Why books don't work (2019)

The very premise of this article shows how demented Western culture has become. The attitude of, “I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I’m not a subject matter expert on the book’s topic” is absolutely insane. It takes a decade of serious work to really get a strong handle on a topic. Books aren’t supposed to teach you something to know, they’re meant to teach you how much you don’t know. Hopefully from that impetus one can go into the world and gain skill.<p>I have been a Software Engineer for over a decade now and I do seriously difficult network and kernel work right now. There has never been another point in my career where I have been so incredibly aware of how much I don’t know about what I work on. If you’re doing your career right you should feel your ignorance more and more. Books offer us something incredibly valuable, the feeling of ignorance. I can’t think of anything our culture could use more of right now than humility.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “I cannot remember the books I&#x27;ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

I don&#x27;t find this line of thinking to be compelling at all, unless you make certain assumptions that I don&#x27;t agree with. For one, you&#x27;d have to assume that the &quot;big idea&quot; of a book is that you read it once, like a novel, and <i>should</i> have great recall of a large body of details &#x2F; minutia from said book. IMO, it just &quot;doesn&#x27;t work like that.&quot;<p>If you want to learn from a book, you have to play a more active role. Personally I find that the process of learning from a book involves A. read it once, straight through like a novel - maybe underlining key passages in pencil, then B. reading again and taking detailed notes as you read, and possibly looking up citations, or related references (the Wikipedia page for a particular term or phrase, for example), then C. re-reading your notes a couple of times as well as reading and re-reading supplemental material that you found, and finally D. writing your own synthesis of the material.<p>Yes, that&#x27;s a lot of work and yes it takes a long time and no, not every book justifies doing all that. Sometimes it&#x27;s OK to just read the book like a novel, and walk away with just a vague memory of the highest level themes and maybe detailed recall or one or two specific points that resonated with you. It all depends on why you&#x27;re reading the book and what you hope to get out of it.<p>Edit: and if it&#x27;s a book with exercises, then add &quot;do the exercises&quot; as another step. That said, I see reading &#x2F; working through a <i>textbook</i> to really &quot;learn a subject&quot; as being a slightly different thing from reading the typical pop-sci book or business book or whatever, that doesn&#x27;t generally have exercises. &quot;Learning a subject&quot; to me usually involves using multiple books, videos, articles, maybe writing some code, etc.

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.<p>So for these examples it is my opinion that it&#x27;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 &quot;some serious non-fiction tomes&quot;.

I see that this is the author of the excellent &quot;Quantum Country&quot; so perhaps the case being made here is obviously biased, for a good reason.<p>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&#x27;t think that is true. Many &quot;good&quot; non-fiction books I&#x27;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 &amp; new connections. Unfortunately, the onus here is on the reader to realize and extract the maximum juice out of this non-linear flow.<p>The key idea of this post is to shift this burden to the &quot;medium&quot; and not the reader. Books can&#x27;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. :-)<p>I love these new directions in dissemination of ideas!<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;distill.pub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;distill.pub</a>

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&#x2F;student. Something more is needed to “learn”.<p>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.

There&#x27;s an unstated assumption here that the <i>reason</i> people read books (especially popular non-fiction) is to extract the maximum usable information content from them over the long-term and that anything less than that is a failure. I think that is fundamentally misconceived. The primary goal of popular non-fiction is to entertain. It is read for pleasure and the only reason it happens to be about things that are true is that readers derive a little extra pleasure from prose that they think may have some relevance to the outside world.<p>If you read &quot;Guns, Germs, and Steel&quot; and recall nothing but find it 6-9 hours of time well-spent, the book has completely achieved its goal. If you get a couple of good anecdotes out of it that you can use at parties later, even better. Not to mention the social cachet of being an intellectual who reads non-fiction for fun.<p>This otherwise very intelligent essay falls into a common failure mode I see. If you look out in the world and see everyone obviously &quot;doing it wrong&quot;, the odds of them all being stupid while you have sole insight are very slim. Instead, it is most often the case that they are doing it <i>right</i> for a goal that is different from the one you presume they have.<p>(There is also the obvious criticism that if the author feels linear narrative is a poor medium... why did they use it for their essay?)

The author cites three mediocre pop science books and is dismayed that after a single reading, he finds himself unable to impress people at parties with his knowledge.<p>He says those books each take &quot;6 to 9 hours&quot; to read. Life changing books are read over the course of...well...an entire life. I have a small handful of books that I have read dozens of times. These are books with very big, and very old, ideas. They have defined my outlook on life, they give me inspiration and ideas in hard times. I have read them in important life transitions at every step. Real wisdom and knowledge comes from years of contemplation of big picture ideas. It&#x27;s hard, and it&#x27;s not the kind of thing that you do to look smart. Reading books is just a way of getting through life and trying to make sense of the world - for yourself.

