Reconsidering Reading
While it may feel good to be able to say you've read something, that doesn’t mean it’s the most effective way to learn.
I felt pretty good about myself when I set a goal to read three books a month this year.
It started when I was discussing reading with a friend, Hayden, towards the end of last year. He had set a reading goal and was reaching out to friends for suggestions. His request made me realize that 1) I didn’t really keep track of what books, or how many, I read 2) setting a public goal could be a good way to motivate myself to read more.
With this realization in hand, and because I’m a total nerd, I made a spreadsheet (complete with summary statistics and graphs) and was off to the races.
The above screenshot shows the summary as of January 9, 2022. I accomplished my goal in aggregate, thanks in large part due to a big September of reading while being infected with COVID, but missed the goal in four individual months.1 While I’m happy with the journey the goal took me on this year, and will be maintaining the goal for 2022, I recently came across a take that made me question if I was misdirecting my efforts.
Holden Karnofsky, founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, has an excellent blog called Cold Takes. He posted two short pieces on reading that produced a lot of cognitive dissonance after I read them: Honesty about reading and Reading books vs. engaging with them. In these two pieces, Karnofsky lays out a counterintuitive claim that society’s emphasis on reading books is misguided.
His central idea is that when you read a (nonfiction) book, essay, journal article, etc. you don’t really come away with a ton of understanding relative to the time invested. His TLDR is:
I think the value of reading a book once (without active engagement) is awkwardly small, and the value of big time investments like reading a book several times - or actively engaging with even part of it - is awkwardly large compared to that.
The following table illustrates his claim:
While you can quibble over the retention percentages, I felt myself feeling exposed. As the thousands of pages of fantasy and science fiction suggest, I enjoy reading for fun. With that said, one of my primary goals from reading is improving myself, and I also read thousands of pages in an attempt to learn more about a laundry list of subjects (this is especially true of the short-form content I read like articles, blog posts, and essays that are not reflected in these book statistics).
So when I read The Selfish Gene last year, a book which I have described to friends as having fundamentally changed my understanding of evolution and one that I think should be required high school reading in every classroom in America, how much did I actually retain? Honestly, 10%-15% doesn’t sound too far off. I’d like to think I have a layman’s understanding of some of Dawkin’s key ideas from the book, like that evolution occurs at the level of the replicator, but as for the details themselves, or what parts of the book were/are controversial to others in the field, I couldn’t tell you all that much.
If I mostly agree with Karnofsky, then, what does this mean for my approach to reading books?
Continue reading whatever fiction you want because that is for fun and this advice does not relate to reading for pleasure.
If reading about a nonfiction topic also gives me pleasure, as is the case with a lot of mountaineering books I’ve read or some philosophy content, then I also don’t necessarily need to change my approach.
If my goal is to learn a lot about a given subject, reading entire books is probably not a good use of time. Instead, identifying the most important books or articles about the topic, reading summaries, reviews, and discussions of the work, and writing out my thoughts on the matter is likely a better use of my time.
I can vouch for the effectiveness of the approach outlined in the third bullet above.
I do a weekly zoom call with some friends from high school where we share an article, podcast, video, etc. and discuss it (and usually play Rocket League afterwards). The following passage is from my personal journal, dated 2/8/2021:
While brushing my teeth I was thinking about the piece that Tom has suggested for our weekly reading this week (he joined the group last week for the first time). He suggested “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Earlier today, I read a few Slate Star Codex posts; in these posts, he linked a past book review he did. I was impressed by the use of the review as a tool for him to better understand the book, its motivations, and its arguments. The act of writing the view undoubtedly increased his understanding of the content to an immense degree. As I continued brushing my teeth, I thought to myself how maybe I could try and perform a writeup of this week’s reading on a small scale to increase my own engagement with the content.
As I hoped I would have the energy to fully engage in this activity tomorrow, as I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather since the big weekend skiing in Steamboat and not sleeping, I found myself thinking about how I would begin to refute the essay’s arguments. I reasoned that, after an initial read of the piece and putting down my first take, that I could perhaps seek out some other writers’ critiques of it. As I wondered about how Coates would structure his argument, I realized that I was approaching the piece intending to disagree with it. This approach is totally contrary to a fair engagement with an argument. I should instead look to read the piece with an open mind, record my thoughts, and come to a conclusion based on the arguments presented. I was taking far too strong a prior stance considering that I hadn’t even heard the arguments yet.
I went on to write almost 2,000 words in summary and analysis of Coates’ essay—and guess what! After reading the article, putting its points into my own words, and weighing the position, I updated my prior position:
The proposal from 1970 that is called out from the paper mentions $34 billion, presumably in 1970 dollars (equal to $235.29 billion today—gotta love inflation). The US population had a population of 203.2 million in 1970, 22.54 million of which was black. Thus, the proposal would have given each black person about $10,400. It seems hard for me to imagine anyone being disappointed with receiving that much money based on the attitudes currently being expressed regarding the COVID checks, but it also does feel rather ridiculous, after reading through Coates’ systematic illumination of the racism present in American society, to think that $10,400 is sufficient.
Just because an amount might be inadequate, however, it does not mean that it is better to do nothing at all. The fact that there is no dollar figure to be assigned to thousands of women being raped, or children killed, or families broken apart does not suggest that there should be no reparations. Although it is a rather weak stance, my takeaways from this article are that 1) reparations should be taken seriously and 2) let Congress examine the issue through HB-40 in whatever way they deem adequate, and start the general public’s conversation about it. Even though the Republicans, and many of the Democrats, are going to absolutely HATE it.
So for 2022, while I’m going to maintain my goal to read 3 books each month, I want to keep in mind the relative efficacy of engaging with content in different ways. While it may feel good to be able to say that you’ve read something, that doesn’t mean it’s the most effective way to learn something.
I’m pretty confident I can assess why I failed here; at the end of February I bought an Xbox, and after my marathon month of reading in September I think I was glad to be able to talk to people other than my roommate Tanner, who had COVID with me. You’re great though Tanner!
Michael, as someone who shares the passion of reading, and writing from time to time depending on what I read and how much free time I have after sucking up to senior managers and clients, I suggest the website/app Goodreads to track your progress and results. Goodreads has this annual reading challenge where you set up a goal and then take records on books you read, while Goodreads counts them in.
That being said, I also come to realize that retaining either wisdom or knowledge from reading non-fiction, fiction, economics, you name it, can be difficult. I've very recently finished The Razor's Edge for the 2nd time, and loved it. However, I have to admit, to a shame, that I didn't remember that much stuff after reading it the 1st time.
I have a hypothesis that part of the book has already been "internalized", and therefore is reflected subconsciously in my daily activities and interactions with people. There is no known scientific evidence to either prove or disprove this hypothesis.
I suggest you read Schopenhauer's opinion on reading. The German philosopher stated that when you read, you replace your own thinking with other people's thinking, so excessive reading may do you harm instead of good.
That's a really astonishing perspective, but recently I have been considering that possibility.
Feel free to write about any non-fiction or literature (I dig 18-20 century writers especially) you read.