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Oh, books do work. Take, for example, early reading. No single book will teach a child how to read. One may reinforce letters, or a more advanced one may reinfo

by lhorie 6y ago

Oh, books do work. Take, for example, early reading. No single book will teach a child how to read. One may reinforce letters, or a more advanced one may reinforce words, or later how they are used in sentences, then vocabulary, and so on until a point when the child has developed the skill to read unassisted. One could argue that the entire fiction genre is merely a roundabout way of reinforcing vocabulary (if one is inclined to do a cynical utilitarian take on the knowledge value they provide). Extending from that, it seems a bit presumptuous to assume that a single book might then be able to convey all there is to any topic due to its size (compared to, say, listicles), given that reading itself is one of the most basic skills and one that - as we've seen - cannot generally be taught with a single book. What books can do is expose you to some idea, in some form, so that you can soak up something from it and adopt it into your own mental framework. Pop culture / self-help books will often try to "sell" a central idea by showering you with stories and anecdotes (e.g. the 1-2-3 system in parenting books), but if you have the presence of mind to already understand that the examples are merely an attempt to add weight to an argument, then you can quickly summarize the meat (the "1-2-3", in this case) and think for yourself whether/when to apply that technique, vs other techniques that you might learn elsewhere. There's a slippery slope in terms of how many core ideas one may pack in a book, vs how many supporting arguments one may add around the core idea. Add too many core ideas and you get something like a dry university textbook. Add too little, and you get books like Malcolm Gladwell. Mind you, having a lot of "frills" doesn't necessarily make a book bad. For example, many consider Godel, Escher, Bach to be a great read, even though [spoiler] it can be promptly summarized as an exploration on occurrences of recursiveness (through very colorful allegory). The beauty of GEB is that the supporting stories themselves give you a glimpse of new domains to explore. At the end of the day, just like a library is a collection of disparate nuggets of human knowledge and no one's expected to uniformly learn all of it, books are but pieces of an ecosystem, with various degrees of "completeness" (as far as their core subjects go) and various degrees of flair; what one chooses to read or skim, and what they take away individually from each book is what the relationship between humans and books are all about.

jfarmer 6y ago
The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it shows just what the bottleneck in "learning" from any kind of text is. QCVC periodically inserts spaced repetition exercises that prompt the reader to recall arbitrary facts about what they just read. The authors even seem to be aware that mere mnemonics won't be enough, e.g., when they write: > I am, by the way, somewhat uncomfortable with some of the questions just asked. My personal experience is that spaced-repetition learning works well when learning facts I have a lot of context for, and care a lot about. It’s a rare person who finds the detailed entries in a unitary matrix fascinating! That’s not to say they aren’t – actually, they are, but you need a lot more context than I’ve provided to see why (for instance) that -i−i in the YY is just so darn interesting. Is lack of recall the problem or a symptom of the problem? If we want to learn about ants, should we start by drilling a million ant facts? Focus on building recall around all the categories of ants and their geography? Sorry, why do we care about Hadamard gates? All the "fixes" to this are squarely in the domain of books-as-books: better organization, better scaffolding, better sequencing of concepts, etc.
- judofyr 6y ago
  > The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it shows just what the bottleneck in "learning" from any kind of text is. I think Quantum Country is extremely well made and an interesting idea, but come on: The idea of interspersing text with exercises is hardly revolutionary. In physics (which is my background) a regular textbook consists of chapters which each present a smaller topic followed by a bunch of exercises you should solve. The way you work through the book is by solving the exercises. Everyone knows that just reading the text is not enough. The author usually writes explicitly in the introduction that "the only way to learn this is to work through the exercises". A good book will have exercises which require understanding a mixture of the earlier chapters as well. Most of the exercises will focuses on what's new in _this_ chapter, but suddenly you need calculate some "basic" formula that was presented early on. Textbooks don't use spaced-repetition as described by SuperMemo, but they use many similar techniques. The page you linked to is enormous (91 pages printed it seems; although that's with a pretty big font) and looking through it seems to have 17 "exercises" and that is including some very basic ones as "What's the standard notation for the NOT gate?". How can they claim that it's not "learning from text" when they have a way bigger text-to-exercise ratio than any textbook I've read?

by lhorie 6y ago

jfarmer 6y ago

The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it shows just what the bottleneck in "learning" from any kind of text is. QCVC periodically inserts spaced repetition exercises that prompt the reader to recall arbitrary facts about what they just read. The authors even seem to be aware that mere mnemonics won't be enough, e.g., when they write: > I am, by the way, somewhat uncomfortable with some of the questions just asked. My personal experience is that spaced-repetition learning works well when learning facts I have a lot of context for, and care a lot about. It’s a rare person who finds the detailed entries in a unitary matrix fascinating! That’s not to say they aren’t – actually, they are, but you need a lot more context than I’ve provided to see why (for instance) that -i−i in the YY is just so darn interesting. Is lack of recall the problem or a symptom of the problem? If we want to learn about ants, should we start by drilling a million ant facts? Focus on building recall around all the categories of ants and their geography? Sorry, why do we care about Hadamard gates? All the "fixes" to this are squarely in the domain of books-as-books: better organization, better scaffolding, better sequencing of concepts, etc.

judofyr 6y ago
> The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it shows just what the bottleneck in "learning" from any kind of text is. I think Quantum Country is extremely well made and an interesting idea, but come on: The idea of interspersing text with exercises is hardly revolutionary. In physics (which is my background) a regular textbook consists of chapters which each present a smaller topic followed by a bunch of exercises you should solve. The way you work through the book is by solving the exercises. Everyone knows that just reading the text is not enough. The author usually writes explicitly in the introduction that "the only way to learn this is to work through the exercises". A good book will have exercises which require understanding a mixture of the earlier chapters as well. Most of the exercises will focuses on what's new in _this_ chapter, but suddenly you need calculate some "basic" formula that was presented early on. Textbooks don't use spaced-repetition as described by SuperMemo, but they use many similar techniques. The page you linked to is enormous (91 pages printed it seems; although that's with a pretty big font) and looking through it seems to have 17 "exercises" and that is including some very basic ones as "What's the standard notation for the NOT gate?". How can they claim that it's not "learning from text" when they have a way bigger text-to-exercise ratio than any textbook I've read?