of those books exist exactly to communicate a very specific, important idea. If you can describe in a few sentences what the central idea of 'The Selfish Gene' is - I would argue that the book has done its job 'transmitting' an idea perfectly. The reason the book takes a hundred or so pages to do that transmission is because the idea is 1. specialized - if you're not a biologist you need to do a lot of work just to understand the questions and the background 2. difficult - even if you're familiar with the biology, you need to think through lots of examples and discussions of what the selfish gene idea implies and 3. controversial - Dawkins spends a lot of time explaining what evidence he has, responding to other views, disclaiming misreadings of his work, and so on.
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 love to read history books, and I'll devour anything Antony Beevor writes. I might not remember exact dates and troop movements, but I will remember the general ideas. The anecdotes only help to drive those ideas home.
The same can be said about the movies I've watched. I rarely remember the plot that well, but I remember how much I enjoyed them, and occasionally some good lessons.
I've also had some fascinating conversation that I simply can't recall. They still shaped how I see the world.
I was looking for the point that someone who wants to learn needs to engage with the topic in some way, e.g. by teaching others about it, using their own words to summarize the content, etc. Did the author mention something like this at all? I’m sorry if he did, I really love books and I read technical books with a highlighter to mark stuff that is more important than other things. But without typing code from books into the computer, I wouldn’t remember much.
In fact that was his main point, that to learn anything from a book the reader has to engage with it deliberately. But since most people don’t do that habitually and books as a medium don’t naturally promote it, most people don’t get anything out of the books they read.
Innovative ways to improve learning are always exciting, but leading with a hypothesis contrary to my personal experience[1] is unlikely to convince me the conclusion be valid.
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, be it the class setting, a study group or just experience enough to self-study.
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.
None of the mentioned books teach specific skill through. And I had success learning new skills from books, but those books were meant to teach that skills. They were not among top popular, because for whatever skill you have in mind, only few people actually want to learn it at the same time.
Not that all book that claim to teach skill actually teach it, but plenty of them do.
Generally, books that attempt to teach a specific skill will be full of exercises. If you read through the book methodically (not like reading a novel) and do all the exercises, I would be shocked if you did not learn that skill.
I guess a lot of people don’t do that. They skim through a textbook like it’s a boring novel and they make a few notes or they highlight everything or they fill the poor book with sticky notes in a multitude of colours. Anything but doing the exercises! And then is it any wonder why they forget everything a year later?
Yeah of course, if I'm already in the process of acquiring some skill, willing to do all the exercises, look up what I don't understand somewhere else, etc., I will learn that skill and the book will help and be a good foundation or guideline.
But the point remains: Just reading the book, as in consuming page after page, is not enough.
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.
A great quote, and very applicable here. I think the author discounts the potential of the human mind to do things without their owners' knowledge or permission.
What I'm trying to say is that when we read a book for knowledge I think we must trust our subconscious to do the heavy lifting. I am a believer that our brains incorporate lessons read and experienced into decision making, even if we're not consciously calling on it or thinking about it directly.
While all retainment is a fraction of the source material, long form (books, essays) offer a level of understanding. Reddit, and HN in some facets, is nothing but trivia porn. You cannot recall the interesting 'factoids' encountered merely the day before.
I see your (apocryphal) quote about eating books and raise you another: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." -Francis Bacon
It's not a coincidence that we have idioms such as 'digesting an idea' or 'ruminating' . It takes time to assimilate and relate concepts, it is not a write operation.
I see that this is the author of the excellent "Quantum Country" so perhaps the case being made here is obviously biased, for a good reason.
I get a sense that the author seems to argue that most book authors are not conscious of the working memory of the reader. I don't think that is true. Many "good" non-fiction books I've read actually rely on space-repetitions throughout the text quite heavily. The author, to their credit, does note this for textbooks. Often concepts in long texts are referenced in a non-linear manner, either in expectation of ideas to come or in retrospect to draw parallels & new connections. Unfortunately, the onus here is on the reader to realize and extract the maximum juice out of this non-linear flow.
