I think reading is an essential skill, but we also need to get reading out of the pedestal. Because a lot of the time these arguments come across as some sort of literary elitism. Like if you're not ingesting information through reading, it doesn't count.
This month I spent many hours listening to lectures on youtube about geopolitics on the Asian continent from the naval war college. Sure I could have read it, but nevertheless I got curious about a topic, engaged in it, and "followed the rabbit holes"
I think there is a case to be made that we need to be more active in information seeking, rather than just being fed what the algorithm suggests you - on that topic Technology connections recently made a really good exposition of that issue -- https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA -- But it should not be about the method of ingesting information, but the quality and the intent of it.
This is a personal take. I agree if you are actively participating and grappling with the material in your mind. One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step. So, it forces me to actively participate, argue and understand the text.
In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding. I heard, that is why Feynman lectures are bad for some people. It is very easy to understand, but doing physics require active problem solving.
Consuming audio is the most human way and if it works for you, it works for you.
> In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding.
That just means exploiting the medium to full potential hasn't been normalized yet. Much like with the books, you can pause video and audio. And, much like with books, you can go through the material once to get the high-level overview, and then play it again to learn more, now that you have better feel for how things fit.
I've noticed that both pausing to think and playing the same work couple times in a short succession, are something people are reluctant to do. Writing this, I've noticed that myself I am reluctant to do it too, for no apparent reason. Might be because people my age and older, we weren't forced to learn from videos or audio during school and university years, so we didn't internalize the same consumption patterns as we did with books.
I find myself rewinding a lot when listening to podcasts or watching videos. It's definitely more trouble trying to hit the right spot where my mind started wandering, compared to realizing the same thing with a book and flicking my eyes back to wherever the text looks familiar and restarting there, so that may be part of it.
At least for fiction, I like audiobooks for rereading something I've read before, where I can enjoy the story and it doesn't matter whether I miss a few lines that might include an important plot point. With a new book, I'm just rewinding too much unless it's a really engaging book and reader.
This is really true. People love to say, "Just don't make the same mistake twice" or whatever, but part of the necessity of ingesting truly novel information is that you're gonna weave back and trip over yourself a ton of times before you get to that clean refined mental model.
For me, note-taking is a godsend - I don't know how I would live without it. Anywhere from hyper specific detailed notes to just unstructured rants. It's the equivalent of storing things in memory - that alone makes algorithms far more powerful.
It doesn't help with real-time tasks like talking though... but I've noticed I have gotten a bit better at talking ever since I started note taking.
I think the "learn instinctually by doing stuff a lot" approach definitely is useful but note-taking is a healthy balance between that and getting perma-stuck in research mode.
I think, it is much more to do with the fact that audio or visual way of consuming information is so natural that you can sometimes go with the flow.
It helps me to be much more aware of the information being consumed, exactly because reading is an unnatural and learned way of consuming information. You can definitely do the same with audio medium, but books make me aware of where I am in the process much more than former.
Similar to other commenters I disagree. You can definitely read without parsing and just “move on”.
Or accept a superficial understanding and fail to see the deeper point. Philosophy might be a good domain to see this happen with - read the words but don’t parse the meaning.
> Similar to other commenters I disagree. You can definitely read without parsing and just “move on”.
What do you disagree with? Nobody said that reading makes you immune to moving on without understanding.
What they said was that while reading it is possible to pause if you don't understand something and move on when you are ready to move on. That's harder to do in videos or lectures. Do you disagree with this?
I should have been more careful with my phrasing. What I meant is I am much more aware of my own understanding, gaps and shortcomings and more actively involved in learning and processing information when I am reading. And I honestly cannot think of even consuming certain books with audio medium. As I commented elsewhere, "Gravity's rainbow" is one such book, in which for me, even a single page cannot be consumed using audio medium.
It happened for sure! But it usually happens for a few words, maybe one or two sentences max.
I think mind wandering briefly is a different thing to what's being discussed here though.
Like, let's say I'm watching a video about a complex subject, in my case it's easier to accidentally gloss over knowledge gaps than it is when when reading about it.
