## Metadata * URL: [https://andymatuschak.org/books/](https://andymatuschak.org/books/) * Author: [[Andy matuschak|Andy Matuschak]] ## Highlights * we can’t pin this all on memory. When you pull on certain strings from the lecture, you might discover that you had never really understood, * to understand something, you must actively engage with it. * lectures don’t work because the medium lacks a functioning cognitive model. It’s (implicitly) built on a faulty idea about how people learn—transmissionism—which we can caricaturize as “lecturer says words describing an idea; students hear words; then they understand.” When lectures do work, it’s generally as part of a broader learning context (e.g. projects, problem sets) with a better cognitive model. * With our intuitions primed through lectures, we’ll see that books, as a medium, reflect the same flawed ideas about how people learn. * Write an essay in response. * Great: that’s a better model! Let’s look at how it plays out. * If they take some notes, they’re not simply transcribing the author’s words: they’re summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing. * Readers must learn specific reflective strategies. * “What does it feel like to understand something? Where are my blind spots?” * “metacognition.” * The experimental evidence suggests that it’s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them.Baker, * 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. * as learning science understands it, they’re only effective for people who are already proficient with both the object-level concepts and also the relevant metacognitive skills. For others, these activities appear to detract from understanding the material; * 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? * textbooks do have explicit cognitive models: they support engagement with their concepts through things like exercises and discussion questions. Yet much of the metacognitive burden still remains with the reader. * Readers must decide which exercises to do and when. * By contrast, courses handle much of this metacognitive burden. * textbooks generally neglect emotional connection; * we don’t necessarily have to make books work. We can make new forms instead. * To help people encode more into long-term memory, we can draw on another powerful idea from cognitive science: spaced repetition.