The author seems to spend almost no time engaging with or thinking critically about the books that he’s read, and then claims that “books don’t work”. Has the author tried writing an outline? Or writing a review?
Simply reading a book, and letting its contents wash over you won’t magically make you retain the contents of that book. There is no royal road to knowledge. One has to engage with a book in order to retain not just the conclusions of the book, but also the reasoning that led to the conclusions.
I don’t think the author disagrees all that much with you. I’m reading his claim as something more like “the default attitude (some) people have towards reading does not set them up for good learning”.
In the essay, he acknowledges the role that effort and metacognition play in making the actual learning happen. The actionable parts I found useful were at the end where he was hypothesizing about improved mediums, e.g. an online textbook with spaced repetition built in to facilitate recall.
There is no royal road to knowledge. One has to engage with a book in order to retain not just the conclusions of the book, but also the reasoning that led to the conclusions.
But what if there was? Certainly with hard work and deep reading, you can learn a good amount from books. However, the central point of the piece is that this is not the optimal way to learn. What if with other mediums you can have a lot of this work done for you, learning more material in less time?
More seriously, I would love for there to be a better way to learn than books, but in practice, books inhabit a sweet spot at the intersection of information density, ease of searching, and portability that’s hard for other forms of media to match.
The author seems to spend almost no time engaging with or thinking critically about the books that he’s read, and then claims that “books don’t work”. Has the author tried writing an outline? Or writing a review?
Simply reading a book, and letting its contents wash over you won’t magically make you retain the contents of that book. There is no royal road to knowledge. One has to engage with a book in order to retain not just the conclusions of the book, but also the reasoning that led to the conclusions.
I don’t think the author disagrees all that much with you. I’m reading his claim as something more like “the default attitude (some) people have towards reading does not set them up for good learning”.
In the essay, he acknowledges the role that effort and metacognition play in making the actual learning happen. The actionable parts I found useful were at the end where he was hypothesizing about improved mediums, e.g. an online textbook with spaced repetition built in to facilitate recall.
But what if there was? Certainly with hard work and deep reading, you can learn a good amount from books. However, the central point of the piece is that this is not the optimal way to learn. What if with other mediums you can have a lot of this work done for you, learning more material in less time?
If wishes were horses, all men would ride.
More seriously, I would love for there to be a better way to learn than books, but in practice, books inhabit a sweet spot at the intersection of information density, ease of searching, and portability that’s hard for other forms of media to match.