It's also feels more practical to take notes or annotate stuff I'm reading about rather than stuff, and it's easier to "revisit" it once recall fails.
It's also generally more convenient to consume (ie I can consume it while commuting/traveling), etc.
However, as a counter point (since I've been doing lots of technical art recently) watching videos on some subjects can be useful, but I still pair it with reading to get a more in-depth understanding on the subjects involved
Harder for me. I thought I can while reading fiction. "Gravity's rainbow" proved that wrong too.
What I mean is, I am more aware of information flow particularly because it is not the natural way of consuming knowledge. Speaking language is in a way part of our evolution. But, written language is a skill you learnt, like driving a bicycle.
This unnatural way, makes me much more aware of my own thinking. While I am reading, even if I understand I stop and muse and breathe in and bask on thoughts it cultivated in me. It has not happened, for me, in other medium.
As mentioned elsewhere, I should have been more careful with my phrasing. What I meant is I am much more aware of my own understanding, gaps and shortcomings and more actively involved in learning and processing information when I am reading.
I think your personal take is more so that you require "interaction" in the learning process; which is extremely common and universally accepted as best way to learn stuff.
>If I don't understand I cannot move on to next step
Everytime you encounter new hard concept, you really have to actively think/interact with that information to make it yours. This is often lacking in the "lecture" style teaching. One key benefit of reading is that you can do it at your pace.
I think for audio/verbal medium, you would probably have a completely different experience if you were talking to Feynman. He have a lecture for you, and everytime you get stuck, you can interrupt him and ask follow up question or ask further. This is probably why Private tuition is so valuable (and very very often used in East Asian nation); whichever fence of preference you fall to, a someone dedicated to teaching you is an extreme advantage.
> This is probably why Private tuition is so valuable (and very very often used in East Asian nation); whichever fence of preference you fall to, a someone dedicated to teaching you is an extreme advantage.
That's gonna be a money printer for LLMs (even if for a short while - "no moat" & stuffs). Many people are fine with LLM-assisted learning, and able to navigate the hallucination problem. Then there's the (in)famous NotebookLM, that's known for only one of its many features: the ability to blend a bunch of source documents and generate an engaging podcast out of them. And a feature they're testing is letting the listener interrupt the podcast with their own questions. Meanwhile, OpenAI's "advanced voice" has been demonstrating for close to a year now, that a spoken conversation with an LLM can be done and feels... natural.
It's not hard to see the convergence of these ideas into ad-hoc experts: blend some textbooks, replace a podcast with a conversational "advanced voice" model, and suddenly you may experience "talking to Feynman". Not a real one - nowhere near as smart or likely to be correct - but still better than anything else you or me have access to.
(Whether or not you believe LLMs are good enough for this, or are too dumb a markov chain stochastic parrot something - it still begs to be tried, and someone will try it soon.)
Feynman's introductory physics course also entailed a lot of problem-solving and labs, in addition to the lectures that are the basis for The Feynman Lectures on Physics. If you go to The Feynman Lectures Website (www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu) and you take a look at the "Original Course Handouts" you can see the homework sets, quizzes and tests his students took (which are not for the feint of heart - many of the problems are quite difficult), and also the labs they did. For those reading the book now, there is also a supplemental volume (sold separately), "Exercises for The Feynman Lectures on Physics" which includes most of the problems given to Feynman's students, and many from later years given to students whose textbook was The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
There’s also the meta element of understanding how each medium affects the way you engage with the topic, which I think can be helpful in understanding when you might want to switch and why.
That is, assuming you probably want to have more than one media type in order to round out your understanding.
I don't think the accusation of elitism is valid here.
Postulating that a particular kind of activity might be better suited to a particular kind of goal isn't elitism. Is it "elitist" to claim that one sorting algorithm is faster than another?