The key idea of this post is to shift this burden to the "medium" and not the reader. Books can't handle this responsibility in their current form. I certainly agree with this. Distill [1] is pioneering this from the perspective of medium-reader engagement. Unsurprisingly, Michael Nielsen, a collaborator of the author of the post, is a member of the steering committee at Distill. :-)
I love these new directions in dissemination of ideas!
This is beautifully expressed. Knowledge consists of connections across concepts but those connections are rarely shown explicitly in textbooks. Even wikipedia, while allowing you to traverse the connections back and forth easily, does not do a great job of giving you the bird's eye view of a subject or a field. Check out this "map" of mathematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y Every subject needs a similar map.
Besides visualizing the connections, we'd also need interactivity to the topic that helps with forming new mental models - which is the core aspect of learning. Jupyter notebooks, ObservableHQ, Mathigon are some of the good projects working on this aspect.
Disclaimer: I am building the open-source project https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/ which is attempting to build the complete map of knowledge/skills. So I too am biased against books and in favor of digital/interactive tools.
> Check out this "map" of mathematics: ... Every subject needs a similar map.
I often find this sort of approach to be rather counter-productive. If I am learning something, I'd be happy with my local part of the graph, the things that I specifically care about. It is much easier to make multi-hop connections in knowledge when one is really familiar with their local knowledge cluster. I, for one, find an absolute knowledge graph of everything quite intimidating and feel lost in the sea.
An actual map (navigable, instead of a presentation) would be kinda of as useful as a world map. You can look at it and say "This time I'll travel here!", and get an idea of what the travel would require.
I feel like expecting to remember all arguments and examples in a book is missing the point. You can only summarize it that way because you have already internalized all background knowledge, right? When you can reduce the core take-away from a book to a paragraph or something you assume a lot of context and pre-existing knowledge. An author can't exactly know what the knowledge-level and amount of surrounding facts the reader has available so these have to be provided to support the main point. You could of course provide only one example per point, but then it's sometimes hard to know if the reader takes away the 'right' conclusion from your example so if you provide multiply it's easier to get the through line of the provided examples.
When you have built up enough ground to place your main point into the readers brain, the supporting facts become less important to remember (barring one or two evocative examples) so they fade away, but you still have the meta knowledge of your brain having read and vetted the supporting arguments/examples, which you wouldn't have if the whole book was just the main point without all the surrounding detail.
"All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it."
My edu friends tell me all the time, "different students best learn differ ways." That is, this isn't a books issue per se. It's that there's a difference between (casual) reading and focused repetitive studying.
That said, I find I do better with reading than say video. In fact, I was watching a course on LinkedIn Learning yesterday and I reminded myself how much such videos are not my medium of choice. In addition, I find audio books aren't for me either.
Conclusion: At least with traditional books I can re-read, highlight, photography and so on. Yes, I miss stuff. But learning is hard. We're not wired to absorb _everything_. We're not. That's a good thing.
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While we're on the subject, what's your goto for finding non-fiction books?
I often feel like writing comments is pointless and contributes to the sea of noise below top level posts, which I none the less often feel compelled to read. But what is a comment box but not an invitation to perform a free form exercise? If I read a whole blog post and don't have anything to say about it, what was the point?
Related: sometimes the content of the book itself ends up being totally diluted into what other people quote the book for. The best example is probably Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: a good third of the book is almost socialist, arguing against land ownership and rent seeking. Yet most people talking about Smith in an argument seem to be completely oblivious about it.
Couldn't get through the whole article to be honest. Started kicking open doors. That made me scroll to the conclusion. Which was also underwhelming.
Reading the books he mentioned, I'm reading them not to know everything word by word. I'm reading them to get a map of that topic. One that would guide me to a narrower source if needed.
