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>> I dare say that someone that's read a book about, say, any given historical era or person, h Usually history books are on the one hand, so full of details t
by minthd 11y ago
>> I dare say that someone that's read a book about, say, any given historical era or person, h
Usually history books are on the one hand, so full of details that you'll probably never remember, and on the other hand, rarely condense the context and present patterns and abstractions of the issue .
And unlike technical books , they are pretty awful at just-in-time learning(like just answering a specific question about history), which is an important mode of learning/knowing.
So if you count in long-term understanding and general usefulness, most historical books aren't that great.
- saturdaysaint 11y agoSo are you saying the Wikipedia reader might have a stronger grasp of historical subjects? I chose history because it's dense on details, so a decent measure of a medium's ability to impart deep knowledge of a domain - a strongly written narrative is thus a powerful tool for bringing together a deluge of facts and figures in a comprehensible and memorable way. And whether or not "most" history books are unreadable is irrelevant to the savvy reader, because the internet has also made it exceedingly easy to find the best books on any subject written by people highly skilled at putting together the most memorable and insightful narrative with the most relevant, up-to-date facts.
- minthd 11y agoIf we're talking about mediums for history,not sure about wikipedia, but i think an high-quality, high volume forum witha good search , like reddit.com/r/askhistorians [1] is a great one , better than books in many cases. And yes, maybe some books solve this, but it's very rare as far as i've noticed. There's something about books, also evident in non-fiction that makes people write too much unneeded stuff. [1]It's far better to search this forum using google, using site:reddit.com/r/askhistorians
- saturdaysaint 11y agoThanks for the recommendation but haven't you just pointed me to a forum of heavy book readers? Every top answer I've read cites a book or a long form journal article as its source. If you wanted to know one specific thing, I'm sure this is a great resource (sincerely: thanks!), but I doubt the posters themselves would recommend their own posts over the authoritative books they cite if you wanted to develop anything like deep knowledge on a given topic. This might be a great place to start, but if you actually wanted to make your own deep connections about history or substantial ideas or wanted to understand the economic/cultural/political/technical origins of well anything, I'm astounded that people think they can cobble that from websites, let alone ones that are decidedly not long form.