People are so individualistic and sensitive these days that they take any proposed alternatives that don't align with their own habits and modes of consumption as a direct affront against them. I don't think this article is claiming any sort of superiority—it's lamenting a previous modality of information exchange and reflection that seems to be on the decline. Sure, you might argue that claiming civilization is in crisis is a form of elitism, but I interpret it more like an elaboration of a perceived problem and not a value judgement about the superiority of some alternatives.
I don't like riding in cars. I prefer to walk. Plenty of people would be right to tell me taking a car is often more efficient, I don't think of them as "car elitists".
This discussion on the immanent collapse of civilization never gets old. Socrates complained that this new invention of writing was ruining philosophy and memory. In his view philosophy was verbal jousting and conversation while walking.
The primary source is from Socrates lips (unavaiable), but you can read Plato’s Phaedrus, ask Wikipedia, or chat with Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
Civilizations did collapse many times, Egyptians forgot how to make their large stone monuments etc. It is important to try to avoid that, not all new things are progress, some does lead to collapses.
Well said. I should stop using social media, the level of discourse is low and anti-intellectualism is rampant. I do think the world would benefit from more amateur researchers.
Listening to a lecture is a far more passive form of learning than reading a book. Being an avid reader is seen as special because it requires more time and effort to do: you just can't read while doing the dishes or morning cardio or running unit tests. Also, by reading challenging books you learn the valuable skills of backtracking and skimming, which may be applied to better and more quickly understand difficult texts. The lecture equivalent is taking notes and asking questions, but you really can't do that with online recorded stuff.
Ok I'm going to invert that thought, and say: if books are so intelectually more efficient, why do we even have universities? Why do we have lectures, and why doesn't everyone just read?
Spoken word is one of the most primitive and human ways of communicating information. Written word appeared as a replacement to spoken word, because there was no other capable medium of information. Now we have mediums capable of doing so, why not use them instead.
Also you're somehow implying that because I'm doing the dishes I'm paying less attention? I think that's a really big assumption, and will probably vary a lot from person to person.
We have universities so students can have help with their work and their expert teachers about any issues they had with the study material. But since printing has become so efficient, a few hundred years ago, universities have gradually tapered off the long lecture times and have been given more and more reading assignments and homework. In fact, in classes that don't take attendance, many students do "just read", and when the classes do take attendance someone will usually beg the teacher to post the slides somewhere so they can read them... And do I even need to talk about how much reading is involved in professional academics?
I would very much dispute your claim that you are actually concentrating "significantly better" while multitasking, but we don't even need to go there. By the nature of an audiobook, you are forced to always go forward in your "reading", so your opportunities to trace back to a hard concept or even pause and think about a sentence for a while are close to 0 (especially if you aren't actively managing the player and instead are "multitasking"). Sure, it can be fine if you're just listening to Critical Role or the 100th true crime podcast of the week, but if you were trying to improve your comprehension of language by reading harder books, or trying to study actual concepts, audiobooks would be useless. I guess that's why most books recommended by audiobook enthusiasts are dumb self help stuff or contemporary genre fiction, no one is reading Goethe while doing the dishes
> you are forced to always go forward in your "reading", so your opportunities to trace back to a hard concept or even pause and think about a sentence for a while are close to 0
my earbuds have a double-tap to play/pause. What makes you think I don't use it??
> but if you were trying to improve your comprehension of language by reading harder books, or trying to study actual concepts, audiobooks would be useless
reading is reading. For nonfiction where my goal is to learn I do audio and pause to take notes. For entertainment I read speculative fiction usually as audio-only, sometimes also with text (Malazan and Terra Ignota being notable for when I wanted text). But that doesn't mean that what I listen to with audio only is somehow lower quality.
And it's kind of funny to me that you say "improve my comprehension of language" because I listen to audiobooks somewhere between 3.5x and 4.3x speed generally (and still working on improving my comprehension at higher speeds). You're probably going to say that this necessarily means I don't understand what I read but...no, actually, listening to audio has drastically improved my language processing ability. And even if mostly I'm listening to fiction for entertainment, this improvement in comprehension carries over to reading nonfiction.
You're not wrong, but anti elitism is a much greater problem than potentially being perceived as elitist.
