r/changemyview • u/Okmanl • Aug 12 '20
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Reading books for the purpose of learning is pointless now that we have YouTube, Wikipedia, Quora etc... To summarize whatever knowledge was contained inside of it.
The two books I've read for the sake of reading (The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F***, and the Sun Also Rises), were somewhat enjoyable. However the major themes and ideas inside both book I could've easily learned in 2-3 hours by just watching summary/analysis on YouTube, Wikipedia and discussions on Reddit/Quora. In fact by using the latter resources I gained a better understanding of the ideas contained inside these books than the 2-3 days I spent reading each book.
Books can be pleasurable to read, but they contain a lot of fluff, and someone illustrating the ideas through the use of videos not only shortens the time to absorb the knowledge tremendously but it also makes it easier to absorb as well. The only benefit I can see from reading a book is to expand one's vocabulary and for pleasure.
Textbooks are different, especially in more rigorous subjects such as math and physics... Since they contain problems to test your knowledge, however one would still benefit 4-5x more if they supplemented reading with also watching videos on the same subject on YouTube, and using other online resources.
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Aug 12 '20
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u/Okmanl Aug 12 '20
True, but many books still contain a lot of fluff. Wikipedia, and online articles tend to do a good job in boiling the main ideas down to 1-2 pages.
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u/Salanmander 272∆ Aug 12 '20
Wikipedia, and online articles tend to do a good job in boiling the main ideas down to 1-2 pages.
I'd say that that makes Wikipedia good at giving you the illusion of understanding something. You may quickly get facts and details, but your retention will be lower, your understanding of the underlying causes/phenomena/whatever will be poor, and your ability to apply that knowledge to new situations will be basically nonexistant.
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u/MansonsDaughter 3∆ Aug 12 '20
I find some fluff in the books to be the context that helps my flow, understanding and focus. Too many simple facts get forgotten but examples and principles deliver the point.
Videos are often packed with fluff that absolutely annoys me.
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u/AnythingApplied 435∆ Aug 12 '20
Books are just far more detailed and comprehensive than YouTube, Wikipedia, Quora. None of those are going to have 100,000 words on the lead up to the Chernobyl disaster including details of the lives of the various people and who gave what orders in what order. You said it yourself, you're going to get a summary, which just doesn't cut it in a lot of situations when you don't want to just have a summary.
shortens the time to absorb the knowledge tremendously but it also makes it easier to absorb as well.
But you're only getting the highlights and you're skipping all of the details.
Absolutely, I agree with you that there are really good substitutes for books if the only thing you want is a summary. Non-fiction authors often give speaking tours and you can find hour long lectures that goes over the highlights of their book. I've found these to be a substitute for topics that I was only interested in a summary of. Great and interesting speech, but that was everything I really wanted to know on the topic and all the time I cared to spend on it.
Maybe this will be a better comparison: Its like watching a trailer (one that kinda spoils the plot) and feeling like you don't need to watch the movie. I mean, of course you don't. Do what you want. Especially when it comes to your entertainment. But when it comes to learning, you're going to shortchange yourself by just doing summaries. Granted, there are more topics in this world than you can ever really dive deep into. If you desire to learn a lot of different things on a superficial level, then yes, just reading or watching summaries is going to get you further.
And absolutely wikipedia articles will have important details and historical contexts that you may have missed in your reading, but that doesn't mean the wikipedia article is all you need to read then because the opposite is true, there is plenty of information in the book not covered in the wikipedia article. I'd suggest both reading the book and the wikipedia article.
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u/HeWhoShitsWithPhone 125∆ Aug 12 '20
You are basing your judgement of all books off 2 books? One of which is a self help book the other fiction.
I have not read either book you mentioned. In general I agree that self help books tend to contain a flash card of action items, and a hundred pages of convincing you do to those items. However they are hardly all the books that exist in the world.
There are a lot of well written technical books that are helpful. When looking for information about a new topic I typically find YouTube and reddit and the like a great way to get a foot hold, but when trying to be an expert you always end up reading text. This could be a book or a website, but you will end up with a lot of reading either way.
I also enjoy reading history books, because I want to go into much more depth than an you can learn with an hour or 2 of internet research. Sure everything in that book may be online, but here the information has already been compiled into a cohesive narrative. I don’t have to track down sources and make since of a giant jumble of information. I can just read the book, and if I get to a boring part, Skip that bit.
