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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
by hacknat 6y ago
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.
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.
- ginko 6y agoWhat does this have to do with "Western" culture?
- hacknat 6y agoWestern culture seems to suffer from collective ADHD. People expect small morsels of information/experience to give them much and people eschew deeper, longer, more meaningful experiences. I could go on.
- ginko 6y agoWhat is particularly Western about this? And compared to what? Do you just mean modern culture?
- hacknat 6y agoIt may be more than a Western phenomena, I don't know. My experience is with Western culture though. I wasn't trying to implicitly compare Western culture to some idealized other culture, I was trying to limit the scope of my critique based on my limited knowledge of the world.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoModern culture might be a more apt term—but an alternate viewpoint would be, people living in huts in rural Africa probably don't have this problem. Then again, of course, I'm sure that applies to plenty of people in the western hemisphere as well. So, I think it could be argued that the term "western culture" is a misnomer in general, and maybe even a problematic one—but I don't think GP was out of line with common usage.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoEmbracing mediocrity and anti-intellectualism. It boils down to "X is too hard. Give me something less challenging."
- aoeusnth1 6y agoThe author is explicitly advocating for a longer, more meaningful experiences. He’s arguing that the way most people consume books leave them with a cursory understanding and a few hours of entertainment.
- tremon 6y agoWhat's your point? Are you trying to argue that the East-Coast culture of New York is similarly to blame?
- ginko 6y agoGP didn't specify, but I assume they meant the global West in general and not just the West-Coast.
- kixiQu 6y agoTo clarify (agreeing with ginko) this seems like a very arbitrary selection of thing to make this post represent. On the surface it seems just as justifiable to say, "people from X nation" or "men" or "people named Andy"--unless you present further evidence of the link.
- TheUndead96 6y agoI agree. The anti-book sentiment has felt quite strong lately, and this article is another example. I think people feel subconsciously guilty that they do not read more. It is thus easier to dismiss books than to acknowledge the fact that most attention spans have been reduced the the granularity of a comment thread. We are all victims to this. Reading a book takes more effort than it used to. I fear that most people have already read the last book they will complete in their lifetime (not that completing a book is necessary in deriving value from it).
- ghaff 6y agoI think that post comes from the same place as comments demanding that longer form articles come with a paragraph abstract and that books should be summarized in a few pages. Because their valuable time is consumed with writing new ad-tech code or whatever. It's an efficiency above all else mindset.
- liability 6y ago> Reading a book takes more effort than it used to. I agree with most of your points but not this one. The proliferation of audio books and text-to-speech (TTS) has made reading books easier than ever. Particularly TTS in my case; I can read an eBook visually for a few hours, then switch to TTS for a while to give my eyes a break, and in this way easily marathon books. Once you are accustomed to TTS you can turn the speed up very fast. I tune the speed on the fly to compensate for mental fatigue to maintain a consistent level of comprehension; when I'm 'in the groove' I can comfortably set TTS to around 750wpm. I can read visually faster than that, but only in a 'sprint', not with endurance. (I find that for finishing a book quick, it's better to be a tortoise than a hare.) I read nonfiction and fiction like this. Math heavy texts aren't well suited for it, nor books with many charts and tables, but except for a few cases like that it's very adaptable. Modern TTS even handles weird names in fantasy novels surprisingly well.
- keenmaster 6y ago750 wpm is extremely high. I hit 420 wpm on low complexity texts and slow down to 380 wpm at higher complexity using TTS. However, which TTS voice I use has a huge impact. Are you using one of those fancy AI TTS voices with cloud processing?
- bla3 6y agoThe attitude in this post is “I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I don't really remember what I read”.
- hacknat 6y ago> 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 collapse That to me doesn't sound like someone complaining about not remembering what they read, but someone complaining that they can't backup the arguments that they now consider their own. Books aren't meant to transfer the author's knowledge to the reader they're meant to offer an abstraction of the author's knowledge to the reader. The writer of this post has no trouble remembering the abstraction, but without more effort the abstraction cannot be backed up. In order to really make knowledge your own you have to do serious work. You can't just read one book.