To even get more Meta, let's be honest. Blog like this are not really written for the readers. They are written because the author likes that topic. I remember writing my thesis, how I had to use the books in anger to create structure, internalise it and combine them to extract conclusions.
That is also why I like all those shitty blogs about "what is a monad" or "how to deploy a nodeJS app to Heroku". Not because they are the best reads written by the people who knows most about the subject. It's the opposite, I read it and I'm proud of the writers, because I know they are the people that learned something. I'm only there to check what command-line command I need, or what library combination they use.
Looking at books like "thinking fast and slow" I also couldn't get through that book. Needed to pay too much attention that I would rather put on something else. But I think I did learn something. I've learned about trying to be more conscious about instinct and reasoning. I think that still holds up, even though not everything in that book held up to scrutiny.
With this explosion of access to information, it's become very clear that Information is the not bottleneck. It is the balance between intention, grit, pain and pleasure. Go to any writing class, you will learn to think about the goals of the text and your audience.
I will never forget of an example of someone who did Jiu-Jitsu. He talked about the fact that if you play that sport, you'll end up finding the limits of your bones, how much they can take before breaking. Everyone that does Jiu-Jitsu will see it, but seeing is just seeing. You have to experience it. I think the HN readers like to go broad, but I don't think the amount of theoretical knowledge you'll get from your 10.000 cards thick anki Library. As diving deep and using something in anger day in and day out.
I tried half of a “Head First” which claims to addressing this problem with cognitive science methods (eccentric pictures, repetition, handwriting, and dialogue style). At first it feels good, but after half of the book, I realized all of these can be done in my head even when reading non-head-first books.
An engaged reader will do more than just “reading”, but actively comparing the content with own experience, trying to prove or disprove the argument, and sometimes making up stories to help them to memorize the content.
So I would argue it's not books that aren't working, but a certain way of reading that's not working. Books with these techniques externalize part of the engaged reading process, but it may not be the optimal way for a specific person.
For the books that a person themselves can actively engaged in their own way, these techniques can be noisy and redundant.
For those they wouldn't have been actively engaged (like the leisure reading mentioned in the post), these techniques could be useful. But the person doesn't expect to get that much out of the books in the first place.
Brilliant article,but I'll give a simpler factor as well - people read too many damn books! Not reading too much per se but just too many books! That combined with the fact that most books are bloated crap (because the author is incentivized to make a book out of what should be a New Yorker article at best), means that most people can't even see the point because they've been ricocheted around a concept by a single opinionated person for way too long.
For this reason I avoid reading books for the most part, and probably read one book a year at best. My to-read list is short and highly scrutinized - I probably spend days making sure a book is worth the time and memory investment. Once I apply that logic, every book I've read has been extremely rewarding and I can at least write a few thousand word summary of each. I also constantly find instances in real life when I can use anecdotes from these books and people are surprised that I remember them. It also helps that for almost every book I deliberately sought out the best tome in the topic I wanted to learn more from.
My reading list from the past 5 years or so:
1. Making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes
2. Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman
3. On Writing by Stephen King
4. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaccson
5. The Logic of Chance by Eugene Koonin
6. GEB (gave up on this one though)
Not the author of the comment. There was a time when I was reading and trying to read many non-fiction books. After some time I started noticing that many of them are padded with mantras and useless fluff. Most of them would make great 20-page essays and nothing more.
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 dedicate one year of my life decoding the magnum opus of a famous Shakespeare expert that would probably teach me more about writing than any other book.
> The books you mentioned are heavy in style and heavy in insights and facts.
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.
I can only second your reading list's #2 and #4, they both left a lasting impression on me.
I did read the Feynman one in 4 days though, you can really breeze through it, and because of its entertainment value the ideas really do stick. The Steve Jobs biography took me a lot longer, I really enjoyed it, but it was more something where I picked it up every once in a while over the course of 2-3 months.
