Transmissionism: Do Books Work?

I was reading an article on BoingBoing about how to read long, difficult books.

So this guy's advice is to read the Wealth of Nations twice? Here's some better advice:

don't read it once

.

The tips are fine as they go, but what I'm really interested in the article it the link to the thing the tips were responding to: Andy Matuschak's essay "Why books don't work". It makes a lot of sense if you read it, but it does something that I'm really on guard for these days: it assumes everyone in the same.

The essay talks about "transmissionism" which is a failed theory of teaching and learning. In transmissionism one person puts information out there in sentences and another person reads or hears the sentences, then absorbs the information. It turns out this isn't great. Which is one reason why you may have been to a lecture in school and walked out realizing you basically never understood what the teacher or professor was talking about.

But if you are going to say:

1. Transmissionism doesn't work

You are going to need to have an explanation for:

2. Some people seem to learn from lectures and books

Matuschak's explanation is that you can learn from lectures or books by doing the kinds of things that really make people learn. You take notes. You think about what it being said to you and connect it to other things in your life. You do little exercises and check back to see you understood. It's a lot of metacognition that needs to go into this process and we don't teach those skills directly so most people just don't have them. Basically a lecture and a book put a whole lot of work onto the listener and the reader with no good reason to think that they can or will do that work.

But when you encounter two statements like (1) and (2) above, there's a pretty easy way to reconcile them that I think was overlooked. We say, "Well, what if (1) isn't universally true. What if it's only true for most people?"

I'm pretty sure transmissionism works on me. You encode your thought into a sentence, you write it down or you say it out loud. I encounter the sentence, understand the meaning of the words and then use the meaning of the words to understand your idea. I don't think it works on me because I learned some great techniques to absorb the content of lectures or books. Quite the contrary, I'd sit in classrooms, tortured, wishing I could tune the teacher out but paying attention involuntarily. I barely read because I found it extremely annoying.

I found limits of functions in highschool calculus but the whole process seemed mysterious to me. Then in my first university lecture they said that the limit of a function f(x) as x goes to a is L if and only if for every epsilon greater than zero there is a delta such that if the difference between x and a is less than delta the difference between f(x) and L is less than epsilon and I thought, "Oh! That's what a limit is." My grade 12 physics teacher joked with my mother that I sat there limply in class, slightly slumped, apparently catatonic, then got the highest mark on the test.

None of that had anything to do with thinking critically or taking notes, it's just actually how I receive information. I think transmissionism does work for some people. Not because those people have learned a special set of skills that allow it to work, but because those people are just the kind of people who learn that way.

I also don't think books started as a way of communicating ideas to the world - without a printing press that's not practical. If you wanted to write something for everyone to read you wrote it on a sign or a wall. Books started as a way of archiving knowledge, whether to make sure that multiple people agreed on the specifics later or as a way of passing it on to future generations. Retrieving the knowledge from the archives wasn't something that everyone did, it was the work of very few people: scholars. So I'm not sure the lecture showed up as a bad way of communicating that we accidentally imposed on people. It may well exist because it was a good way of communicating to the small group of people who would ever really be lectured at - future scholars. People who needed to be selected for their ability to be receivers of transmissionism.

None of this really takes away from Matuschak's point that maybe the vast bulk of people are subjected to a school system that doesn't work for them.

That sounds totally plausible to me

. But it feels like there's a much better explanation for how we arrived at using a system like the one we use than "We just didn't know any better." Of course we didn't know any better, but behaviours evolve, there was some reason to repeat it for a long time.

Having finished my commentary on how it's a good idea to contemplate diversity, there was a second problem with Matuschak's essay I want to address. The jump from the presumably familiar experience of absorbing nothing from a lecture to the less intuitively grasped experience of not remembering what was in a book seems iffy. Matuschak tries to convey this by asking the reader what the Selfish Gene said.

If you've read the Selfish Gene you might not have a deep knowledge of what it said. It's possible you think you remember it but under questioning your knowledge would wither. That's what Matuschak expects of you. But that doesn't mean you never understood it, it doesn't even mean you forgot what it said. It may only be that you forgot that the knowledge you acquired from that book came from the book. That is that you retain the knowledge, but the knowledge doesn't have pointers attached to it referencing back to where it came from.

This is especially problematic with the books that Matuschak picks as examples: The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns Germs and Steel. These books were all pretty widely read and they affected popular culture and popular thinking. If you didn't read them right away there's a good chance that by the time you did read them you'd had already been exposed to most of their ideas.

For example, I have read the Selfish Gene, but by the time I read it I already knew the basics of genetics. For a person who didn't know anything of genes the book might have been very educational. For me, it contained very few new or useful ideas. So if Matuschak asked me was the Selfish Gene was about, I'd say

Richard Dawkins trying to use a metaphor of selfishness for survival of the fittest and, despite specifically admitting that selfishness is a bad metaphor because it implies intent, falling into their own trap and ending up laying infrastructure for the popular acceptance of greed as natural and the neoliberal sacrifice of future generations.

I'm not going to remember Dawkins' layperson account of genetic inheritance because I've got a perfectly good layperson account of genetic inheritance. Even if Dawkins had been my first source for that account, I've probably refined it since with other sources of information, and I wouldn't recall exactly the way I was wrong when I finished the book. Remembering what the book said wouldn't just require me to absorb the knowledge that the book contains, it would also require me to having good versioning of that knowledge. The idea that we don't remember what books said doesn't go a long way to proving we don't understand what they said.

I guess, though, what I'm most interested in is the inherent irony of writing sentences to teach people that you can't teach people a thing by writing sentences. To whatever extent you are successful you disprove your thesis. And Matuschak might be tempted to argue, if they were to ever read this blog post, that the reason I might remember what they wrote is because I went to the trouble of arguing against it here, but that would be a deep misunderstanding of what I am doing.

I am not reflecting on the work and learning it as I reflect.

I am reflexively vomiting out a stream of automatic thoughts that whirred around inside me concurrently with reading the piece because it is uncomfortable to contain them.

I'm not learning by taking notes, I'm taking notes to relieve the

unbearable feeling of learning

.