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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 pos
by Causality1 8y ago
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.
- andymatuschak 8y agoAuthor here; this is a great point and I’m grateful for it. Maybe we shouldn’t expect to absorb such knowledge! That said, if the theory is that books’ knowledge is absorbed through concrete use, why is the book so uninvolved with facilitating or interleaving with that concrete use? I’d suggest the impetus and regulation of the concrete use (and its relationship to the book) is all on the reader. Does that align with your thinking?
- Causality1 8y agoCertainly, and the same applies to other types of media. I can tell you that approaching a classroom lecture that doesn't involve homework or testing, like a free online lecture, with the same casual attitude as one reads a mildly interesting book will give you the same failure to retain the information. I know this because I've done it many times myself.