Growing up, I've pretty much never learned anything from lectures or textbooks in school. In math/science you prepared by doing the exam review questions and the "humanities" type courses, to be honest, I still don't know.
As an adult I took some Coursera courses and it was much much better. There are problem sets that test your knowledge after 10 minute chunks of lecture, but the biggest difference for me was being able to 2X speed and rewind infinitely.
The ability to speed through the filler and replay parts I didn't understand makes me think that all lectures should be taught like this instead, and professors should just be available for questions and help with problem sets.
You learn facts by attempted to recall and by creating relationships to already known facts. So for humanities, you learn by making notes from test, trying to recall them, trying to write own essay based on the texts or answering questions etc.
The same thing as you do with math/science where you learn by actively engaging with topic.
What a terrible take. If anything I'm convinced that reading blogs with pumped up titles and nothing important to say are the things that don't work.
Did anyone get the point behind the title in all that text? But sure, let's bring down the thing that has been the pillar of human knowledge for thousands of years because it's "static". Amazing...
Memory isn't freeform, it's triggered and asssociative. If I ask you what you were reading a year ago, you probably won't be able to tell me. But if I mention an associated experience or concept, your recall may be triggered and you'll be able to remember something relevant - and talk about it, possibly in some detail.
People are much better at remembering narratives and parable than facts, and also better at remembering practical experience than theory.
Textbooks are useless unless you do the exercises and use your new skills to solve real problems.
But it's also why liberal political and economic books rarely have much political influence.
The right always frames its points as memorable narratives with an emotional kick, not as attempts at objective analysis. The left rarely understands why this matters, or how you can use that one weird trick to persuade people to do all kinds of stupid and self-destructive things.
One thing that I learned from Gladwell's masterclass notes [1] is giving the reader (or listener in a speech) some candy. Candies are fluffy - but they also help readers/listeners retain more and also share more. Personally I've noticed myself using such candies to broach an idea with someone or a team - and the difference in interest is visible.
It's funny, the author has made a decent case for why pop science/non-fiction books are useless (I agree) despite pitching a book on an obvious nonsense subject about imaginary computers unlikely to ever exist (or, if you're an optimist; to exist in our lifetimes). Imagine wanting to master a field less realistic than phlogiston theory or medieval demonology to the extent that it "also means repeating those quick memory tests in expanding intervals over the following days, weeks, and months." I suppose indoctrination is necessary since this form of anti-knowledge is unlikely to ever be actually used -unlike actual knowledge, say, such as linear algebra or obscure tree data structures relating to metric spaces.
Books are mostly not for actually learning a technical subject; they're for reviewing the subject after you already know something, and expanding your knowledge after you have the basics. There are many things I know, and can recall with effort, as they're in long term memory, but can easily recall and apply if I pick up a book and thumb through it for a few minutes. Yeah, I can cook up a nice boeuf bourguignon or pumpernickel bread from memory, but it's gonna go a lot more smoothly if I read the cookbook.
Another thing he misses; if a book makes you feel something, it's going to stick with you a lot more clearly than some recitation of dry facts. Storm of Steel sticks with me better than the official British History of the Great War. Similarly, "Darwinian Fairytales," which is absolutely hilarious in addition to being perfectly correct, sticks with me a lot better than "The Selfish Gene" -which I've paid considerably more attention to.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadFor 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?
So for these examples it is my opinion that it's not a case of books not working, but of very healthy brain garbage collector discarding information that is not actionable and in a lot of cases not even correct. Popular edutainment is not exactly "some serious non-fiction tomes".
I've gone on to read more of his work and agree the data is from, "WEIRD societies: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic." (i.e. a lot of small study groups from ivy league schools) -- but nevertheless found the book enjoyable and useful
I became excited with Jordan Peterson's first videos and bought his book "12 rules" when it came out. I skimmed it and... I'm literally using it as a footrest. Peterson is a powerful speaker but has little content.