Books work fine, but reading comprehension is a real skill and very few master it by adulthood, or even by the end of a higher degree. I’ll suggest a simple solution to try. After you read a chapter (or whatever suitable section), spend 10 minutes re-explaining it to yourself. Begin by merely regurgitating: argue what the author argued, but in your own words. If you find gaps or contradictions, go back to the source and correct them. (With time your need to do so will diminish: your brain will learn to pick up more the first time.) After regurgitating, a larger inner discussion is both helpful and fun: what did you agree with? Disagree with? What questions are you left with?<p>This brief rehearsal and analysis of the contents will greatly aid comprehension and recall, and the value of the time spent.<p>You could try it on this very post.<p>This technique works also with video and audio content, conversations, or any other form of information exchange. Early rehearsal and analysis increases comprehension.<p>And that’s significant because if you think books don’t create lasting comprehension, try measuring the effectiveness of video, audio, lectures, etc. I’m not aware of a medium that outperforms text, properly read.

It&#x27;s funny, the author has made a decent case for why pop science&#x2F;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&#x27;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 &quot;also means repeating those quick memory tests in expanding intervals over the following days, weeks, and months.&quot; I suppose indoctrination is necessary since this form of anti-knowledge is unlikely to ever be actually <i>used</i> -unlike actual knowledge, say, such as linear algebra or obscure tree data structures relating to metric spaces.<p>Books are mostly not for actually learning a technical subject; they&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s gonna go a lot more smoothly if I read the cookbook.<p>Another thing he misses; if a book makes you feel something, it&#x27;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, &quot;Darwinian Fairytales,&quot; which is absolutely hilarious in addition to being perfectly correct, sticks with me a lot better than &quot;The Selfish Gene&quot; -which I&#x27;ve paid considerably more attention to.

Couldn&#x27;t get through the whole article to be honest. Started kicking open doors. That made me scroll to the conclusion. Which was also underwhelming.<p>Reading the books he mentioned, I&#x27;m reading them not to know everything word by word. I&#x27;m reading them to get a map of that topic. One that would guide me to a narrower source if needed.<p>To even get more Meta, let&#x27;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.<p>That is also why I like all those shitty blogs about &quot;what is a monad&quot; or &quot;how to deploy a nodeJS app to Heroku&quot;. Not because they are the best reads written by the people who knows most about the subject. It&#x27;s the opposite, I read it and I&#x27;m proud of the writers, because I know they are the people that learned something. I&#x27;m only there to check what command-line command I need, or what library combination they use.<p>Looking at books like &quot;thinking fast and slow&quot; I also couldn&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>With this explosion of access to information, it&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t think the amount of theoretical knowledge you&#x27;ll get from your 10.000 cards thick anki Library. As diving deep and using something in anger day in and day out.

&quot;... one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences....as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken.&quot;<p>Delicious irony. Tell me about this in your text-only blog post.

Endless blog posts don&#x27;t work either.

I fear the author, and many others, have treated many books as a thing to get through rather than a thing to make a part of yourself.<p>There is an excellent book (as it happens) called How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler. The focus is on how to read for improved understanding rather than pleasure. There are many great ideas and tactics in the book but these are the ones that jump out for me:<p>- Not all books or even pages deserve to be read at the same speed or with the same care. Being able to identify which is which is a mark of a good reader<p>- If you don&#x27;t understand a word or passage, continue through it. Perhaps you will understand it with greater context. Even if you don&#x27;t, if the book as a whole turns out to be great then you should reread it, and if it doesn&#x27;t you can cast it aside with little harm.<p>- An &quot;inspectional reading&quot; (a.k.a. skimming) is a useful tool for understanding what a book is about without dedicating a lot of time.<p>- Write in the margins. This helps to make a book your own.<p>That last point has really been a game changer for me. I&#x27;ve generally tried to keep my books &quot;clean&quot; but writing in the margins, underling, etc. incredibly improves 2nd, 3rd, and so-on readings.<p>In general you can tell if you&#x27;ve properly read a book by seeing if you can answer the the following questions:<p>-What is the book about?<p>-What is being said in detail?<p>-Is it true?<p>-What of it?<p>I think it&#x27;s a neat idea to ask how we could improve books, but the assertion that books don&#x27;t work remains unproven to me after reading this book (and after my own experience).<p>Lastly, I think of books as a necessary but inadequate component of much learning. I think Montaigne put it well (btw i read this in a book :)):<p>&gt; To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory. That which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book. A mere bookish learning is a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it...

I&#x27;m a physics teacher. I attempted to improve the text book model by adding some web based interactive elements. I mostly added interactive simulations and questions with step by step solutions.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landgreen.github.io&#x2F;physics&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landgreen.github.io&#x2F;physics&#x2F;index.html</a> Having this website ready before we all had to start teaching online was very lucky.