- watwut 6y agoThe proper conclusion from that is that the book is bad. If you are reading fourth similar book and all sux proper conclusion is that I need to select books differently. Or read to learn differently. (Because most reading is not to learn). If we were in situation where many people rarely learn from books then conclusion would make sense. But authors examples are all fairly in same category - pop famous edutainment. Maybe selfish gene sux at teaching. But it is apparently good entertainment and did a lot to popularize that part of biology and evolution. It worked in that sense for many people.
- amatic 6y agoI had a very different reading of the article. The author acknowledges that books do work after the reader actively engages with the topic, does the exercises, rereads, etc. The issue is that this process of transmitting knowledge could be more efficient in a different medium. The post is not against books, but pro interactive teaching methods, as the author gives a link to his proposal https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc
- grawprog 6y agoI agree with this. I read the top comments before the article and went in totally expecting someone just dismissing books as useless, by the end though, I got the same takeaway as you, the author was stating the need to immerse yourself in a subject to truly learn it and that hastily reading through a single book on a subject is not something you should expect to give you full understanding of it. Not that books are useless or you shouldn't read them.
- mindcrime 6y agoI agree with this. I read the top comments before the article and went in totally expecting someone just dismissing books as useless, by the end though, I got the same takeaway as you, I think part of the problem is that the author of TFA sorta "buried the lede" and didn't really get to the point until very near the end. I suspect a lot of people got bored and quit reading before that point. Honestly, I did, and it wasn't until my second reading that I got what he was saying near the end, which is admittedly a somewhat different take.
- starfallg 6y agoIsn't the title pure clickbait then? "Books work, but they're not the complete solution" is a much better title, but then us as the audience don't need to read a multi-page Medium article type rant to know that.
- grawprog 6y agoPretty much, it's also vague and ambiguous to begin with. My first question even just seeing it was, work with what? Being HN, I figured it to be something related to programming or something rather just a general acknowledgement that 'learning takes time' To be honest, you could replace 'book' with 'video', 'article', 'podcast' or any other medium people learn from and the article could stand pretty much as is and give the same general point. The whole article could probably be more effectively re-written with the focus on time and learning, using different media as well as books as an example and make the point stronger. By choosing books as a focus, the author loses the main point and doesn't really get to it until the end, making the article, as you and other commenters pointed out, ranty and a slog to read through.
- rtx 6y ago>Books aren’t supposed to teach you something to know, they’re meant to teach you how much you don’t know. I read about a similar concept few years ago. https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/ https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/
- austinl 6y agoPeople also expect too much after reading a book just once. Reading a book once isn't enough to make a lasting impression, if you're able to remember anything at all — especially for a complex book like Thinking, Fast and Slow. The books I truly love, I've read at least three times, with pages full of highlights and notes. Re-reading a great book is worth more than reading the latest trends. Seneca wrote a bit about this nearly 2000 years ago: Be careful, however, that there is no element of discursiveness and desultoriness about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind.
- Bodell 6y agoI often quote this line from Nabokov “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” [1] Also, these books mentioned, as all non-fiction books do, include a bibliography. If someone wants to learn more, they simply should read more. We can’t expect any device, book or otherwise, to do the work for us. If someone is not getting what they want out of it, I would suggest that they work harder. “I believe that learning at its best is the antithesis of comfort.” Ruth J. Simmons, 18th president of Brown University. [2] [1] http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.html http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.htm... [2] https://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2001-02/01-014t.html https://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2001-02/01-...
- ZainRiz 6y agoWhat you're describing is part of the point the author is making
- mark_l_watson 6y agoI think that you are correct on the value of reading a book twice. I have a shortcut that still gives some of the multiple reading value: when I am reading a book on Kindle/PDF/etc. I hilite useful snippets. When I want a refresher on a book that I previously read, I start by just reading the hilited snippets and sometimes this is sufficient to remind myself what I need to know.
- coffeefirst 6y agoI've happily never met a person in real life who both views books as a means to an end like this AND expects them to just dump understanding into their memories like installing an app. This is bizarre, mistaking both what a book should "do" and why you want to read it in the first place. I don't know where this idea comes from, but as far as I can tell it's specific to a niche of software engineers. Fortunately, they are far outnumbered by people who love books, buy them, read them, share them, put them on bookshelves, and would generally think this article is profoundly silly.