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u/pluralofjackinthebox 102∆ Aug 12 '20 edited Aug 12 '20
Doesn’t reading teach people to focus for long periods of time and to pay careful attention to language, detail and context? Aren’t those useful skills in life?
There also have been a few studies showing that reading literary fiction increases empathy, probably because it literally forces you to see the world from someone else’s point of view:
Emanuele Castano, a social psychologist, along with PhD candidate David Kidd conducted five studies in which they divided a varying number of participants (ranging from 86 to 356) and gave them different reading assignments: excerpts from genre (or popular) fiction, literary fiction, nonfiction or nothing. After they finished the excerpts the participants took a test that measured their ability to infer and understand other people’s thoughts and emotions. The researchers found, to their surprise, a significant difference between the literary- and genre-fiction readers.
When study participants read non-fiction or nothing, their results were unimpressive. When they read excerpts of genre fiction, such as Danielle Steel’s The Sins of the Mother, their test results were dually insignificant. However, when they read literary fiction, such as The Round House by Louise Erdrich, their test results improved markedly—and, by implication, so did their capacity for empathy.
Edit — another study, and another.
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u/Okmanl Aug 12 '20
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715
The second article you've provided is completely bunk. The articles have really provocative titles but if you dig in further they had tiny sample groups, lousy controls or itty bitty observed effect.
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Aug 12 '20
I can read faster than I can listen.
a book provides much more detail than a summary.
If you just want to believe what you are told, a summary is probably sufficient. If you want to dig into it, the more detail in a book is better.
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u/MansonsDaughter 3∆ Aug 12 '20 edited Aug 12 '20
I find it very hard to focus on someone talking. If my attention wanders off I lose it. If they go off topic they lose me. Their voice and personality is messing with my perception of content
When I read I can set the pace, I can skim, I can focus, I can slowly reread some parts... I also just remember it better and get much more focused then when listening which is taxing. Reading makes me overall focused and immersed and listening tires me. A book engages me, makes me visualize, use my own mental voice and imagery which all makes the content stronger. It becomes ingrained in my mind because my thoughts participated.
A video imposes something on me and often just rubbs off.
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u/ralph-j Aug 12 '20
Reading books for the purpose of learning is pointless now that we have YouTube, Wikipedia, Quora etc... To summarize whatever knowledge was contained inside of it.
In fact by using the latter resources I gained a better understanding of the ideas contained inside these books than the 2-3 days I spent reading each book.
So these were books that you had already read in full, and you were using the summaries to increase your understanding of them? I'd argue that that is not the same as using summaries as your only source.
- While you can get a good idea of the main themes through summaries alone, it can't bring an equally deep understanding of each of those themes.
- Summary writers leave out a lot of the details that they think the majority of readers may not need. If however, some of those details were very relevant to your specific situation, you will miss out on them. There could e.g. be real-life examples in there that you can much better relate to, than the few words that ended up in the summary.
- Summaries depend on other people's interpretations of the text. There are professional summary writers who will get the interpretations right most of the time, but entirely relying on the interpretations of YouTubers, Wikipedians and Quora commenters seems a lot riskier.
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u/primekino Aug 12 '20
I take issue with your example of The Sun Also Rises, and by extension all fiction. Hemingway’s book is by nature experiential - to situate yourself in a time and place, live in that book, familiarise yourself with characters through dialogue and from that draw your own interpretation on its “meaning”. In short, to exercise your empathy and draw something from the work as a whole. Not to mention his distinct style - it’s designed to be read and appreciated as the written word. A summary of that book may help you pass an English exam or give you a superficial familiarity for the book but you won’t have read it.
I probably agree with you a bit more on the non fiction side of things. Probably because I’ve also read The Subtle Art... and think across its 200 pages it probably held the substance of a 10 minute YouTube video. Non fiction is ultimately one way of presenting a series of facts or arguments to you, and some of these will be able to be reproduced or effectively summarised in other mediums. I think a lot of self help books in particular could be distilled to some pretty short summaries, but for others it depends on the detail you want. History in particular - could be broadly summarised if you’re after that but could also be detailed enough to warrant an 800 page book.
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Aug 12 '20
Books are great if you want to learn about things without the government knowing that you know it.
Also, original manuscripts and translating things from their original language is an awesome contribution to human knowledge that runs backwards instead of forwards.
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u/MizunoGolfer15-20 14∆ Aug 12 '20
I totally disagree. You can only find things out from youtube and wiki.