Older books:
(a) Have stood the test of time.
(b) Typically arose in a time where intellectual celebrity fermented in core intellectual circles first, and only then popularized.
Kahneman and Tversky have their share of technical contributions but were catapulted to thought leaders (and Nobel-Sveriges Bank prize winners) due to classic tokenism: someone from psychology or behavioral science had to win. The same just happen to someone two rungs below their level, Esther Duflo.
If she comes out with a popular book, don't buy it. Read Polanyi's "The Great Transformation", if inclined to left-ish ideas, or Richard Powers' novel "Gain", otherwise.
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 what they actually are, it's the wrong level.
I get reading a book once doesn't translate directly to "facts retained in memory" whereas his idealised new form of media does. But as you say, his examples are edutainment. I feel like what he's suggesting only usefully applies to either textbooks (which he's separated off into a different category anyway) or to a situation where the aim is to memorise as much as possible in a single reading. Which is fine! But it doesn't really need to happen for pop science -- just getting the general gist of an idea across in an entertaining package is okay.
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 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 Selfish Gene has also done. Pop science books are good ways to attract young readers to the sciences and to keep older readers engaged in it, but they are not in and of themselves contributions to the field.
Edit: to go back to original article: memorising the stuff in detail isn't hugely useful -- it's a useful jumping off point to investigate in more detail, but the books basic ideas are easily understood, that's the point
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 love to read history books, and I'll devour anything Antony Beevor writes. I might not remember exact dates and troop movements, but I will remember the general ideas. The anecdotes only help to drive those ideas home.
The same can be said about the movies I've watched. I rarely remember the plot that well, but I remember how much I enjoyed them, and occasionally some good lessons.
I've also had some fascinating conversation that I simply can't recall. They still shaped how I see the world.
I was looking for the point that someone who wants to learn needs to engage with the topic in some way, e.g. by teaching others about it, using their own words to summarize the content, etc. Did the author mention something like this at all? I’m sorry if he did, I really love books and I read technical books with a highlighter to mark stuff that is more important than other things. But without typing code from books into the computer, I wouldn’t remember much.
Such a boring take on books.
https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/the-secret-of-aca...
> "The temptation is to write papers proclaiming the superiority of your work and the pathetic inadequacy of the contributions of A, B, C, …"
[1] in particular, working memory is not an issue with books: rereading is a thing.
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, be it the class setting, a study group or just experience enough to self-study.
Not that all book that claim to teach skill actually teach it, but plenty of them do.
I guess a lot of people don’t do that. They skim through a textbook like it’s a boring novel and they make a few notes or they highlight everything or they fill the poor book with sticky notes in a multitude of colours. Anything but doing the exercises! And then is it any wonder why they forget everything a year later?
Indeed, books do not "work." Dedicated students work, and by doing so, they will learn.
But the point remains: Just reading the book, as in consuming page after page, is not enough.
What I'm trying to say is that when we read a book for knowledge I think we must trust our subconscious to do the heavy lifting. I am a believer that our brains incorporate lessons read and experienced into decision making, even if we're not consciously calling on it or thinking about it directly.
I get a sense that the author seems to argue that most book authors are not conscious of the working memory of the reader. I don't think that is true. Many "good" non-fiction books I've read actually rely on space-repetitions throughout the text quite heavily. The author, to their credit, does note this for textbooks. Often concepts in long texts are referenced in a non-linear manner, either in expectation of ideas to come or in retrospect to draw parallels & new connections. Unfortunately, the onus here is on the reader to realize and extract the maximum juice out of this non-linear flow.
The key idea of this post is to shift this burden to the "medium" and not the reader. Books can't handle this responsibility in their current form. I certainly agree with this. Distill [1] is pioneering this from the perspective of medium-reader engagement. Unsurprisingly, Michael Nielsen, a collaborator of the author of the post, is a member of the steering committee at Distill. :-)
I love these new directions in dissemination of ideas!