&gt; only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?<p>This is akin to saying that &quot;F = MA so why do I need a whole series of lectures and chapters in a textbook to explain it!&quot; Understanding the basic idea in physics that F=MA involves building a variety of intuitions about what this really means, what it entails in the real world, and how this influences the ways we think about this powerful idea. You need to see examples, experiments and applications of this idea for it to make sense, even though it can be perfectly reduced to 4 characters. Once the student of physics has all of the information in their head a vast amount of complexity can be reduced to F=MA.<p>An even more powerful demonstration of this is of course Einstein&#x27;s famous E = MC^2. A pretty simple assertion, but really unraveling what that means and entails is easily many years of study.<p>On the other end of the spectrum, there are many books that genuinely defy reduction in this way. Hegel and Derrida are notorious examples of these. Scholars of either would tell you that not being reducible is an essential property of what each of these writers is trying to say. However I suspect the author of this post would very quickly become frustrated with these works and beg them to &quot;get to the point!&quot;.<p>And another perspective outside of these are the &quot;Desert Fathers&quot;, the early Christian ascetics, who would spend years meditating on single passages from the bible.

Single most shocking line of the article for me:<p>&gt; Adult American college graduates read 24 minutes a day on average [0]<p>If this is referring to actual <i>books</i> (and not just random articles on the internet), that number seems crazy high to me. I would guess the percentage of college graduates that read <i>any book at all</i> during a given day to be something like 5% (As in, even of the ones that read a book or two per year, most days they&#x27;re not reading), and the average amount of time spread over all adults in this category would be closer to 1 minute than 24. 24 minutes a day would mean serious readers would have to do a <i>lot</i> of reading to make up for the (probably large) numbers of adults who simply don&#x27;t read at all.<p>I think it&#x27;s much more likely that &quot;reading&quot; includes articles on the internet (the big one) as well as newspapers&#x2F;magazines (probably still significant among the older crows), and far less actual books. Which would sorta invalidate that particular point.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;news.release&#x2F;atus.t11a.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;news.release&#x2F;atus.t11a.htm</a>

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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;billwadge.wordpress.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-secret-of-academic-success-or-fun-filled-failure-if-you-prefer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;billwadge.wordpress.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-secret-of-aca...</a><p>&gt; &quot;The temptation is to write papers proclaiming the superiority of your work and the pathetic inadequacy of the contributions of A, B, C, …&quot;<p>[1] in particular, working memory is not an issue with books: rereading is a thing.

Jonathan Blow recently streamed a talk called &#x27;Video Games and the Future of Education&#x27;[0] that makes similar arguments.<p>He discusses various tools we have to transmit knowledge from teacher to student and argues that games really shine as away to trick people into &#x27;learning by doing&#x27;. He&#x27;s sharply critical of existing educational games and really lays into &#x27;gamification&#x27; as a concept.<p>The talk certainly left me hearing that echo that the author alludes to.<p>Books are great.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qWFScmtiC44" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qWFScmtiC44</a>

If the author (or anybody) really wants to <i>absorb</i> knowledge from books, it&#x27;s simple and only takes two steps:<p>1. Take notes while reading, which usually also has the side-effect that you have to re-read passage around your note taking<p>2. Convert notes to Flashcards utilising SRS (spaced repetition systems like Anki)<p>Thus all the info you noted and found interesting will go into your long(er)-term memory.<p>But that&#x27;s not why we read most books now, is it?

I often find myself really bad at remembering what I read in a book or blog post or heard in a lecture on youtube or Coursera beyond the larger point, so I&#x27;d agree with the author at least that far.<p>However, when a question is raised relating to something I read, eor a point is stated that conflicts with something that I read, I usually find I can remember where I read about it. Even if I didn&#x27;t internalize the idea I can look it up pretty easily, and 90% of the time being able to look up something is good enough. So I think whether books work depends on your goal: is it to perfectly internalize something, or to be able to have something you know you can refer to later?

What a terrible take. If anything I&#x27;m convinced that reading blogs with pumped up titles and nothing important to say are the things that don&#x27;t work.<p>Did anyone get the point behind the title in all that text? But sure, let&#x27;s bring down the thing that has been the pillar of human knowledge for thousands of years because it&#x27;s &quot;static&quot;. Amazing...

For an interview in this article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;andy-matuschak-on-books-and-learning&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;andy-matuschak-on-books-and-learnin...</a>

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&#x27;t have anything to say about it, what was the point?

Books rarely <i>teach</i> a subject to a person. It&#x27;s more about <i>shaping the concept in their mind</i>.<p>Let&#x27;s take a book that shaped how I think about the media: &quot;The Powers that Be&quot; by David Halberstam. It&#x27;s a tome of a book, clocking in at over 700 pages. It is a history and analysis of American media in the 20th century. I cannot recite many anecdotes or facts from it - although it&#x27;s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that facts and anecdotes related to the media I know <i>are</i> from that book, I just have forgotten that. But it shaped how I think about the media, its various mediums, the power it has, and in particular, its influence on, and relationship with, politics. This &quot;shaping&quot; thing is both nebulous but critical to how we think and understand the world.<p>Let&#x27;s take yet another example: the astrophysics courses I took in undergrad. Two semester&#x27;s worth: one semester on stars, and one semester on everything else in the universe. (Quoth my professor: &quot;And that&#x27;s reflective of our understanding.&quot;) I used to be able to narrate all of the steps of a main sequence star. I no longer can. I can get close, and I can throw out phrases like &quot;hydrostatic equilibrium&quot;, but I have forgotten <i>so much</i> from those courses. It&#x27;s a year of learning! But that is not a waste. My understanding of our solar system, galaxy and universe were shaped by this course, so that I at least can have an intuitive understanding of what we know. This influences how I think about these things, and it influences how I interact with new information about these things.