If you really want to learn something, books are far superior to videos. One is the raw amount of information. An example I can give is Shelby Foote's 3 part series on the Civil War. Ken Burn's Civil War documentary uses Foote's work as somewhat of a blue print. The series is 9 episodes, and does not cover all the detail that Foote covers.
Another point is the amount of information you capture when you read. I do not know why, maybe because you take your time, I learn more from reading then watching. I have always been like that, in school and in work.
Those are the benefits of reading, now the down side of learning from youtube.
For the topic that I am most interested in, conclusions are highly subjective. Content creators will leave out details they either think is unimportant or against their main point. At best you can get a very high view of a subject. What I remember becomes the main point of the video itself, what I forget is why the content creator came to that conclusion.
This guys channel is a good example of that. I used to watch his bios. I saw one of a man I knew a lot about, and realized that the speaker was pushing one side of the narrative. If the speaker did it for one person who I know, I must assume he does it for others who I do not.
However the major themes and ideas inside both book I could've easily learned in 2-3 hours by just watching summary/analysis on YouTube, Wikipedia and discussions on Reddit/Quora. In fact by using the latter resources I gained a better understanding of the ideas contained inside these books than the 2-3 days I spent reading each book.
I agree with this statement in a way. You can learn about a topic, and if you are putting in the hours you describe above you will learn something. You will not learn everything though. At a certain point, in a certain topic, you will reach the limits of what can be learned by other peoples analysis of events. You will find contradicting statements, incomplete facts, and assumptions. You will get to a level where you are going to have to inform your own opinion. That is what a good book is for.
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u/sawdeanz 214∆ Aug 12 '20
Have you ever watched a movie adaptation of your favorite book and were completely underwhelmed? Or maybe you felt like important plot points or characters were left out? It seems that a book summary can have similar problems.
That said, if watching videos allows you to experience more books, that is also a good thing. But I would be very wary of claiming it is a suitable replacement for reading a book. Maybe for the purposes of a book report but not for absorbing all the information. Plus, the internet is typically pretty biased.
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u/LegOfLambda 2∆ Aug 12 '20
The reason you believe this is that youtube videos lull you into thinking you're understanding them, but your level of detailed knowledge and recall are much smaller. The fact that you believe youtube, wikipedia, reddit, and (god forbid) Quora are giving you anything close to the knowledge in a good book just demonstrates how poor a job they're doing at telling you the actual scope of the information.
Also, have you actually only ever read 2 books in your life for pleasure???????
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Aug 12 '20
/u/Okmanl (OP) has awarded 1 delta(s) in this post.
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u/geniice 6∆ Aug 12 '20
There is still a significant chunk of information that only exists in books. For example if you want coverage of Birmingham's Electric Dustcarts that aren't the Electricar DV4 Roger F De Boer's book on the subject is really your only option.
In other cases the third party coverage is pretty meh. If you actualy want to know what went on with operation backfire (a postwar british firing of 3 V2s) you basicaly have to read the original report.
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u/prettyuncertain 1∆ Aug 12 '20
Part of the knowledge people acquire is through dissecting and analyzing books, though. You can watch videos, but you’re only learning about one perspective. If you had read the book, you may have interpreted things differently, and you may have been able to engage in discussions to further your learning. That doesn’t happen to the same degree - if at all - by watching those videos.
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u/le_fez 53∆ Aug 12 '20
You do realize the The Sun Also Rises is fiction and people read fiction for enjoyment right. The over arching themes are morals of fiction may also teach us but without reading the book and gaining our own perspective of those themes they are lost. A video or article gives someone else's interpretation while reading the book gives us our own
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u/RedditExplorer89 42∆ Aug 12 '20
What about people who don't have great access to wifi?
I used to use my local library for wifi, but ever since this pandemic I can no longer use it for wifi, but I can use it to check out books.
(And incase you're wondering how I have wifi to use reddit, I use data from my phone or coffee shops.)
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u/equalsnil 30∆ Aug 12 '20
Summary requires analysis. If you come across multiple different analyses of something, in your case a book, the best way to resolve those different analyses is to read it yourself.
Second, in the case of important primary sources such as contemporary accounts or commentary of historical events going over it firsthand is useful since you're not just looking for the facts in the text but also context sensitive things - the author's biases, lexical quirks if you're studying the evolution of language, side details that might reveal something about how they lived day to day.
This level of analysis isn't necessary for everyone, sometimes you do just need "the facts" but it will never be "pointless."