Books and lectures don't work

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.

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.

I think you might be reading books wrong if that's what you're hoping to take out of them, that is, remember this or that specific quote out of it. For me, at least, the value of a book is changing your way of thinking, or better yet, present new questions that you did not even dare to ask.

I would recommend Darwin's own Origin of Species instead of Dawkins' Selfish Gene. I've read both. They can't even begin to compare. One is a serious scientific and a mind bending exercise in nature's ways, the other one deserves the title of pop culture. I cannot tell you the different beak sizes of Darwin's finches but I can tell you I've felt a void inside me after finishing the book and for a few years I thought constantly about the implications of the theory and saw behaviors around me that could be explained in terms of evolution, survival of the fittest and all that.

After you've read some serious books you won't ever say again that books "don't work". Schopenhauer said it better,

Students and scholars of all kinds and of every age aim, as a rule, only at information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, every stone, plant, battle, or experiment and about all books, collectively and individually. It never occurs to them that information is merely a means to insight, but in itself is of little or no value.

.....huh?

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 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.

This is a very well thought-out analysis of the textbook and lecture modalities for learning.

I don't understand the virulent negative responses from many of the comments here—perhaps it's just a reaction about the clickbaity title? Take it easy y'all.

The thesis of the article is much more nuanced that the title would suggest. A more appropriate title would be "Analysis of the relative benefits of textbooks and lectures as medium of instruction, and ways we can improve on them." Specifically, the author talks about the assumptions (in caricature) of how learning works in lectures:

   "The lecturer says words describing an idea;
    the class hears the words scribbles in a notebook;
    then the class understands the idea."

and similar assumptions in textbooks

   "The author describes an idea in words on the page;
    the reader reads the words;
    then the reader understands the idea.
    When the reader reaches the last page,
    they’ve finished the book."

The above two "learning APIs" are in use widely today with various levels of "support" for learners provided by the lecturer/author and the learning setting. In the end though, the hard work of understanding falls on the learner. It's on the learner to absorb, incorporate, relate, and learn to apply the knowledge.

The author points out that rather than thinking about medium of conveying information (lecture, video, text), we should think about "learning API design": what tools, learning modalities, structured activities, projects, and workflows can we provide for learners to foster the cognitive processes needed for learning to happen?

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 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”

This guy seems to be searching for that magic pillow that you put the book under and sleep upon and later wake up with all the information & learning you were after downloaded and integrated into your person.

He says the key to getting there is better understanding our cognitive learning models.

But ask anyone who has mastered 'learning' (plenty such people exist) and they won't confess to you any magic pill.

Each time you want to learn something substantial or new, you've got to roll up your sleeves and do the crazy hard work to take new ideas and information and bring them into your present map of the world in a way that results in a new coherent map of the world. For any self-reflecting person, this is an internal transformation process. It's not a "medium problem"; no new medium is going to make that internal process any easier. And books and pen & paper & lectures etc are all dynamic tools that are each optimal at various times during a learning process.

And I would venture to say that you simply cannot do better than a book at building up and presenting a coherent thesis that can be used by someone in their learning process to move from one position of perception and understanding to another.

That learning (re-constructing your internal models) is hard seems (to me) prima facie a necessary thing. A magic pillow to get from A to B in a snap is just magical/fetish thinking.

Whenever I've gone from an 'A' to a 'B'... to really be able to master it, to wield it, to truly _know_ it... when I look back with self-reflection I do not see 'B' as this static plane ... the whole process to get there is the 'B'. So focusing on the medium is such a silly thing here, imo.

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.

> How might we make books actually work reliably?

The 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.

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.

"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!

Well, the amount of contrasting opinions in the comments here and [1] and [2] are enough of a proof, to me, that written words and video/audio are equivalent, with the latter having the potential of being much more engaging, especially in our current "low attention span" society. I gathered arguments in favor and against books in a recent /r/changemyview [3]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095947521...

[2] https://mitili.mit.edu/news/compared-reading-how-much-does-v...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/beiywx/cmv_vi...

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.

> 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.

This sounds really intriguing.

Counterpoint: books work really well as evidenced by all of human development?

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.

FWIW despite not having been in school for nearly 2 decades, I take a few short notes on all books I read in a personal wiki.

