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? I’ll be honest: it happens to me regularly. Often things go well at first. I’ll feel I can sketch the basic claims, paint the surface; but when someone asks a basic probing question, the edifice instantly collapses. Sometimes it’s a memory issue: I simply can’t recall the relevant details. But just as often, as I grasp about, I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea in question, though I’d certainly thought I understood when I read the book. Indeed, I’ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment.
…All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.
I think that there are two groups to blame: readers and writers.
As Matuschak points out, readers do not read actively enough. I have pointed out that I read a nonfiction book with an eye toward reviewing it. As I read, I am thinking in terms of summarizing each idea in my own words and of coming up with a critique.
Book authors pad too much. Sometimes, I will finish writing a book review and say to myself, “If people read this review, they don’t have to read the book.”
In my opinion, the educational return on investment for the consumer is highest on essays and blog posts. Books are next.
Podcasts are difficult to compare with written materials. One of their advantages is that you can listen while doing something that keeps you from reading, which means that the opportunity cost can be low. Another advantage is that sometimes a conversation is more stimulating than a monologue. But when you could be reading, that is more likely to be educational than listening to a podcast.
One thing about books is that a lot of effort goes into them. Authors spend time working on them. Editors spend time screening them. Editors and others spend time making suggestions about them.
Another thing about books is that they are focal. People can use heuristics like “What are the best-selling books”? or “Who are the authors I’ve heard of?” But even if you do that, before you read the book you should search for an essay by the author that is based on or is the basis for the book.
My guess is that writers could contribute more at the margin by blogging than by composing books. But perhaps blogging is a more difficult skill.
One problem that most people have with books is that it takes too much effort to take notes about the book they are reading that they can review later to refresh and refine their memory and understanding of the book’s themes and major points.
For readers who use a Kindle to read their books, Readwise ( https://readwise.io/ ) is an excellent resource that allows you easily to highlight portions of the book you are reading, tag them, and annotate notes to them.
Then, each day, Readwise sends you an email with a dozen or so excerpts from books that you have read (as well as books that Readwise thinks that you would be interested in reading). You can also jump on the Readwise site and review your excerpts randomly, by tag, or by book. It’s a great way to recall the important points of a book.
I have been using Readwise for over a year now and have accumulated a large database of notes. It’s fun to be able to jump into that database at any time and read portions of books that I have read. I highly recommend Kindle readers to check out the service.
Books are both too much work and too little. Perhaps reverting to a system in which the author handwrites the original and every further copy requires a scribe to invest his time would be better – padding would be diminished. Meanwhile, twitter can capture most of the value in the average self-help book. Let the author find his audience in that format and we can all be spared the book.
The essay states: ” 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.” Teachers back in the day encouraged students to mark up the books they read and make notes in the margin. Used textbooks these days seem to still be full of markings and highlightings. And even e-book readers typically have note functions and highlighting, that even a decripit geezer like me can learn to use. So I am not at all sure that most readers are not engaging effectively.
Blogs, however, that offer commenting seem to have a pronounced advantage in attracting readers who are prone to commenting. Commenting would seem to be a form of deploying metacognition. And as a bonus, the give and take among commenters sometimes provides a socratic exchange that clarifies and deepens understanding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson encouraged people to keep journals and I imagine journaling one’s thoughts about what one read increased the amount of metacognition involved in engaging with books. It is a probably still an excellent recommendation, especially for those disinclined to throwing off thoughts into the public sphere of a comments section.
One enemy of engagement is the promotion of “increasing awareness”as an ideal for creators. This is the worst form of transmissionism for both creators and consumers. Invariably whenever a creator announces their work is intended to “increase awareness” the work itself turns out to be slop. Create what you want to create and stick your assumptions about others’ ignorance away somewhere out of sight, would be my personal advice.
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I found his argument pretty compelling, though I would argue that his criticism of books is true of most any medium. I have a pretty good memory, but watching Avengers: Endgame I was reminded of all sorts of things that I had seen before but struck me as “oh, yeah. Right!” moments. (Did you remember that in Ultron Captain America got the hammer to move a bit? Do you realize how important that was to the history of the Universe!?!).
The same is true of pretty much any television series I’ve ever watched — I sat through every episode of Breaking Bad I don’t recall most of the details unless prompted.