Books work exactly the way the way they’re intended to work; he’s trying to solve a different problem. The problem of conveying information about a topic is solved by books. The problem he has been unable to solve is conveying all that information in a highly compressed way with no loss of information. Not possible.<p>The answer to “what was that book about” can be a sentence. The answer to “teach me the concepts in that book” can also be one sentence, but it’s the same sentence for every book: “go read the book.”

I have thoroughly enjoyed the author&#x27;s quantum country (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantum.country" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantum.country</a>) and can definitely vouch for that essay&#x27;s methods of improving cognition. 6 months later I can still recall quantum computation, which was a black box to me earlier.<p>However, I&#x27;m not sure I fully agree with with this essay, specifically the definition of what it means for a book to &quot;work&quot;.<p>Is it necessary to be able to recall a book or a talk? I mean, it is good if you can, but is it a failure if you don&#x27;t? Perhaps it isn&#x27;t the fault of the medium. It may be the way our brains are structured. Maybe reading a book changes something subtly, not enough for recall, but a change nevertheless. Like training a neural net with one training example. I know that when I dig out a book that I have put aside several years ago, it seems much more approachable.<p>I think that reading a book increases your _capacity to receive_, and the more you read similar stuff (or the same thing over again), the more you are able to absorb. There comes a tipping point where you are able to see connections to other things you have read.<p>I approach books and articles like I approach music: I don&#x27;t expect to recall much. If I want to recall it, I expect to revisit the material. Either way, the hours spent on it have not been fruitless.

Reading has been my main source of education. As I grow as an engineer, I find that books become more and more valuable. I&#x27;m at a place where the internet rarely provides the answers I need on deeper technical topics, instead I&#x27;m reading from the best books I can find almost daily, and it works for me.<p>In other areas, I&#x27;ve learned tons about history and other topics, by reading. What other form of knowledge transfer is better? Video? The books I read would fill thousands of hours of video.

Brilliant article,but I&#x27;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&#x27;t even see the point because they&#x27;ve been ricocheted around a concept by a single opinionated person for way too long.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>My reading list from the past 5 years or so:<p>1. Making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes 2. Surely you&#x27;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)

It&#x27;s an interesting post, and I&#x27;ll have to have a look at his &quot;Quantum Country&quot; to see if his ideas work in practice.<p>However, it seems one-sided: He only talks about the difficulties with reading, ignoring the difficulties with writing.<p>He also thinks of reading a book as a one-off activity. But in reality, one of the things we learn from reading books is how to read books - we ideally get better over time at the &quot;metacognition&quot; skills that he notes are needed to absorb information from books.<p>If we look at scientific communication in particular (I know, not what most people are reading for...) these two points interact. Researchers typically try to communicate their findings in the &quot;author describes an idea in words on the page&quot; format because that&#x27;s the easiest way to do it. Researchers also learn how to absorb information presented in this fashion by other researchers. By definition, research ideas have not been worked over for many years by people skilled at presenting them in an easily-absorbed form. And in any case, it would be rare for the researchers to be particularly skilled at sophisticated methods of presentation. (We hope they do get better at this with time, but they will all have had more practice at reading than at writing, so it makes sense that the joint enterprise of communication will rely more on skilled reading than on skilled writing.)<p>One might wonder in light of this whether the trend in K-12 education away from the traditional lecture &#x2F; textbook forms is short-sighted. Once students are out of K-12 (going into higher-level academia, or business, or the military, or whatever), lack of practice at reading traditional material may be a problem.

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.<p>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.<p>So I would argue it&#x27;s not books that aren&#x27;t working, but a certain way of reading that&#x27;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.<p>For the books that a person themselves can actively engaged in their own way, these techniques can be noisy and redundant.<p>For those they wouldn&#x27;t have been actively engaged (like the leisure reading mentioned in the post), these techniques could be useful. But the person doesn&#x27;t expect to get that much out of the books in the first place.

I started off thinking he had a good point, but when he came to textbooks, I realized that it doesn&#x27;t match reality. If what he claims were true, then books like Selfish Gene; Guns, Germs, and Steel, etc. should leave me with LESS knowledge than a typical textbook, which at least has questions, tests, etc. associated with it. But, in fact, I&#x27;m pretty sure that most textbooks have taught me precisely nothing, or at least nothing that I retained a year later, whereas Pinker, Taleb, Dawkins, Diamond, and other such authors have absolutely taught me things that stayed with me. So, there must be something missing, and I think it&#x27;s this: good books stay with you a while. I think about them a lot, for some time after reading them I keep revisiting the ideas.<p>If I never did that, perhaps I would learn as little from them as the author of this post. But, for textbooks, this almost never happens, and that is probably why textbooks do worse than other non-fiction, even though by his analysis here the reverse should be the case.