I don't do this as I read, but after reading the book. Or sometimes a couple times while reading the book if it's particularly interesting. If you do it as you read, you may fall into the trap of taking too many notes. And the forced recall after a few days improves retention, rather than a recall after 5 minutes.

Crucially, I connect the ideas to other books and Internet articles I've read. It's surprisingly easy IME to let keep a book in a knowledge silo; only by connecting the information will you actually learn something.

For example, I read both Nate Silver's Signal and the Noise, and Taleb's Black Swan / Antifragile, etc. Both of the books are roughly on drawing conclusions from data with statistics (or really the limitations of statistics in the latter case).

But if you don't actually compare the two books then it's pretty easy to read but not understand. I don't claim that I understood everything, but certainly taking a paragraph of notes is better than nothing.

----

Paul Graham has a nice essay about whether you actually remember what you read!

http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

I also recall reading a NYTimes piece about this. It's good to wonder about your retention, like the author of this blog post is. Although like others, I don't agree with the title. I think it's entirely possible that many people are not good readers. That is a skill that has to be taught -- there's a reason that every child in the states is MANDATED TO DO for ~12 years. And it can be done poorly, or it can be done well.

I think if you don't actually check if you know something, then you don't know it. So I think I agree that many people could improve their retention of books with a few small adjustments to their process.

People are reading and writing more than ever with the Internet, and I generally view that as a good thing. But I suppose it wouldn't be surprising if the retention of long form books suffered due to that development over the last couple decades. People learn to read earlier and "informally" rather than in a more deliberate fashion.

Passive vs. active.

Passive reading of non-fiction isn't going to teach you much. If you, instead, take reading notes, write a report, cross-reference, or otherwise engage with the material, well, you'll learn something.

There's nothing revolutionary here. College classes aren't just "go read some books"; they involve writing for a reason. This is really basic pedagogy.

If somebody feels books don't work for them (any more) I highly recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)

Author has great writing skills. The pace, the depth, the cadence, it all feels just right.

My college roommate always had an impressive recall of the (many) academic sociology/philosophy books he'd read. Some of this is down to him having a gifted memory, but also some is due to his use of a generally applicable technique where he summarized each book he read into a single page, forcing re-engagement and consolidation.

Inspired by this, I'm experimenting with writing and posting online reviews of books I've read.

"Books and lectures don't work"

But to tell me that, you just wrote around 2 chapters of a book to tell me that. If your experiences apply to me, and I can only digest things properly via video, I'm not likely to read it.

As a side note, it might also be worth looking into NVLD (Non-Verbal Learning Disorder), which is something that gets confounded with autism and ADHD, but is a distinct disorder.

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?

I, too, thought this piece took a strange position. It would be better titled "Books and lectures don't work if all you do is passively consume them in a single pass", which I don't think anyone argues or believes or prescribes.

The piece touched on the importance of metalearning strategies, but stopped short at simply designing experiences that lighten the cognitive load on learners by doing much of the heavy lifting for them. This is valuable but misses what the true goal should be.

We should be teaching learners how to take some information source (e.g., a book, lecture series, etc.) and apply those metalearning techniques (e.g., spaced repetition, distillation, etc.) in a self-directed manner. Otherwise, you only have learners capable of learning those things that already have great experiences built by skilled learners and are otherwise still not capable of self-directed learning.

The most profound thing that ever happened to me reading books was "spaced repetition".

Spaced repetition is the model about how your memory works the author claims do not exist. With Anky I know exactly how much I retain of everything and how much I forget, with graphs and all.

So now , every time I acquire something new I must make an allocation in the future for rehearsal with Anki.

Another very useful thing is fast reading. Your mind can read extremely fast provided one detail: You use always the same layout standard format, then your subconscious can read multiple lines at a eye glance(after lots of training of course).

Every single book has a different format, and most of the time is not suitable for fast reading, with things like long lines that make it impossible to make sense of multiple lines for your mind.

So in order to make them useful I have to parse them and display on a standard way.