When I say you should read, I'm not really saying that's the only valid way to take in information.
I'm saying that to a first approximation, if you do read, you are probably practicing healthy habits around taking in information. And if you don't, it's likely you're not.
It's a slightly blunt statement, but the more nuanced 'try to engage with information deeply, think through multi-step reasoning cascades on your own, integrate different sources of information and transfer them to new domains' really doesn't land in the same way.
As long as you're paying more attention to the road than to your audiobook...
That's the main reason I never got into audiobooks and podcasts. They engage my brain just enough to prevent multitasking, but not enough to stop a part of me from getting bored and restless.
Similar to most work meetings when I'm not presenting or otherwise directly involved in specific topics under discussion. It's a pain.
> As long as you're paying more attention to the road than to your audiobook...
I am, that's why I hit "Rewind" on my audiobooks very often. But even though I'm "distracted" by the road, I find that I concentrate more on a (difficult) audiobook than the equivalent book. With a book, it's actually easy to zone out for a paragraph or two. With audiobooks, if I zone out, I feel quite lost very quickly. I need to rewind.
Interesting! I guess it depends on the kind of driving. Once you hit the Autobahn it's pretty easy on the brain. Riding a motorcycle in a big city is a different experience.
I love working from cafés. That mention in your manuscript is a lovely touch.
Me too. The different atmosphere acts like a catalyst if I like the place and work comfortable.
> That mention in your manuscript is a lovely touch.
Thanks.
I drive a car, but city traffic is much more demanding than the Autobahn. Even then, I lately prefer to listen to the machine, and let my brain to do its background processing.
I somehow learnt to sit comfortable by myself and let what lies beneath to surface. It serves me much better than constantly consuming something.
Personally, even if I lose something listening to an audiobook while driving, I gain more than if I did something else. It's otherwise lost time. I can always re-listen and gain something I missed the first time.
That's one perspective. On the other hand, I find many missing pieces what I'm looking for while driving in silence. When I reach my destination, either have answers or new questions to jot down.
I think silence / noise is another form of breathing. After filling your brains' queues, you need to allow it to process these queues in its own terms. When queues are processed, there is loot to collect at the other end of the bar.
I tend to rewind audio books and re listen to the last minute or two or three.
Ten years ago I read James Joyce’s Ulysses as a book. I enjoyed it, but when I listened to it as an audio book a year later, the excellent actors/voice artists really brought it to life for me.
I often self describe myself as a ‘gentleman scientist’ because for many years I have done my own research, sometimes in areas where I had no interest in practical application. I also believe that the act of writing is crucial to thinking (I have written 20+ books, 2500+ blog articles). I think too many people put too much emphasis on “work” vs. just living: averaging only ‘working’ about 60% of my adult life has made room for other activitites.
I cannot say what works for other people. For me, unless I’m reading with my eyeballs, taking notes, and working examples, I’m not really convinced I’m learning anything difficult.
disagree. You just have to actively listen, and cannot let your mind wander. you can also read and have no idea what you just read if you let your mind wander. Currently learning spanish via a podcast and its very effective, I just have to pause and rewind constantly to make sure I fully understand whats going on
I was pretty clear that I was just describing what works for me, right? So, as the authority on the topic, I declare you incorrect.
It is fine if you think I’m not representative or usual, but I’m telling you, I’ve tried listening very hard in many different contexts, it just doesn’t work.
I don’t think language-learning is a good example, because of course hearing the language is a crucial part there. And on the other hand, good luck learning to read/write Chinese (or even Spanish) with just podcasts.
The snob's take is bad, but there is a point of agreement I have with one aspect of audiobooks: it's impossible to remember details about things that fall outside your native language, if you haven't already studied them. For example, I listened to a nonfiction audiobook about Xi Jinping. I could tell you the broad strokes of the people in his orbit from the late 1970s on, but I have no idea how to spell or even Google them effectively, because I never read them--I only heard them.
The same goes for foreign concepts/places/etc., for me at least there is no substitute for reading when it comes to retention and recall of material.