Just look at the bibliography of any book, it is usually more than 6. So that&#x27;s how many books you have to read on average to remember what you read, let alone deeply understand the material. The whole idea of trying to remember and understand from one reading is a fallacy. The best thing is to re-read the book again or read multiple books on the same subject.

&quot;All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.&quot;<p>My edu friends tell me all the time, &quot;different students best learn differ ways.&quot; That is, this isn&#x27;t a books issue per se. It&#x27;s that there&#x27;s a difference between (casual) reading and focused repetitive studying.<p>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&#x27;t for me either.<p>Conclusion: At least with traditional books I can re-read, highlight, photography and so on. Yes, I miss stuff. But learning is hard. We&#x27;re not wired to absorb _everything_. We&#x27;re not. That&#x27;s a good thing.<p>-------<p>While we&#x27;re on the subject, what&#x27;s your goto for finding non-fiction books?

It&#x27;s important to realize that &quot;reading a book&quot; is no guarantee of learning any more than (say) &quot;watching a Khan Academy video&quot;. Knowledge isn&#x27;t &quot;downloaded&quot; into one&#x27;s head by passively consuming sequences of symbols on paper (or a screen).<p>Schopenhauer wrote a compelling essay on this topic. I&#x27;ll link to this article (not by me) which breaks down and discusses that essay.<p>&quot;It’s important to take time to think about what we’re reading and not merely assume the thoughts of the author. We need to digest, synthesize, and organize the thoughts of others if we are to understand. This is the grunt work of thinking. It’s how we acquire wisdom.&quot;<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fs.blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;schopenhauer-on-reading&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fs.blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;schopenhauer-on-reading&#x2F;</a>

I honestly can&#x27;t believe how many words the author uses to say nothing. It almost reads like a freshman trying to reach a word quota. Or an &#x27;SEO expert&#x27; trying to keyword stuff for search rankings. Judge for yourself. Here is an excerpt from the main section on fixing books:<p>&quot;bla bla bla... more blah...<p>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?<p>I’m afraid that’s a research question—probably for several lifetimes of research&quot;<p>Woah... So tl; dr: author says books don&#x27;t work because of rigid assumptions about how people learn; Takes tens of thousands of words to say this, and reaches no new conclusion that points anywhere. Woah... upboat.

Growing up, I&#x27;ve pretty much never learned anything from lectures or textbooks in school. In math&#x2F;science you prepared by doing the exam review questions and the &quot;humanities&quot; type courses, to be honest, I still don&#x27;t know.<p>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.<p>The ability to speed through the filler and replay parts I didn&#x27;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.

Advice for the author, and anyone who cannot seem to learn from books: 1. Read better books. The three he mentions off the top are all pop science low-knowledge perspective pieces, imo. Especially G,G &amp; S.<p>2. Learn how to learn. Gaining knowledge is like building a fortress. It requires a solid foundation and years of diligence. And it doesnt happen all at once, it is built brick by brick.<p>3. Know how to cope with your learning style. Visual, Auditory, Verbal, Structural, etc. Go get a full battery IQ test. If you discover you have no talent at visual processing, that could be why reading doesnt work for you.<p>Further elaboration:<p>1: A good book is like a dead man talking. The dialogues of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle only survived in written form, because they were good and useful. If you want a modern example, the last good information book i read was &quot;Ignition: An Unofficial History of Rocket Fuel.&quot; A little more difficult than the best-sellers, but man thats cool stuff.<p>2. Knowledge is not something you are going to just &quot;get&quot; by going through the pages. I have read probably tens of thousands of pages of history and politics to get to where I am now: actual knowledge, I can almost predict the news, and frequently do, weeks or months in advance. Think of it like a D&amp;D character. If you put points into &quot;Knowledge: Whatever&quot; every level, eventually you&#x27;ll get to a +10 bonus where you are correct more often than not.<p>3. Because the schools are failing at their real jobs, most students never learn how to teach themselves. They require information to be presented, just so, for them to &quot;get it.&quot; Different learning styles are coddled and enabled, while refusing to teach critical thinking, dialogue, i.e. how to actually learn and teach yourself. People really do have differing mental abilities. Its why some are lawyers, others are musicians.<p>Written material will always be the largest share of meaningful information and communication.<p>I try not to sit on HN logged into Upvotes Anonymous, but this article was so silly I had to. Im learning how to read Hebrew, guess what, from a .... a book! What a world!

Books represent captured, frozen, language. As in spoken language. The author&#x27;s complaint is really that <i>language</i> doesn&#x27;t work for communicating knowledge and understanding.<p>Unfortunately, the author&#x27;s argument has two problems: first, that his definition of &quot;work&quot; is too narrow. No, reading a single book once, or listening to a single lecture, won&#x27;t inform you or make you understand a broad, complex topic. Second, there isn&#x27;t really an alternative; it&#x27;s language or nothing.<p>The bottom line is that the reader has to put in some work, too, which is the point of the author&#x27;s suggestions at the end of the article.