"In this section we’ve seen that, like lectures, non-fiction books don’t work because they lack a functioning cognitive model. Instead, like lectures, they’re (accidentally, invisibly) built on a faulty idea about how people learn: transmissionism. When books do work, it’s generally for readers who deploy skillful metacognition to engage effectively with the book’s ideas. This kind of metacognition is unavailable to many readers and taxing for the rest. "

Well, maybe taxing your brain is exactly the point. It's like training your muscles - no pain no gain. It actually reminds me of an Asimov's story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)

Disagree. Reading is not the same thing is learning, or self-education.

When I read to learn, I take notes, I highlight, I reflect and write my thoughts on the subject.

Reading is a highly effective way to learn and absorb information, if you engage with the text, and make it an active experience, rather than a passive experience.

Reading isn’t about memorizing a few sentences. It’s about understanding a subject, the contents within, and being able to apply to various contexts you encounter throughout your life.

Whenever I encounter a problem or challenge in my personal or professional life, I can immediately recall and reference the knowledge or wisdom I’ve gained from books.

And if I can’t, I find the book I’m missing, and actively read it to assimilate a new understanding.

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.

Writing a book is like writing a thesis. I decided I was going to write a book - it ended up being nine months, 55,000 words and 400+ footnotes. Every sentence was rewritten multiple times. And this was designed to be a breezy, accessible read - something you could read on your phone over the course of a day.

I write a blog as well. Writing a post takes three to five hours, to come up with a good linkable article. I've got this down, I think.

Today I tried uplifting a blog post to material for the next book. 1,500 words ... five hours, to bring the material up to date and up to book quality.

I like and respect books a whole lot more now.

Selfish gene is a popular science book, not a text book. You want to learn something? Get a dense, highly-regarded text book with lots of problems and work through the problems. Supplement it with lectures, or more importantly, office hours at a prof or grad student who knows the subject cold. Maybe even get a mentor to give you a real problem and struggle through it for several years (aka go to graduate school). That's how its been done for centuries because it works. Why else do you think there are so few self-taught (real) engineers and (real) scientists out in the wild making an impact.

The title is definitely click-baity although the author is a bit more charitable towards books in content. I feel he is too harsh on books by judging them against unrealistic expectations. We can't remember everything we read from a book, much less explain it like a domain expert, but that is not the point of book reading. To me, books (at least the pop-sci books) are never about transfer of exact mental models, they function like a chisel to shape one's intuitions and understanding according to one's own disposition. Even though the aggregate effect on public tend to converge (for e.g, acceptance of evolution), it is hardly a case that everyone will have exact mental representation of a theory. Only place where the knowledge transfer can be (and should be) exact, is research and knowledge work domains (such as tech documentation). In such environments there is an incentive for the reader to engage with the material and the mental model of majority of the readers tends to be sufficiently homogeneous due to prior training. So the said shortcomings don't take place there.

Earlier, I too carried that feeling that I didn't remember much after reading and wondered whether there was any benefit from spending time on books. This turned out to be a cold-start problem because as more I read, cognitive structures started to form and I was more receptive to fresh ideas. New ideas, by means of comparing and juxtaposing against each existing ones, had a better chance of settling down in a proper cognitive framework and consequently a better chance of recall. For example reading Harari, Dawkins and Haidt roughly around the same period, strengthened my understanding of each's ideas as if they were all part of one giant discussion, although they were books on different topics and sometimes they contradicted each other.

Also it is important to engage in dialogue with a book, be it by participating in book clubs, online reviews or even simple note taking. Recently I switched to reading books on my mobile, I can't describe how much it has transformed my whole reading experience. My ebooks are littered with notes, questions and pointers which I know I will never let anyone see. Just an act of trying to compare or contradict an author in your personal note, can make you internalize the concepts and restructure your existing understanding. It is like solving a problem on blackboard. Now I prefer to buy books from Google Playstore even if I can get the same book for free from a local library. And I plan to post reviews on the books I read, by pouring through my notes and re-reading the important points from the books. In my experience, the second read is often more rewarding than the first.

Popular science books are not meant to be purely educational, it's a type of books designed for entertainment where the learning is just a byproduct. This article make so many generalizations and assumptions that I can hardly take it seriously. Lectures do work if they are made to reinforce the textbook materials, though by itself it simply isn't enough and you need to have other forms of learning - active ones where the students solve the puzzles, work in group on problem solving, building toy projects, etc.