I saw elsewhere that someone said it was ablist to say that an audiobook doesn't count as a book, which I could only think that we put too much importance on books.
Don't take this as an anti-intellectual screed. Far from it--I read a lot. But I think you can also learn from magazines, newspapers, plays, orations, etc. It leads to this weird situation where people are optimizing not for what they're learning but for the count. How many books have you read this year? Does an audiobook count? Like... it doesn't really matter.
Yeah if someone force me with gun to say it, I'd say even reading braille doesn't count as reading either. But it doesn't matter anyway since it's just different modes of absorbing information.
Reading material (backlight vs. reflective screen) differs in my experience. Also typing and writing are very different neurologically, but people don't want to acknowledge that, AFAICS.
Speaking of neural pathways, my pet theory is that you're a lot more likely to be "engaged" by an "influencer" if you watch them talk than if you just read the same speech.
Mostly because a lot more of your brain is involved in just handling the input so a lot less is available to notice the bullshit.
I used to agree with you, but then I found out how most people get through audiobooks and TV shows. They just miss stuff! They zone out for a few seconds or a few minutes. They take phone calls and move the laundry into the dryer without pausing and rewinding. It's crazy! Watching a fast-moving TV show with someone like that is bizarre because they'll happily sit through a complex conversation between characters even though they missed all the context that makes the conversation make sense.
Granted you can miss a lot when you're reading, too, since a lot of the context for any work is external to the work itself, but with a book, you have to actively choose to keep going when you're confused, rather than passively letting it flow past you. Nothing privileges the choice to turn to the next page rather than returning to the previous page.
I think the experience of reading books at least is good training for how to read an audiobook or listen to a lecture. You should be quick to pause and rewind if you suspect you missed something.
To be pedantic, it’s definitionally not reading. You listened to the book, you didn’t read it.
There’s just an odd legitimacy associated specifically with reading - that people want to access, and so makes other people weirdly snobbish/defensive of it.
The reading pedestal also often ignores that reading, and even writing, is not enough. In the posted piece the steps of "research" are, apart from haphazardly watching birds and architecture, all reading or writing.
I see problems arising from this in academia quite commonly. The discussions based only on reading and writing (and discussions) tend to get detached from reality, often to the point of inability to point out any real world examples where the discussion actually applies to.
Also many who lament lack of reading can be quite proudly "not technical persons", "not mathematical thinkers" or "not good with my hands", with kind of implication that these are not of much significance for intellectual development.
I do think people writ large do not read enough, there has been a lot of knowledge already written down and many engineers and researchers I work with would rather do than read. And the most detailed information is written, not in other forms. But I love video/audio too, it is often presented in a much more accessible form than papers.
But the people who put reading on a pedestal also need to remember that reading is still subservient to doing, because that is where theory meets reality and reality is not usually kind to theory.
If there are alternative media that covers the material, by all means utilize them!
The reality is when you get deep enough in a topic, virtually all the content is available solely in text form. So I tell people that while it's fine to consume content in other formats, you have to make sure you are quite capable when it comes to reading.
It feels like a healthy variety of media types and engagement types is the best way to engage with a subject. Internet, audio/podcasts, video, and also active writing on the topic.
Balance them all out depending on your preferences.
btw, the common idea that people have “learning styles” seems to have been debunked, but I do feel that there are so many ways to approach a topic that it’s helpful to understand them through different media
The reason reading was put on a pedestal is to ensure young learners develop the skill of reading. Once you have the essential reading skills, reading loses it's special position. But it can be hard for adults to break the mold of what they were taught as children.
This month I spent many hours listening to lectures on youtube about geopolitics on the Asian continent from the naval war college. Sure I could have read it, but nevertheless I got curious about a topic, engaged in it, and "followed the rabbit holes"
I think there is a case to be made that we need to be more active in information seeking, rather than just being fed what the algorithm suggests you - on that topic Technology connections recently made a really good exposition of that issue -- https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA -- But it should not be about the method of ingesting information, but the quality and the intent of it.