Why Books Don’t Work

Author: Andy Matuschak URL: https://andymatuschak.org/books/ One-line: Books and lectures fail as knowledge-conveying mediums for the same reason — both implicitly assume Transmissionism (you absorb knowledge by reading/hearing sentences), a model that’s plainly false; the fix isn’t better books but new mediums designed “out of” ideas about how people actually learn.

Key Takeaways

Kyle’s own takeaways from the read, preserved.

• The ways we learn are not nearly well understood. There is a lot of Self-Reflection that ought to occur in everyone’s life to best identify their learning preferences. #Multiple Intelligences
• Learning is a skill that is honed and practiced — an idea that does not receive enough attention. You can only get good at Metacognition if you practice. As Matuschak puts it: “I spend a lot of time thinking about why knowledge workers don’t spend very much time thinking about knowledge work.”
• There is an opportunity to invent new mediums that can be as impactful as books originally were. TikTok-style education could be a revolutionary form of learning (e.g. the reason Camden likes sharonsayso on Instagram).

Highlights

Learning

• Understanding that we don’t “absorb knowledge by reading sentences.”
• Lectures, as a medium, have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation. Yet if we were aliens observing typical lectures from afar, we might notice the implicit model they appear to share: “the lecturer says words describing an idea; the class hears the words and maybe scribbles in a notebook; then the class understands the idea.” In learning sciences, we call this model “Transmissionism.” It’s the notion that knowledge can be directly transmitted from teacher to student, like transcribing text from one page onto another. If only! The idea is so thoroughly discredited that “transmissionism” is only used pejoratively, in reference to naive historical teaching practices. Or as an ad-hominem in juicy academic spats.

Mediums of Education #Multiple Intelligences

• Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false.

  Kyle: We don’t spend enough time thinking about the proper modes of learning that best fit the person.

• To illustrate what I mean, I’ll try to draw on your own learning experiences. You’ve probably discovered that certain strategies help you absorb new ideas: solving interesting problems, writing chapter summaries, doing creative projects, etc. Whatever strategies you prefer, they’re not magic. There’s a reason they work (when they do): they’re leveraging some underlying truth about your cognition—about the way you think and learn. In many cases, the truth is not just about your cognition but about human cognition in general.

Metacognition

• “Even if readers know how to do all these things, the process is quite taxing. Readers must juggle both the content of the book and also all these meta-questions. People particularly struggle to multitask like this when the content is unfamiliar.”
• By shouldering some of readers’ self-monitoring and regulation, these authors’ efforts can indeed lighten the metacognitive burden. But Metacognition is an inherently dynamic process, evolving continuously as readers’ own conceptions evolve. Books are static. Prose can frame or stimulate readers’ thoughts, but prose can’t behave or respond to those thoughts as they unfold in each reader’s head. The reader must plan and steer their own feedback loops.

  Kyle: Knowing what questions to ask represents a metacognitive skillset, and it’s not easy for most people.

• Readers must decide which exercises to do and when. Readers must run their own feedback loops: did they clearly understand the ideas involved in the exercise? If not, what should they do next? What should students do if they’re completely stuck? Some issues are subtler. For example, textbook exercises are often designed to yield both a solution to that specific problem and also broader insights about the subject. Will readers notice if they solved a problem but missed the insights it was supposed to reveal?

Courses handle SOME of the cognitive load #Syllabus 2.0

Courses provide things books and lectures don’t:

• Scope and sequence
• Feedback on exercises (individually and class-wide discussion)
• Office hours for specific support
• Review sessions
• Social learning — Class discussions support social learning: students understand topics more deeply by grappling with their peers’ understandings of the same ideas.
• Access to an expert — Courses can provide a personal relationship with a disciplinary expert, a rich conduit for accessing the discipline’s culture.
• Accountability structure — “Courses offer a helpful accountability structure, playing an important role in supporting their willpower.”
• Emotional salience — Seeing the passion of both the instructor or the prose of the material can inspire a student.

  Kyle: Sapiens didn’t say anything new, but it spoke with an “authorial voice” — it struck people’s passion.

Books 2.0 #Open Source Knowledge

• So let’s reframe the question. Rather than “how might we make books actually work reliably,” we can ask: How might we design mediums which do the job of a non-fiction book—but which actually work reliably?
• “The form is made out of ideas about logic.”
• How might we design a medium so that its “grain” bends in line with how people think and learn? So that by simply engaging with an author’s work in the medium one would automatically do what’s necessary to understand?
• Some characteristics:
  • Spaced Repetition: Helping people encode more into long-term memory. “So maybe part of ‘what’s necessary to understand’ something is that most of its prerequisites must be not just familiar but fluent, encoded in long-term memory.”

    Kyle: Similar to the review sessions on Made To Stick.

• If we pile together enough of these questions we’re left with: how might we design mediums in which “reading” is the same as “understanding”?

Notable quotes

Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. — Carl Sagan, Cosmos, “The Persistence of Memory”

Mathematical proofs are a medium; the step-by-step structure embodies powerful ideas about formal logic. Snapchat Stories are a medium; the ephemerality embodies powerful ideas about emotion and identity. The World Wide Web is a medium … the pervasive hyperlinks embody powerful ideas about the associative nature of knowledge.

The form is made out of ideas about logic.

This note is mere kindling, and I’ll be very happy if it’s fully consumed by the blaze it ignites.

How it connects

• Transmissionism — the load-bearing villain of the piece: the false “knowledge transcribes directly from teacher to student” model that books and lectures both silently inherit.
• Metacognition — Matuschak’s diagnosis of why books fail: they offload all the self-monitoring/feedback-loop work onto the reader, which is taxing and unevenly distributed.
• Spaced Repetition · Memory — the two cognitive-science ideas he weaves into a prototype medium (Quantum Country, built with Michael Nielsen).
• Tools For Thought — this essay is a foundational text of the tools-for-thought / Open Source Knowledge program.
• The Science of Learning — companion long-form: neuroplasticity, motivation/attention, and the reform lineage; same “how people actually learn” terrain.
• How To Take Smart Notes — the active-reading practice (summarize, synthesize, analyze rather than transcribe) that Matuschak says distinguishes readers who do absorb books.
• Made To Stick — Kyle links the spaced review sessions to its stickiness principles.
• Sapiens — Kyle’s example of “authorial voice” / emotional salience carrying a book.
• Multiple Intelligences — the lens Kyle reads the piece through: matching mediums to how a given person learns.