I have many hours experience learning from books (though I don’t disagree with the authors reasons books don’t work). However quantum.country did not work for me. I think I prefer more organic spaced repetition. Like read an article/attend a lecture/read a book/watch a YouTube video about a subject and then do it again about the same subject later. Perhaps the “scientific” spaced repetition can be more efficient if I really work hard at it, but I just don’t know.

I am working on an edtech related project for a course I am building. My questions to everyone is, based on your experience, what have you found to be a very effective way to learn something new?

For my courses, I do write a textbook for the course but I don't really write the books for the student to learn from. I write it more as a reference book and as a guide for me to teach the course....essentially for me to hash out what is important to teach in each chapter.

I also create the lecture videos and interactive tools to learn the subject. From what I've seen, the preferred method for most people to learn something is essentially by example and then trial and error (doing it on their own with immediate feedback of how they're doing). For my courses, this essentially happens like the following: student watching a 1-10 minute video on a very specific subject/lesson/topic. The video is me explaining the topic, working some example problems possibly etc. After this the student is immediately redirected to an online tool that requires the student to directly apply what they should have learned from the lecture video. For simple factual exercises I just use multiple choice questions. For complex topics (involving calculations or multiple-step procedures) I use simulation type exercises where the student has to work through the problem on their own. If the student gets stuck, they have tips that explain the specific step further. From what I've noticed, people seem to remember stuff better when they are actively thinking about what they've learned and are actively using the newly learned information to solve some sort of problem. When this type of thinking happens, it seems students get more "ah ha" type moments where it suddenly clicks for them. I have also made multiple "learning paths" for students to use. One path, you can just read the textbook and do practice problems, Another path you can do the lecture videos followed by the interactive problem sets and another path where you just get highly summarized study notes followed by the interactive study problems. This allows students to basically use whichever method works best for them without forcing them into a "one size fits all" model.

This is my method of doing effective teaching but my question is always the same: based on your experience, what have you found to be a very effective way to learn something new?

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.

Not everyone learns the same way, so the entire tone of this article would be better if presented as, "Here are why books and lectures don't work for me."

The title feels incomplete. It should be "why books don't work for <something>".

Books may work better for some people for some purposes, but books do work.

> 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!

the fragility of my own memory has bothered me many times. Countless hours spent on studying something to then end up not being able to present core theses of a text. I wonder whether I should behave like the protagonist in the movie Memento. Live with the certainty that anything I don't write down and review every day will be lost within 24 hours.

Books and lectures let you know about something. Doing the homework or a project where you get to reference a book, or an expert when you get stuck really teaches you.

On fiction, I've found that listening to an audiobook gives a different experience. It's weird, you pick up different things.

An idea: comic book is a very powerful medium. Textbook authors should collaborate with comic book artists to create comic textbooks.

Someone tried, and the result is amazing: http://openborderscomic.com/

Consider the breath of human knowledge before and after the invention of the printing press.

I liked the alternatives proposed but they are not implementable by the current level at which the state governments fund universities and colleges.

The article does an effective thing by creating a strong interest in knowing how the author will justify himself for some of the claims he's made—and it doesn't disappoint: if you give it a chance, it gives answers to the controversies.

This is one variation of an important pedagogical concept called 'motivation'. And, ironically, after reading the article, my main takeaway was that while I appreciate the main line of thinking behind it, there seems to be a fatal weakness at the foundation where it has left out the critical role of motivation in learning.

The most controversial claim made by the article is that books don't really work. It illustrates this by bringing up issues with poor retention, and justifies it by (1) pointing out that this should be expected since books as a medium were not designed on the basis of an accurate model of human cognition/learning, but rather more by chance or expedience (2) pointing out that we know from experience that some kind of active engagement with the material (e.g. problem sets) is necessary for true learning, which books by default do not provide.

The problem with that however—and probably the main reason why people are reacting so strongly against the article—is that we know books do work, and that learning by 'transmission' does work: the form books take isn't accidental, it mirrors our communication with one another by speech. And speech works. We wouldn't be here if didn't.

And the article basically admits this much, but limits it to working for "some people sometimes". I think if you hone in on that 'sometimes,' the 'some people' isn't even necessary.

