A few months ago I listened to this episode of the Search Engine podcast in which PJ Vogt, the host, talks to Ezra Klein about the internet and media consumption in general.
This is the noisy channel theorem by Claude Shannon applied to books :-) You need some amount of redundancy to pass information without errors over a noisy channel.
Wow, how this topic resonates with my thoughts last, hm... decade :) Starting from "how the fast broadband internet with social media spoils our perception of information" to "why books still work".
I think that slowing down in getting information in books-manner (with good structure and repetitive flow) works because a brain can't build neural links immediately. It takes time and you need to "burn" those new paths in the brain. A blog post can't do this. A blog post can give you an instant hammer to nailing, but it can't teach you how to actually nail like a skill. That's how StackOverflow (and all Web 2.0) works: myriads of instant tools against strong knowledge.
Some people hear that we are in the age of the instant information and think it is a good thing to have everything distilled by someone else for you. The truth is exactly the opposite, real knowledge comes from hard work and taking time to learn, despite everyone around you doing the opposite.
I know people that would prefer to watch video reviews of movies rather than the movies themselves because it takes considerable less time.
We need to get out of this madness, and thank you for bringing up this topic
Story of my life learning and practicing some Haskell XD. You read it and think, that makes a lot of sense, then you try it and things go wrong and you get frustrated. You get back to reading again and understand it a bit more, go back to practice and repeat the cycle.
This is the noisy channel theorem by Claude Shannon applied to books :-) You need some amount of redundancy to pass information without errors over a noisy channel.
Wow, how this topic resonates with my thoughts last, hm... decade :) Starting from "how the fast broadband internet with social media spoils our perception of information" to "why books still work".
I think that slowing down in getting information in books-manner (with good structure and repetitive flow) works because a brain can't build neural links immediately. It takes time and you need to "burn" those new paths in the brain. A blog post can't do this. A blog post can give you an instant hammer to nailing, but it can't teach you how to actually nail like a skill. That's how StackOverflow (and all Web 2.0) works: myriads of instant tools against strong knowledge.
And now it's boosted by an AI.
We are all doomed.
Some people hear that we are in the age of the instant information and think it is a good thing to have everything distilled by someone else for you. The truth is exactly the opposite, real knowledge comes from hard work and taking time to learn, despite everyone around you doing the opposite.
I know people that would prefer to watch video reviews of movies rather than the movies themselves because it takes considerable less time.
We need to get out of this madness, and thank you for bringing up this topic
Story of my life learning and practicing some Haskell XD. You read it and think, that makes a lot of sense, then you try it and things go wrong and you get frustrated. You get back to reading again and understand it a bit more, go back to practice and repeat the cycle.
should i read the book? a bit confused, i don't even smoke...
Johnny Mnemonic is the prequel to Matrix and the true GOAT of the genre :)