I found this very interesting and valuable (if imperfect).<p>The point about lectures is where I disagreed most, and I don’t see it discussed in this thread. The two points that people read much faster than a lecture pace, and people don’t learn well just from reading at full speed, should tell you something. Lectures are designed for active listening and frequently contain questions, pauses for discussion, and desirable difficulty (e.g. I claim something and give you a few seconds to figure out why it’s true).<p>This is also why prerecorded or YouTube lectures are a game changer. It’s a different medium more like reading notes than like participating in a class.

Books work in different ways.<p>Memory isn&#x27;t freeform, it&#x27;s triggered and asssociative. If I ask you what you were reading a year ago, you probably won&#x27;t be able to tell me. But if I mention an associated experience or concept, your recall may be triggered and you&#x27;ll be able to remember something relevant - and talk about it, possibly in some detail.<p>People are much better at remembering narratives and parable than facts, and also better at remembering practical experience than theory.<p>Textbooks are useless unless you do the exercises and use your new skills to solve real problems.<p>But it&#x27;s also why liberal political and economic books rarely have much political influence.<p>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.<p>See also the ad industry, talk radio, QAnon, etc.

Well, it depends on whad kind of books you&#x27;re reading. Certainly mathematics textbooks work if only for the reason that if you move forward without really understanding what is being said, you wont understand the rest, so it will be incomprehensible and boring. SO you need to put some effort: go back, read the difficult fragments a couple of times, maybe take a sheet of paper and try to figure it out - and only then move forward. Whereas pop science books allow you to pretend you understand while reading.

I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s always the case.<p>I love to read history books, and I&#x27;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.<p>The same can be said about the movies I&#x27;ve watched. I rarely remember the plot that well, but I remember how much I enjoyed them, and occasionally some good lessons.<p>I&#x27;ve also had some fascinating conversation that I simply can&#x27;t recall. They still shaped how I see the world.

Books work very well, when you use them right. When I want to truly understand the contents of a book, I use the following strategy:<p>I first skim the entire book. This gives me a rough idea of its structure. I then read the first chapter. Then I reproduce what I can remember from memory. Usually it&#x27;s very little. Then I re-read the chapter and reproduce it from memory again. This time, I remember quite a lot. The third time, I have a very good understanding of it. Rinse and repeat for each chapter.<p>Something strange happens when you do this. I urge everyone to try it. There&#x27;s some sort of subconscious restructuring going on; an implicit compression of the material. Somehow, it has become organized without your explicit involvement.<p>This is my theory of what&#x27;s going on: you are incrementally improving a cognitive model of whatever it is that you are reading. You start off with a rough set of expectations. When you re-read the material for the first time, you have a basis for comparison. Expectations get violated. Beliefs get updated. The learning rate is high. With each re-read, you get diminishing returns.<p>This method is time-consuming, so I only use it when I have to. But it works. And it&#x27;s much more efficient than flash cards.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s sometimes hard to know if the reader takes away the &#x27;right&#x27; conclusion from your example so if you provide multiply it&#x27;s easier to get the through line of the provided examples.<p>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&#x2F;examples, which you wouldn&#x27;t have if the whole book was just the main point without all the surrounding detail.

Why does it have to be a long book with a million anecdotes? Just give me the idea.

<p><pre><code> And at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. This last idea so invisibly defines the medium that it’s hard not to take for granted, which is a shame because, as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken. </code></pre> By this notion I won&#x27;t learn anything from this post, either.

I think the author misses a big point, and takes a lot of words to miss it.<p>A book exists as a subset of a language--it itself can be considered a language itself--the way the words interact and how they relate is more important than any particular within. Taking something out of a book doesn&#x27;t meaning learning some particular order of symbols contained within--it&#x27;s about learning the language and how all the symbols relate. You could even extend that to identifying that language in the future and generating it themselves as well.<p>So you get content where the information density is very low, which happen to be some books. I hate to compare this article to, but essentially it&#x27;s identified the idea of information entropy and still misses the fact that knowledge and understanding are not a bucket of facts but rather a model. The author spits this out verbatim but it&#x27;s obvious given the language the author is using his understanding of this topic is very low. The author seems to be quantifying knowledge, but really it&#x27;s quite hard to quantify knowledge in and of itself but rather it&#x27;s important to judge knowledge in relation to other knowledge--hence information density. I think a lot of people simply read a book for the journey and not to take something out--and just because there&#x27;s no conscious summary in their head doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;ve not learned or that it&#x27;s not changed their entire lives, in fact, since understanding by definition is an unconscious process.<p>If learning well is simply absorbing knowledge quickly and retaining it then count me out--I don&#x27;t want to absorb random facts and symbols which have no practical use in relation to the objects and symbols and things I use in this world.<p>So the author misses the point of learning, and constructs a giant strawman (using a long-form argument, strangely) about how books don&#x27;t &quot;work&quot; in the sense that they don&#x27;t necessarily give you any knowledge at all! I agree, but I&#x27;ll definitely still be reading them.