The situation may be as as simple as: 'sometimes' depends on whether there is true motivation/desire/interest to learn the material in question. (And it has to be interest in the intrinsic contents of the material: being genuinely interested in learning it because it's going to make you sound smart will not work!)

Let's say you've got some debilitating condition and a book comes out that offers instructions on how to remedy it, which rest on a body of new concepts introduced by the book. Are you going to need exercises and flash cards etc.—in short, any kind of supplement to understanding beyond the raw ideas themselves—in order effectively internalize the ideas?

I would claim no. A raw stream of ideas will be adequate as long as a demand for those ideas has been made beforehand.

So what the article is really answering is: how can we teach people things that they don't really desire to know. We may desire to "know things" in general and be motivated to read books as a consequence—but that's different from having a genuine desire to understand some specific thing, and then reading about that specific thing.

The situation with instruction in schools is largely the same thing: we want students to be 'educated' and they (sometimes) want 'education'—but that generic desire for knowledge appears to be inadequate in creating the necessary antecedent desire for knowledge on the specific subject at hand.

I see going beyond books to create "mediums in which 'reading' is the same as 'understanding'," as basically a proposal to develop surrogates for motivation/interest. And maybe for e.g. systematized childhood/teenage education that ends up being the best approach. I think it's intriguing. There are definitely cases where we don't know why we should know some things, but we should just learn them anyway.

But I'd say in the general case, you should let your genuine interest guide you, and if you don't really want to know the answers given by some book, don't read it. If you really do want to know, then issues like properly dealing with metacognition etc. while reading will fall into place naturally. Your brain knows how to update its schemas with new knowledge; it's not something we need to figure out for it.

Yet entire civilisations were built by people who learned only from books and lectures.

Come on, we know you are trying to promote your flashcard idea but there’s nothing new about it, and if you cast your mind back to your university days you’ll probably remember that you don’t simply read a book or listen to a lecture, you also need to reinforce and apply your learnings with numerous exercises.

That’s why all textbooks are full of exercises...

> Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel

Serious non-fiction tomes? I mean, I guess if you regard Harlequin romance as difficult novels. Okay, I'll stop giggling long enough to skim the rest.

Reading the rest, the core complaint seems to be that most people cannot effectively read and most people cannot effectively write. Which is true.

The author's general thesis is that the medium needs to lead you by the nose into learning things. It's the book's fault you didn't absorb much because it should have forced you into metacognitive patterns of thinking.

This is a great and important topic to think about but I disagree with the conclusion. Instead I think people need to learn (and be taught) how to learn. Sitting and absorbing media is often ineffective (and something left out is especially recently popular books trying to teach you something are often garbage or could be delivered in a few pages instead of a few hundred).

One resource – which unfortunately is much longer than it needs to be (you can skip the extensive portion devoted to classifying books into types) – is How to Read a Book

In short: to get the most out of books, lectures, anything of the sort you need to do more than just consume at the normal rate. Skim, outline, ask questions for yourself to answer, research outside sources, skip parts which seem unnecessary and pour over the important parts many times, make yourself flashcards, make notes in the margins, discuss with people, teach somebody what you have learned, on and on and on, tl;dr actively read, don't passively absorb.

RE this quote:

> Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false.

This reminds me of the intro chapter in Derek Alexander Muller's PhD Thesis, which is a very useful summary of a lot of ed-tech research, particularly about video: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/super/theses/PhD(Muller).pdf#... (see Chapter 1 "Framing the study")

Some useful quotes from Muller's thesis:

- [prior work is...] body of research that has failed to establish answers to fundamental questions about learning with multimedia.

- [...] technology developers have focused on the ground-breaking abilities of the new technology to promote interest in its application to the educational domain. Thomas Edison’s appraisal of the motion picture is an oft-cited example of the excitement that accompanies innovation. Promoting his invention, he proclaims “that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks,” (Edison 1922 as cited in Cuban 1986, p.9).

