An Intermission: On Reading and Learning
I don’t care how many books you read, something else is way more important
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Remember when I said part three of Toward a Pragmatic Philosophy of Technology was coming out this week? Turns out I need some more time with it. This article serves as an intermission between the parts.
Here’s, hopefully, a non-contentious statement: reading is learning. This isn’t to say read is the only way to learn, and I’m not saying that it is the best media of learning either. We might have different levels of precedence of learning media than someone else (you might read more than me, who might read more than someone else, for example), but so long as we are capable of rudimentary literacy, some of our learning will come from reading.
We embrace this fact in abstract, when it is divorced from the context of our lives, but our lived experience tells us a different story. As we go about our day, our practice of reading becomes burden. We are bombarded by emails, workplace memos, twitter threads, and comment sections. Under these conditions, reading is no longer a matter of learning, but a matter of getting through, a matter of efficiency. This might be fine if this practice stoped with the mundane parts of our reading lives, but it bleeds into the reading we were supposed to enjoy. Relishing in or exploring the meaning of a sentence becomes a chore, 30 minutes on a paragraph becomes an unacceptable metric. We’re much worse off for this.
What is Learning?
This guiding question is not me looking at learning science, nor will I dive too deep into a philosophy of the idea of learning (as I am want to do lately). Given this self limitation let’s start with simple definitions. Merriam-Webster defines learning as… I’m kidding. The definition from Merriam-Webster is serviceable but not for the ends I am seeking. Instead, a definition expressed by a J. N. Washburne in 1936 is much more serviceable to the point of this article. In the paper “The Definition of Learning”, Washburne characterizes learning as “an increase, through experience, of problem-solving ability”. (He models this dynamic mathematically which might be interesting for some of you, but the specific formulation isn’t necessary here).
I want to stress that Washburne’s definition is not about the accumulation of facts, it is embedded in what one can do as a product of a learning experience. Many definitions you’ll find in dictionaries will dedicate their first definition the fact accumulation view of knowledge, while only some that I’ve seen mention the outcomes of having learned.
Learning Strategies
I’ve been fascinated with learning strategies lately. I don’t know if that’s because the algorithm wants me to be interested in learning strategies because that’s what drives up my watch time, but that’s besides the point, sort of. What fascinates me about learning strategies is how many of them have become mythologized. We have, for example, the idea of learning styles which are entirely false. In fact, let’s take a second just to show how little the idea of learning styles actually stands up to any critical inquiry. Let’s say I wanted to learn to ride a bike, how would I best learn to ride a bike? Or how about geometry? Imagine if you will learning geometry with no visual examples and only spoken words about length of sides and angles. I would have fared much worse in the subject than I would have other wise.
Evolutionarily speaking, our brains are well adapted for learning it makes no sense no matter the metric used (be it efficiency, survivability, or navigating complexity) to have a specific learning style.
There is another reason for my interest, which is that there are still tools that actually work that both extremely beneficial but majorly over looked. I think about this when I think about the idea of free recall. Free recall is a pretty simple practice. What you do is get a blank sheet of paper, and set aside some amount of time, and write down what you know about a topic. You can connect it to other topics, but the idea is to do your best to exhaust what you remember about a given topic that you are trying to learn sometime after reading or a lecture, etc. For instance, here’s what this looks like when applied to the idea of deliberate practice, which I’ll talk about a bit later in this (Note 1: please ignore my misspellings, Note 2: there are different ways to employ free recall. You can do it before YouTube video for example, to activate the contextual knowledge around the topic, and you can also do it after. It is recommended that you do both before and after):
There are the tried and true methods, too, like spaced repetition, interleaving, and contextual variation, which have all been proven to help out in your learning.
Quick Point on Deliberate Practice
To get to the point I am eventually going to make, I have to talk about deliberate practice. Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, the idea of deliberate practice is forever tied in our cultural psyche to the idea of 10,000 hours to become an expert at a thing. People tons more capable than me will have far more thought out reasons as to why Gladwell’s particular cherry picking of Anders Ericcson’s work has been harmful, but I want to mention it for an adjacent reason. The point of deliberate practice and the idea of getting in 10,000 hours are at ideologically at odds. Deliberate practice is about quality of practice rather than quantity. To see as the measure of deliberate practice to be a certain amount of hours is the performance of a particular kind of self-sabotage. Remember: quality of learning of quantity (for the particulars of how to do deliberate practice, there are great videos, papers, and books on the topic).
Meandering to a Point: Reading as Learning
If learning is about an increase of capacity to solve problems and if learning is about quality over quantity, then how do we return quality to our reading so that what we learn from reading can readily be of service for problem solving?
We have to transform our relationship with reading. Reading for us has become a matter getting through (ex. “I got through Infinite Jest” or “I’ve gone through 52 books this year”). The siren that is efficiency has lured us to our doom, placing quantity metrics over quality metrics. Course correction is our only hope, so long as we can snap out of our mesmerization.
The type of reading you need to do to gain quality back to your reading is going to tug at core of how we’ve been trained at reading. Spend more time thinking or relishing (depending on the genre and subject matter) per sentence. For nonfiction, my primary focus of reading lately, this means pulling out as much as you can from each sentence. This is best illustrated by cognitive scientist Benjamin Keep on his YouTube channel. In a video about active reading, he showcase just how much you can pull out of a paragraph of text (his example was on Queen Victoria) by actively reading and applying critical thinking skills. Then, you can use a technique like free recall to test yourself on the material after some time has passed, ideally just as you’re starting to forget the material (this is called spaced repetition).
Closing Thoughts
Reading is learning. No matter what you read, it can be a portal to new ways of thinking and being that you would have otherwise never experienced. Getting the most of reading means taking the call seriously when you are engaged with material that you want to learn from. It means taking time. It means being “inefficient” for higher quality learning in the long term. It means opening yourself up to the possibility of being changed by engaging with it earnestly.