(2019-06-01) Matuschak Why Books Don't Work

Andy Matuschak: Why books don't work. (Printed Book) The powerful ideas are often invisible: it’s not like we generally think about cognition when we sprinkle a blog post with links. But the people who created the Web were thinking about cognition.

See e.g. Douglas Engelbart’s 1962 “Augmenting Human Intellect” for a classic primary source or Michael Nielsen’s 2016 “Thought as a Technology” (2016-11-31-NielsenThoughtAsATechnology) for a synthesis of much work in this space.

(See also (2018-12-21) Mod The Future Book Is Here But It's Not What We Expected)

What to do about it

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?

Courses also offer emotional salience, which motivates and amplifies learning: live lectures might be inefficient, but an instructor’s palpable fascination can leave a lasting impression

that’s a research question—probably for several lifetimes of research—not something I can directly answer in these brief notes. But I believe it’s possible, and I’ll now try to share why

we don’t necessarily have to make books work. We can make new forms instead. (Media Inventor)

these systems generally fixate on a narrow, task-oriented view of what’s happening in classrooms.

are we climbing the right hill? Why are we climbing this particular hill at all?

Textbooks generally neglect emotional connection

textbooks don’t effectively implement their own models about how people learn—and that even if they did, textbooks’ models neglect important ideas about how people learn.

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?

Readers can’t just read the words. They have to really think about them. Maybe take some notes. Discuss with others. Write an essay in response.

Academic courses offer more than just metacognitive support for textbooks; their cognitive model is also social and emotional.

Can we just slap some exercises and discussion questions on The Selfish Gene?

The lectures-as-warmup model is a post-hoc rationalization, but it does gesture at a deep theory about cognition: to understand something, you must actively engage with it. (engagement)

class discussions support social learning: students understand topics more deeply by grappling with their peers’ understandings of the same ideas.

some people do absorb knowledge from books. Indeed, those are the people who really do think about what they’re reading. The process is often invisible.

Unfortunately, these tactics don’t come easily. Readers must learn specific reflective strategies. (Reflective Thinker)

AI-based learning systems...For instance, intelligent tutoring systems have for decades specifically aspired to shoulder more task-oriented metacognitive burden

If we believe that successful reading requires engaging in all this complex metacognition, how is that reflected in the medium? What’s it doing to help?

These skills fall into a bucket which learning science calls “metacognition.”

If the model is that people understand written ideas by thinking carefully about them, what would books look like if they were built around helping people do that?

if authors believe that understanding comes only when readers really think about their words, then they’re largely leaving readers to design their own “problem sets” and to generate their own feedback

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

The reader must plan and steer their own feedback loops

We call this model “transmissionism.”

But if we’d begun with this model, would we have chosen live, ninety-minute speeches to convey raw information for a problem set?

If pressed, many lecturers would offer a more plausible cognitive model: understanding actually comes after the lecture, when attendees solve problem sets, write essays, etc.

at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. This last idea so invisibly defines the medium that it’s hard not to take for granted, which is a shame because, as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken.

great authors earnestly want readers to think carefully about their words. These authors form sophisticated pictures of their readers’ evolving conceptions. They anticipate confusions readers might have

Certainly most readers absorbed something, however ineffable: points of view (point of view), ways of thinking, norms, inspiration, and so on. Indeed, for many books (and in particular most fiction), these effects are the point.

I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed

Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?

All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.

why do books seem to work for some people sometimes? Why does the medium fail when it fails?

Like lectures, books have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation, but the medium does have an implicit model. And like lectures, that model is transmissionism.

When you pull on certain strings from the lecture, you might discover that you had never really understood, though you’d certainly thought you understood during the lecture.

Like books, lectures can be entertaining or influential; like books, lectures do seem to work… sometimes, for some people. But you probably don’t believe that lectures are a reliable way to convey knowledge

By contrast, courses handle much of this metacognitive burden

What about textbooks?

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.

Why lectures don’t work

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

If we collect enough of these underlying “truths,” some shared themes might emerge, suggesting a more coherent theory of how learning happens. We’ll call such theories cognitive models

Lectures, as a medium, have no carefully-considered cognitive model.

implicit model they appear to share

How might we design a medium so that its “grain” bends in line with how people think and learn?

For example, people struggle to absorb new material when their working memory is already overloaded. More concretely: if you’ve just been introduced to a zoo of new terms, you probably won’t absorb much from a sentence which uses many of those terms at once

To help people encode more into long-term memory, we can draw on another powerful idea from cognitive science: spaced repetition. (SRS)

Of course, memory is only a small slice of “understanding,” but to illustrate how one might begin to address understanding as a whole, let’s explore how we might weave a medium out of these two ideas about memory.

My collaborator Michael Nielsen and I made an initial attempt with Quantum Country, a “book” on quantum computation.

Reading Quantum Country means reading a few minutes of text, then quickly testing your memory about everything you’ve just read, then reading for a few more minutes, or perhaps scrolling back to reread certain details, and so on.

How might we design mediums in which “readers” naturally form rich associations (associative) between the ideas being presented? How might we design mediums which “readers” naturally engage creatively with the material? How might we design mediums in which “readers” naturally contend with competing interpretations? 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”?