Incredible work!
Meta question: why aren’t there more people working on this? Why *hasn’t* anyone built, say, some type of REPL for reading? CC @michael_nielsen
New essay distilling one strand of some ongoing work
I argue that books lack a functioning model of how people learn—instead, they're (accidentally, invisibly) built around a model that's plainly false. Plus some early models for what to do about it.https://andymatuschak.org/books/
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We’re trying to answer that question in another, larger piece. Quick preview of theory: requires inventors who are able to do both original design work and also original cognitive science. Existing institutions and incentive systems make such teams unlikely.
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Interesting. At a deeper level I wonder how much has to do with a shortage of people that believe they’re “allowed” to question such fundamentals. And what content would generate 10X more dangerous thinkers and builders.
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Lots of thought about this inside higher ed — in some ways we think about little else than alternatives to books and lecture halls. The small intense seminar still works best and is most expensive.
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Indeed! Are there approaches to scaling seminars which you think are particularly promising? If you're familiar with Minerva's approach, I'd be curious to hear what you think of it! (c.f. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-intentional-university …)
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Very familiar -- I believe they're only up to a few hundred people and I'm not sure things are scalable beyond that... The constraint is excellent seminar leaders.
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Any thoughts on how to make the reader more involved in creating the Anki cards for your interactive books? AFAIK that's the part of Anki that makes it as effective as it is- whereas in your examples you're handpicking the cards for the reader (^ small, ^ connected, X meaningful)
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Yes, I think it’s possible to create an environment which scaffolds that skill through expert modeling, sentence starters, social comparison, etc. Would be a fun design project, but not top of my list this moment.
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Do you worry that without it the Anki-like system isn’t as effective?
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Sort of. Efficacy is multivalent. Empirically, Quantum Country students’ retention does indeed increase over time. But yes, that’s only part of the story. Lots of work to do here.
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Great work! I touched on this “effectiveness” wrt fiction work:https://www.jamesyu.org/hyperliterature.html …
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I love the fiction angle. Thank you for sharing!
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Convincing essay! It reminded me of “Clear and Simple as the Truth”, a wonderful book on the unstated discursive assumptions of expositional prose, and of “The Little Lisper”, a Scheme tutorial written in an interactive dialog style. (You probably know them already.)
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The latter is a favorite but the former is new to me; looking forward to reading! Thank you.
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Fantastic post. This is helpful for a book I am working on. This problem is at the heart of why
@hrdwrknvrstps and I startedhttp://www.committed.app -
Interesting idea! I signed up for your mailing list; I'll be interested to see what you make when you're ready to share.
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Genuinely shocked nobody replied with a “tldr?” comment
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There's a lot of that on HN.
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/me sighs
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Great piece, agreed on most points. But one issue that isn't addressed: creator effort. Part of the appeal of books and lectures is that they're extremely easy to make, particularly once you've internalized basics of good presentation.
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That's why, for my course, I spend 80%+ of total preparation time making assignments and quizzes. Coming up with the right questions and hw design is a hard job. I think it's useful to talk about a new medium that can lower the barrier to entry in creating this type of content.
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Which is to say, the answer may be just as much a shift in priorities/resources (valuing homework design as a skill, having explicit education for instructors on helping students engage) than the design of a new medium. Or better creator tools, e.g. http://www.penrose.ink/
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This is a great point, and it's certainly something I think about: Quantum Country took forever to build, after all. That said, I'll consider it a great start if we can end up with even a handful of media artifacts which embody powerful ideas about cognition!
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