Most people read ineffectively

• Knowledge work should accrete, but most reading does not
  • People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice
  • Evergreen note-writing helps reading efforts accumulate, but most people don’t do this
  • Of those that do, Note-writing practices are generally ineffective
  • However! The most effective readers and thinkers I know don’t take notes when reading
• Skillful reading is often non-linear, but most people read linearly

References

Matuschak, A. (2019 0). Why books don’t work. https://andymatuschak.org/books

People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice

It seems that most people can remember only a few high-level details of a book weeks later—if that. A typical reader might spend hours finishing some serious non-fiction—then maybe it comes up at a dinner party, and they find you can remember like three sentences. Basically no detailed recall. Barely the gist! (((Scattered notes|Reading comprehension.md|1,99|1,114))) (((Scattered notes|Reading comprehension.md|1,99|1,114)))

What’s more: people seem surprised when this happens. They seem to consistently overestimate how much they’re absorbing from a book.

Part of the problem here is People often struggle to remember details of prose text because they never processed them in the first place.

See How rapidly do people forget practical knowledge?

This observation is unfortunate for many reasons, but among them: Deep understanding requires detailed knowledge of fundamentals and Complex ideas may be hard to learn in part because their components overflow working memory.

For common objections: Many people view memory as unimportant to deep creative work.

DiAlexRev - I try to explain how I learned something so quickly, in @HolbertonCOL @holbertonschool-1271832215215800321.mp4

References

Amlund et al - Repetitive Reading and Recall of Expository Text

• In a limited experimental setting, grad students are given an expository passage; they read once, twice, or three times; delayed (one week) free recall scores at 27% (main idea) and 16% (details) after one reading; cued recall scores at 57% and 64% respectively. Re-reading helps a bit in the cued setting, but not much in for freed recall.

Matuschak, A. (2019). Why books don’t work. Retrieved from https://andymatuschak.org/books

Deep understanding requires detailed knowledge of fundamentals

In response to People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice, many suggest that they don’t want detailed recall. They do most of their reading “to get a general picture,” or “just to get a conceptual understanding.” That might sometimes be possible, but in many cases it’s not possible to really understand a concept without a firm grasp of the details on which it’s built.

The intuitive argument:

Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. Imagine meeting a person who told you they “had a broad conceptual understanding” of how to speak French, but it turned out they didn’t know the meaning of “bonjour”, “au revoir”, or “tres bien”. You’d think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious.”

How can we develop transformative tools for thought? - How important is memory, anyway?

A more concrete argument is that conceptual understanding is mostly about connections—understanding how elements relate to each other, causes, effects, implications, constraints, tendencies, etc. You can’t understand these high-order relationships without familiarity with their constituents.

Another argument draws on our understanding of human information processing: Expertise requires building sophisticated chunk recoding schemes.

A related, simpler claim: Memory augmentation may make it easier to learn complex topics by decreasing working memory load

Q. Reductio ad absurdum argument against someone who only wants a “broad conceptual understanding,” not detailed recall?
A. That’s like wanting to have a “broad conceptual understanding” of French without knowing the meaning of “bonjour.”

Q. Connectivist argument that deep understanding requires detailed knowledge of fundamentals?
A. Conceptual understanding is largely about relationships; can’t learn the edges without knowing the nodes.

References

Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom (1st ed). Jossey-Bass.
“understanding is remembering in disguise”

Matuschak, A., & Nielsen, M. (2019). How can we develop transformative tools for thought? Retrieved December 2, 2019, from https://numinous.productions/ttft

Agarwal, P. (2019). Retrieval Practice & Bloom’s Taxonomy: Do Students Need Fact Knowledge Before Higher Order Learning? Journal of Educational Psychology, 111, 189–209

• Weak evidence against this thesis: students practicing with factual quizzes did no better than re-studiers on delayed higher-order quizzes.