4 ms·

I see that this is the author of the excellent "Quantum Country" so perhaps the case being made here is obviously biased, for a good reason. I get a sense that

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

mathnmusic 6y ago
> shift this burden to the medium This is beautifully expressed. Knowledge consists of connections across concepts but those connections are rarely shown explicitly in textbooks. Even wikipedia, while allowing you to traverse the connections back and forth easily, does not do a great job of giving you the bird's eye view of a subject or a field. Check out this "map" of mathematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y Every subject needs a similar map. Besides visualizing the connections, we'd also need interactivity to the topic that helps with forming new mental models - which is the core aspect of learning. Jupyter notebooks, ObservableHQ, Mathigon are some of the good projects working on this aspect. Disclaimer: I am building the open-source project https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/ https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/ which is attempting to build the complete map of knowledge/skills. So I too am biased against books and in favor of digital/interactive tools.
- activatedgeek 6y ago
  > Check out this "map" of mathematics: ... Every subject needs a similar map. I often find this sort of approach to be rather counter-productive. If I am learning something, I'd be happy with my local part of the graph, the things that I specifically care about. It is much easier to make multi-hop connections in knowledge when one is really familiar with their local knowledge cluster. I, for one, find an absolute knowledge graph of everything quite intimidating and feel lost in the sea. LearnAwesome looks interesting. Good luck!
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    An actual map (navigable, instead of a presentation) would be kinda of as useful as a world map. You can look at it and say "This time I'll travel here!", and get an idea of what the travel would require.

mathnmusic 6y ago

> shift this burden to the medium This is beautifully expressed. Knowledge consists of connections across concepts but those connections are rarely shown explicitly in textbooks. Even wikipedia, while allowing you to traverse the connections back and forth easily, does not do a great job of giving you the bird's eye view of a subject or a field. Check out this "map" of mathematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y Every subject needs a similar map. Besides visualizing the connections, we'd also need interactivity to the topic that helps with forming new mental models - which is the core aspect of learning. Jupyter notebooks, ObservableHQ, Mathigon are some of the good projects working on this aspect. Disclaimer: I am building the open-source project https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/ https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/ which is attempting to build the complete map of knowledge/skills. So I too am biased against books and in favor of digital/interactive tools.

activatedgeek 6y ago
> Check out this "map" of mathematics: ... Every subject needs a similar map. I often find this sort of approach to be rather counter-productive. If I am learning something, I'd be happy with my local part of the graph, the things that I specifically care about. It is much easier to make multi-hop connections in knowledge when one is really familiar with their local knowledge cluster. I, for one, find an absolute knowledge graph of everything quite intimidating and feel lost in the sea. LearnAwesome looks interesting. Good luck!
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  An actual map (navigable, instead of a presentation) would be kinda of as useful as a world map. You can look at it and say "This time I'll travel here!", and get an idea of what the travel would require.