It&#x27;s incredibly unfair to expect broad introductory books to provide deep understanding and insight. These books exist to mostly make people aware the field&#x2F;topic exists and as a starting point. They serve their purpose. Article seems mostly about expounding his book tbh.

Textbooks with pretty well. I’ve learned almost all my math and science from textbooks. The concepts build on and reinforce each other.<p>I imagine this is harder to do for the class of books he mentions which don’t really get built on or reinforced except when you try to recall them to a friend.

It seems like some authors get over-ambitious about actually teaching the material. But as a reader, often I don&#x27;t care enough to do the exercises, because I&#x27;m just exploring, and I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;ll come back this way again. I haven&#x27;t made a commitment to actually learn the subject yet. I just want to know the layout of the landscape and I&#x27;ll come back to it if I actually need to know it.<p>In particular, I think hardly anyone really needs to know quantum mechanics well enough to do homework?<p>It seems like before testing effectiveness, you need to determine what subset of your audience shares the goals you assume. Often, it&#x27;s only going to be a small fraction.

&quot;It&#x27;s a book. It&#x27;s a nonvolatile storage medium. They&#x27;re very rare. You should &#x27;ave one.&quot;<p>Books are neat because not only can you read them to gain information, but when you forget stuff, as your squishy brain is wont to do, you can easily refresh your memory using the book. If it&#x27;s a well organized one, this isn&#x27;t even particularly hard or slow. Books are low-tech enough to be rather durable and to not need any special equipment to be read -- just eyes and a brain. Even writing to a book requires minimal equipment.<p>Books will be here long after you, I, and whatever we cook up to replace them are gone.

I might be controversial, but, from my experience, reading at least 1 fiction and 1 non fictional book every 6 weeks, there is a big difference in information density.<p>The non fictional books, especially the self helping&#x2F;improving one, tend to be very diluted. whatever the reason is. This is naturally in conflict with the reader purpose: extracting value in the fastest way possible.<p>That is probably why apps like Blinkist or &#x27;OneBookADay&#x27; have quite some success. This, by no mean, is to say that books are not an amazing format for the vast majority of content they are being used today, and for the past 700 years.

To learn you need to study. Reading is a part of studying but is not enough.<p>If you were to take an important exam will you just read the text from start to finish or will you also take notes, analize, discuss, memorize, etc?

&gt; Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?<p>Maybe those books are specifically bad? I haven&#x27;t read them, but I had long monologues about some historical books I read giving people basically lectures on topic.<p>And my brain recalls facts and situations from them when it is associated in unrelated discussions too.

I find it highly effective for retention and understanding to talk with someone about what I&#x27;m reading, as I&#x27;m reading it. If I just read a chapter from a book on Austrian Economics about how profit&#x2F;loss signals in a market allocate resources more efficiently than a planning board, I&#x27;ll bring it up with my friend next time we talk. As they ask questions I&#x27;m forced to deepen my own understanding of the topic by answering them.

Consequently I think a common tasks in software development that contribute to burnout are defined as: &quot;In this very limited time, go into this completely unfamiliar code and try to fix this bug&#x2F;extend this feature&quot;. All tasks of this sort usually require &quot;understanding&quot; and it is a hard thing to do in a limited time. If you are a time conscious person or a person that is prone to stress, that stuff just burns your soul.

Previously: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19887424" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19887424</a>

For maths and physics lectures, I always got vastly more out of them if I could somehow obtain a summary beforehand and be conscientious enough to read it through. (Similarly, I found the best way to read the Feynman Physics lectures was to read through the published text, then listen to the audio recordings while reading the text. You can do the same with Leonard Susskind&#x27;s Theoretical Minimum physics lectures).

Books work well when they are helping you solve a problem in your life. They are vital in communicatung new concepts and exploring old ones.<p>Who needs to remember more than the general idea of guns, germa, steel or darwinian memes in their life?<p>People who prosper from retaining a broad general knowledge tend to remember it better. I don&#x27;t see the failure to instill articulated memories, people read books they don&#x27;t need to consciously recite.

I can’t recall books verbatim after I read them. My recollections are more holistic and nuanced than that.<p>Just looking at the spine or the cover of a book that I really enjoyed gives me a feeling of connection and strength. That is recall - it’s just not total recall.<p>Total recall is nice too. That’s why I keep the books I read on the shelves in my house.<p>Does the author of TFA not have bookshelves? They are an excellent companion product to books.

Is it worth mentioning that many people <i>enjoy</i> reading books? If you spend 6-9 hours reading a book and you didn&#x27;t particularly enjoy that time, probably your cost-benefit analysis is going to be completely different from the primary intended audience of most books, people who will enjoy reading it.<p>If you don&#x27;t enjoy reading books, you don&#x27;t have to read them.

What about instead of chapters you break books down into concepts. You can then test the reader on the concept by embedding the page number of the immediately following concept into a problem that can be solved through mastery of previously read concept. So smaller chapters with locked physical material. They probably already do it for digital material.