- acephal 6y agoThis. If you want to know what instantaneous knowledge transfer looks like you just have to look at how ideas commute via Twitter/Facebook memes, which is largely a reification of word-of-mouth. On a certain level, actual learning requires active participation: you have to want to learn. Learning disrupts your entire world and that's kinda the point. The idea of frictionless learning seems fanciful. You can say you're shortening the feedback look in a multimedia text, but the desire to learn in my experience starts very early in life and is a fragile thing to cultivate. The author is trying to pour water out of a sinking ship with a bucket. You want people to want to learn, get rid of common CORE with basically tells all the kids who don't have STEM proficiencies or can match pace with its demands, "good luck with life" There are gigantic swathes of people, the people most in need, who'd already be daunted merely opening the author's marketed multimedia text they wrote at the sight of the math equation. You're already introducing something terribly new and threatening, threatening to the sureness of the reader's ego, which, again, is why people learn easiest from toxic, context-less memes.
- systemvoltage 6y agoWhat's this have to do with the West?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SftwrSvior81 6y agoI agree with your point wholeheartedly. This makes me think of "knowledge transfers" in software companies where a meeting is set up between the outgoing engineer/team and the new engineer/team where all knowledge about some project is transferred in the duration of that meeting. For the participating engineers, it's usually clear that this doesn't work but management still expects the new team to be able to basically pick up where the old team left off. If we were able to transfer knowledge gained over months or years of work within a few hours, we would revolutionize scientific advancement and the education industry. Maybe one day that will be possible but for now it is ridiculous to think that reading any kind of complex information once is sufficient to not only memorize it but to truly understand it.
- sammorrowdrums 6y agoYes, I cannot personally fathom the appeal of things like Blinkist. "Get explainers of insights from 3,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles. Free 7-day trial. It takes just 15 mins to read or listen to the key insights from bestselling nonfiction. Audio and Text. Insights in 15 minutes." Personally I recoil in horror at their marketing as an "app for intellectuals". Genuinely, deep diving is frequently required. Summaries by their nature lack nuance. I want to read the nuance. I want to give the author the chance to get their point across. I want to read all the footnotes, maybe lookup things in the bibliography. I don't think anyone I know to be what I'd call an intellectual simply listens to summaries of books. It's sort of anti-intillectual to do that indeed.
- mistermann 6y agoI'd say it depends on your purposes. The entirety of human knowledge is incredibly vast, even within some individual fields. I'm extremely interested in shallow but broad summaries of ideas, in order to compile a kind of inventory of ideas that are out there, so that if I encounter something interesting while reading, I then have a better chance of having knowledge of pre-existing knowledge that I can dig down into if I'm particularly interested in a particular idea.
- pell 6y agoI have a special distaste for their advertising scheme. Daily I will see ads claiming "Blinkist is the new hype in Berlin", "The app that all CEOs use", "The company that's harder to get into than Harvard", etc. We get it, it's Cliff Notes in an app.
- dynamite-ready 6y agoThinking of it another way, the author is challenging the efficacy of learning from books, which is actually a pertinent point to make in a post GPT3 world. But, tbf, the author doesn't make that specific point. So long as I am able, I will always try to find time to read something new. Especially from books. I can't be precise about this point, but I seriously believe that the kind of information that can be conveyed in a book, cannot be communicated any other way. I think it's fair to discuss what can be gleaned from a single reading of a book, but there can never be any question of just how much can be communicated by a book, and how much can be learnt from one. The advent of cinema, and even personal computing, has only served to show how essential a technology the written word is. It's going to take a very radical piece of technology to improve on it. One that we probably won't see in our time.
- wakawaka1 6y agoI totally agree. A person must learn actively while reading: - By taking notes - By summarizing important/difficult to understand sections in their own words via writing - By looking up and exploring alternative explanations of complex idea, and following the two aforementioned avenues towards solidifying one's understanding Rinse & repeat. Reading != Learning. Reading is more of a casual perusal of knowledge, when one isn't actively engaged in the above 3 ways mentioned (or other strategies to absorb the knowledge presented in a book or other compendium of information) Learning = actively engaging with subject matter with a strong intention to understand and even memorize when necessary.