I’ve watched endless hours of NCAA basketball and couldn’t tell you who was in the final four these past two years, though I remember lots of details about my alma mater’s deep runs in the tournament.
And if you asked me to solve for a three-firm Cournot equilibrium with heterogeneous costs I would probably muddle through that, too, even though I’ve actively solved 1 zillion problems like that.
Matuschak’s overly broad argument cannot reasonably called compelling — art sucks because making Art is hard?
This kind of sour-grapes argument should be completely expected by someone who confuses tendentious prolixity with writing, as Kling rightly points out.
To be fair to Matuschak, he seems to deeply care, it’s just that he’s been too long in the trenches, and has forgotten what makes reading enjoyable in the first place.
Watch Sal Khan do math problems on Khan Academy. It looks simple and you’ll think that you’ll be able to breeze through the problems, until you have to actually do the problems yourself.
The books that I’ve grokked the best are ones that I’ve had to give a presentation for in something similar to a Toastmasters speech. It forces me to read carefully, take a few notes, make some bookmarks, then synthesize the ideas in to something coherent and interesting.
Personal theory about non-fiction books (based on very little): many people read them before they go to sleep, and the next night, they pick up where they left off — but to absorb the material, you would need to go back and review the content you read as you were nodding off.
I wonder what retention would look like if the norm were to read a non-fiction book for 30 minutes first thing in the morning, or what retention looks like among such readers.
Copious note taking in non-fiction is almost unbeatable for truly understanding what an author is trying to convey- also add in a quick reread after the first run through.
I read far fewer non-fiction books today than I read even 10 years ago when I was still working, but I still use the same process of taking notes when I do. When it was assigned reading for classes, I used the same process for fiction, but not otherwise. Textbooks are a bit different in that pretty much any science text is going to have a problem solving section, and I always do the problem solving sections- that serves as my notation.
I never listen to podcasts, wait for the white paper instead.
In college we had some texts that were industry standard in some STME topics. You could only proceed if you kept the books and constantly referred back to them. Knuth books on the art of programming was one of those, it had a quick reference to the most common algorithms and their modifications. Morrison and Boyd I always remember held the biochemistry text monopoly. This continues in graduate school with some very specialized texts becoming industry references.
I guess the term here might be Reference, not book. Do texts qualify as books?
And what about links in the Internet, they are any to any connectors from book to book. So it changes the reading order. I read a paragraph of Hagel, got a commonly accepted synopsis, but only because it was referenced in another page of the internet. But I understood better because the source of the link gave me context.
Then there is the classic fictions that generate idioms and sayings for long after their current popularity. Shakespeare comes to mind. This is me, trying to find the ordering of this generic term, ‘book’. It seems to me the media is not the message, the message is impact, does content imply classic truths worth remembering?
Example. There was a STEM class I took, got the basics, not much more. But the text was a classic, still is and on the internet. I can go right back to that text, even as I think about it, I can recreate the blury image I need, know right where in the book to find it. That book, I won’t mention as there are many like it, is on the web, linked. That means we are talking about something different than 40 years ago. This book, on the web, links me back to school, I get the blurry class where taught, where I mostly sat. So, give me a few clues today, like a link in context back to the book, and I can have the “Oh yea” moment, and ‘remember’ the lecture, blury, on the day it was discussed.
The remembering is all about recreating with these external aids, book, whatever they are; like signposts we put up in public to aid our ability to recreate an action.
Having read Michael Nielson’s Anki review (http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html) my friend and I started experimenting with Anki specifically in the context of summarizing non-fiction books. It has been over a year since we started and each of us ankified 10-15 books by now. I can’t recommend it enough, I merely wish I started doing this earlier.
Now, if a book that I read over 6 months ago comes up in a conversation I can recall, discuss and explore the ideas that I found to be the most insightful at the time when I was reading it. This was most certainly not the case prior to Anki.
There too many benefits to Anki to go over here (see Nielson). But for one thing, to ankify something in an ask-and-answer form you must express the idea yourself, which forces you into clarity and tests your understanding. That by itself forces you to engage with the book, and then you have a tool to help you retain that engagement and incorporate it into your overall body of knowledge.