- When Clark (1983) concluded that no particular media had a unique impact on learning and that research seeking such an impact should be abandoned, he believed the point to be uncontentious and well-supported by the evidence. “Media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition,” he wrote (p.445). The paper kicked off debate in the research community because, stated explicitly or not, the notion that media inherently affects learning had been a presupposition of virtually all previous studies in educational technology [...] he proposed the ‘replaceability’ challenge: “to find evidence, in a well designed study, of any instance of a medium or media attributes that are not replaceable by a different set of media and attributes to achieve similar learning results for any given student and learning task.” The challenge was meant to demonstrate the equivalence of different platforms and highlight the methodological differences that actually impact on learning.

- “It is time to shift the focus of our research from media as conveyors of methods to media and methods as facilitators of knowledge-construction and meaning-making on the part of learners” (Kozma 1994a, p.13).

- The equivalence principle in multimedia states that the relevant cognitive processes inspired by different formats of multimedia can be made indistinguishable, by choosing appropriate methods. [...] Consider a student reading a book with words and pictures about Newtonian mechanics. Then, consider the same student watching a movie about Newtonian mechanics. The two experiences appear very different. One involves written text and static images while the other involves spoken text and dynamic images. If we found that following these two instructional treatments, our hypothetical student performed equally well on the same test, what could we conclude about the two different forms of multimedia? We might, like Lewis (1995), suspect that a movie may not be an appropriate medium for teaching Newtonian mechanics, or perhaps that the movie was deficient in content or presentation. The alternative is to conclude that both media encouraged similar cognitive processes in the student.

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.

_______________

1. http://measure.axler.net/MIRA10May2019.pdf

The Selfish Gene and Guns, Germs, and Steel are pop science, not "serious non-fiction tomes".

As for books not working, that's absurd. 1) Some books work better than others. 2) To a large extent, you get more out of books the more you put into them.

You learn by doing problems, even in the humanities.

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.

Am I the only one to think the article missed a trick here?

Yes, it may be that traditional books don't work as well as they might. I do know I frequently read articles and come away with very little to show for the time spent. I think partly that's a function of the setting - I seem to retain much more from paper or e-ink compared to something read on a VDU. It's probably also a function of my own state of mind. I know I retain much more when I'm rested and reading earlier in the day. I also retain much more the day after, when I've had time to sleep on something.

And yet, there is something about the art of learning. I did a really good Coursera course that went through this (How to learn), and it, too, explained the importance of working to engage with material. Even doing something like looking away every few paragraphs and giving yourself a quick test to see if you can summarise what you just read works wonders. Combine that with spaced repetition, exercise, sleep and memory tricks like a memory palace, and retention/understanding grows hugely. So I do think there's something to this article.

But I also think about some classic articles that are also models of what they are discussing, and I'm wondering why the author didn't attempt something similar. For example, here's a description of the importance of varying sentence length in writing that at the same time is an example of the very practice of what it's talking about:

"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important." = Gary Provost.

Here's an article about suspense that's also a model of the very thing it's talking about:

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/a-simple-wa...

Given this is possible, I'm disappointed. I tend to agree the article made sense and that there are better and worse models of how to engage with a text. It's even possible that a text can self-guide a novice reader through good techniques simply by good writing. So, my disappointment. I think the article definitely missed a trick here, which would have been to go one level deeper, and tried to not only discuss the importance of a new type of text, but to do so with a model of the very text the author was talking about. As a result, although I think it may be possible to do what the author is describing, I don't know how anyone might go about it. And I'm not sure I fancy reading an entire book on a subject that doesn't interest me all that much in order to find out, either.

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.

It's been years since I read Guns, Germs and Steel, but I think I remember the one or other thing.

Off the top of my head: north/south axis of the Americas vs East/West of Europe/Axis - same crops can grow everywhere. No big mammals suitable for herding had survived in the Americas, sweetcorn only crop suitable for breeding for agriculture.

Writing may have been discovered in some places for fun, but discarded because it was useless - only became established when it was needed for bookkeeping.

One thing I think about a lot, actually, especially with all the discussion here in Europe about the European union: China didn't conquer the other continents because at some point in time, some emperor simply decided China would abandon sailing the high oceans, and China stuck to the decision for hundreds of years. Same thing couldn't happen in Europe because of competition between all the small kingdoms.

In general I seem to remember things from Jared Diamond's books. For many other books I would have to admit the article has a point.

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.

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