[1]: https://distill.pub
This is beautifully expressed. Knowledge consists of connections across concepts but those connections are rarely shown explicitly in textbooks. Even wikipedia, while allowing you to traverse the connections back and forth easily, does not do a great job of giving you the bird's eye view of a subject or a field. Check out this "map" of mathematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y Every subject needs a similar map.
Besides visualizing the connections, we'd also need interactivity to the topic that helps with forming new mental models - which is the core aspect of learning. Jupyter notebooks, ObservableHQ, Mathigon are some of the good projects working on this aspect.
Disclaimer: I am building the open-source project https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/ which is attempting to build the complete map of knowledge/skills. So I too am biased against books and in favor of digital/interactive tools.
I often find this sort of approach to be rather counter-productive. If I am learning something, I'd be happy with my local part of the graph, the things that I specifically care about. It is much easier to make multi-hop connections in knowledge when one is really familiar with their local knowledge cluster. I, for one, find an absolute knowledge graph of everything quite intimidating and feel lost in the sea.
LearnAwesome looks interesting. Good luck!
Sure, I don't recall any sentence of 'Thinking Fast and Slow', but every (ok, most) moment I'm aware of human biases that are in play.
That is the point of book reading, to accumulate sub-conscious knowledge(model of the world) and (near optimal) decision making
When you have built up enough ground to place your main point into the readers brain, the supporting facts become less important to remember (barring one or two evocative examples) so they fade away, but you still have the meta knowledge of your brain having read and vetted the supporting arguments/examples, which you wouldn't have if the whole book was just the main point without all the surrounding detail.
My edu friends tell me all the time, "different students best learn differ ways." That is, this isn't a books issue per se. It's that there's a difference between (casual) reading and focused repetitive studying.
That said, I find I do better with reading than say video. In fact, I was watching a course on LinkedIn Learning yesterday and I reminded myself how much such videos are not my medium of choice. In addition, I find audio books aren't for me either.
Conclusion: At least with traditional books I can re-read, highlight, photography and so on. Yes, I miss stuff. But learning is hard. We're not wired to absorb _everything_. We're not. That's a good thing.
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While we're on the subject, what's your goto for finding non-fiction books?
Reading the books he mentioned, I'm reading them not to know everything word by word. I'm reading them to get a map of that topic. One that would guide me to a narrower source if needed.
To even get more Meta, let's be honest. Blog like this are not really written for the readers. They are written because the author likes that topic. I remember writing my thesis, how I had to use the books in anger to create structure, internalise it and combine them to extract conclusions.
That is also why I like all those shitty blogs about "what is a monad" or "how to deploy a nodeJS app to Heroku". Not because they are the best reads written by the people who knows most about the subject. It's the opposite, I read it and I'm proud of the writers, because I know they are the people that learned something. I'm only there to check what command-line command I need, or what library combination they use.
Looking at books like "thinking fast and slow" I also couldn't get through that book. Needed to pay too much attention that I would rather put on something else. But I think I did learn something. I've learned about trying to be more conscious about instinct and reasoning. I think that still holds up, even though not everything in that book held up to scrutiny.
With this explosion of access to information, it's become very clear that Information is the not bottleneck. It is the balance between intention, grit, pain and pleasure. Go to any writing class, you will learn to think about the goals of the text and your audience.
I will never forget of an example of someone who did Jiu-Jitsu. He talked about the fact that if you play that sport, you'll end up finding the limits of your bones, how much they can take before breaking. Everyone that does Jiu-Jitsu will see it, but seeing is just seeing. You have to experience it. I think the HN readers like to go broad, but I don't think the amount of theoretical knowledge you'll get from your 10.000 cards thick anki Library. As diving deep and using something in anger day in and day out.
An engaged reader will do more than just “reading”, but actively comparing the content with own experience, trying to prove or disprove the argument, and sometimes making up stories to help them to memorize the content.