I&#x27;ve found that truly reading something is not a passive activity. To be most effective, I need to frequently reflect; reread; and rephrase, often in written form.<p>Also see the Feynman Technique: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fs.blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;04&#x2F;feynman-technique&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fs.blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;04&#x2F;feynman-technique&#x2F;</a>

Oh, books do work. Take, for example, early reading. No single book will teach a child how to read. One may reinforce letters, or a more advanced one may reinforce words, or later how they are used in sentences, then vocabulary, and so on until a point when the child has developed the skill to read unassisted. One could argue that the entire fiction genre is merely a roundabout way of reinforcing vocabulary (if one is inclined to do a cynical utilitarian take on the knowledge value they provide).<p>Extending from that, it seems a bit presumptuous to assume that a single book might then be able to convey all there is to any topic due to its size (compared to, say, listicles), given that reading itself is one of the most basic skills and one that - as we&#x27;ve seen - cannot generally be taught with a single book.<p>What books can do is expose you to some idea, in some form, so that you can soak up something from it and adopt it into your own mental framework. Pop culture &#x2F; self-help books will often try to &quot;sell&quot; a central idea by showering you with stories and anecdotes (e.g. the 1-2-3 system in parenting books), but if you have the presence of mind to already understand that the examples are merely an attempt to add weight to an argument, then you can quickly summarize the meat (the &quot;1-2-3&quot;, in this case) and think for yourself whether&#x2F;when to apply that technique, vs other techniques that you might learn elsewhere.<p>There&#x27;s a slippery slope in terms of how many core ideas one may pack in a book, vs how many supporting arguments one may add around the core idea. Add too many core ideas and you get something like a dry university textbook. Add too little, and you get books like Malcolm Gladwell. Mind you, having a lot of &quot;frills&quot; doesn&#x27;t necessarily make a book bad. For example, many consider Godel, Escher, Bach to be a great read, even though [spoiler] it can be promptly summarized as an exploration on occurrences of recursiveness (through very colorful allegory). The beauty of GEB is that the supporting stories themselves give you a glimpse of new domains to explore.<p>At the end of the day, just like a library is a collection of disparate nuggets of human knowledge and no one&#x27;s expected to uniformly learn all of it, books are but pieces of an ecosystem, with various degrees of &quot;completeness&quot; (as far as their core subjects go) and various degrees of flair; what one chooses to read or skim, and what they take away individually from each book is what the relationship between humans and books are all about.

Struggle with things, and then attempt to build on them. You don’t need to publicly build, but the act of applying something on top of what you just consumed is how you get the most out of the consumption. In my experience, if something was easily consumed, it end up being a waste of time.

&gt; Listeners’ attention wanders after a few minutes<p>So does readers&#x27; attention. It&#x27;s like he never got to the point. I was expecting some revelation about how he reads books, or how books should be read, or what is a better replacement for books... couldn&#x27;t past a quarter of that post.

If you want to tell me &quot;I tried X, and it doesn&#x27;t work.&quot; My first reaction is, &quot;How did you do X?&quot;<p>I feel author should have also explained how did he read those books.<p>Without knowing that, it&#x27;s hard to see how exactly things didn&#x27;t work.

Or they do work, but you&#x27;re doing it wrong: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;How_to_Read_a_Book" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;How_to_Read_a_Book</a>

“people absorb knowledge by reading sentences”<p>Such a boring take on books.

The best way to learn is one-on-one (given that the teacher&#x2F;mentor knows what he is doing). We all have different processes and need different data to helps us get the big picture or tackle some problems more efficiently (eg: learning an instrument).<p>Unfortunately this approach is way too expensive and doesn&#x27;t scale which is why we have all sorts of tech to distribute knowledge (books, classes, lectures, blogs, videos, etc).<p>I imagine 100 years from now we will have AI teachers that can reproduce the one-on-one experience.

Books are like meals: you enjoy them once and they keep your future self in shape (if you read&#x2F;eat the proper books&#x2F;meals).

Author seems to be surprised in finding out there is no such thing as a free lunch.

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&#x27;s <i>Wealth of Nations</i>: 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.

If you actively apply what you read from books you can remember it better.

... for me

TL&#x2F;DR: The author doesn&#x27;t know how to learn, and rather than admit it and fix that problem, he&#x27;s blaming it on the learning materials instead.

Knowledge is impossible!

In which Andy mostly makes a convincing case for not having learned how to read books.

So is discussing things on HN a good way of consuming knowledge?

This comes off as a dogmatic person who is trying to get at external factor of his life to help them move forward instead of looking inward.<p>I fear this kind of mentality because when you don&#x27;t want to solve your own problems, you will get external forces to fix your problems. Like, say, the government, in the form of passing too many laws.

A book is an inherently introverted medium. I think that&#x27;s the crux of the issue. Please leave books alone. Extroverts have other options: social media, movies, telephones. I&#x27;d rate TV and radio as neutral.

I cannot decide if the author of the article aimed at being pretentious and meta, or he if is a simpleton.