So I would argue it's not books that aren't working, but a certain way of reading that's not working. Books with these techniques externalize part of the engaged reading process, but it may not be the optimal way for a specific person.
For the books that a person themselves can actively engaged in their own way, these techniques can be noisy and redundant.
For those they wouldn't have been actively engaged (like the leisure reading mentioned in the post), these techniques could be useful. But the person doesn't expect to get that much out of the books in the first place.
For this reason I avoid reading books for the most part, and probably read one book a year at best. My to-read list is short and highly scrutinized - I probably spend days making sure a book is worth the time and memory investment. Once I apply that logic, every book I've read has been extremely rewarding and I can at least write a few thousand word summary of each. I also constantly find instances in real life when I can use anecdotes from these books and people are surprised that I remember them. It also helps that for almost every book I deliberately sought out the best tome in the topic I wanted to learn more from.
My reading list from the past 5 years or so:
1. Making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes 2. Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman 3. On Writing by Stephen King 4. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaccson 5. The Logic of Chance by Eugene Koonin 6. GEB (gave up on this one though)
If you read history written by historians, you get completely different experience. Or if you read "for dummies" series.
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.
I did read the Feynman one in 4 days though, you can really breeze through it, and because of its entertainment value the ideas really do stick. The Steve Jobs biography took me a lot longer, I really enjoyed it, but it was more something where I picked it up every once in a while over the course of 2-3 months.
As an adult I took some Coursera courses and it was much much better. There are problem sets that test your knowledge after 10 minute chunks of lecture, but the biggest difference for me was being able to 2X speed and rewind infinitely.
The ability to speed through the filler and replay parts I didn't understand makes me think that all lectures should be taught like this instead, and professors should just be available for questions and help with problem sets.
The same thing as you do with math/science where you learn by actively engaging with topic.
Did anyone get the point behind the title in all that text? But sure, let's bring down the thing that has been the pillar of human knowledge for thousands of years because it's "static". Amazing...
Memory isn't freeform, it's triggered and asssociative. If I ask you what you were reading a year ago, you probably won't be able to tell me. But if I mention an associated experience or concept, your recall may be triggered and you'll be able to remember something relevant - and talk about it, possibly in some detail.
People are much better at remembering narratives and parable than facts, and also better at remembering practical experience than theory.
Textbooks are useless unless you do the exercises and use your new skills to solve real problems.
But it's also why liberal political and economic books rarely have much political influence.
The right always frames its points as memorable narratives with an emotional kick, not as attempts at objective analysis. The left rarely understands why this matters, or how you can use that one weird trick to persuade people to do all kinds of stupid and self-destructive things.
See also the ad industry, talk radio, QAnon, etc.
One thing that I learned from Gladwell's masterclass notes [1] is giving the reader (or listener in a speech) some candy. Candies are fluffy - but they also help readers/listeners retain more and also share more. Personally I've noticed myself using such candies to broach an idea with someone or a team - and the difference in interest is visible.
[1] - https://taimur.me/posts/notes-from-malcolm-gladwell-s-writin...
Books are mostly not for actually learning a technical subject; they're for reviewing the subject after you already know something, and expanding your knowledge after you have the basics. There are many things I know, and can recall with effort, as they're in long term memory, but can easily recall and apply if I pick up a book and thumb through it for a few minutes. Yeah, I can cook up a nice boeuf bourguignon or pumpernickel bread from memory, but it's gonna go a lot more smoothly if I read the cookbook.
Another thing he misses; if a book makes you feel something, it's going to stick with you a lot more clearly than some recitation of dry facts. Storm of Steel sticks with me better than the official British History of the Great War. Similarly, "Darwinian Fairytales," which is absolutely hilarious in addition to being perfectly correct, sticks with me a lot better than "The Selfish Gene" -which I've paid considerably more attention to.