To give one example of a limitation of books outside of memory not addressed by your post, books don’t provide any way for me to answer questions about the ideas being discussed beyond what I can visualize in my head (in particular in cases where the ideas are heavily quantitative).
How would this be different from a textbook with problems to work through? Or did you mean good visualization (of data, imbedded in the text) as the link demonstrates?
The latter. To be clear, exercises are great but I think they’re often not enough, in particular for topics where it’s harder to build intuition just by thinking. The visualizations in that post would be an example of a prototype of the sorts of visualizations I’d want for a data-heavy topic.
Regarding textbook problems,the subset of things for which textbook problems substitute for rather than complement interactive visualizations seems relatively small, especially outside of more theoretical domains. Even for something like math, imagine if an addition to exercises, your textbook let you play with 3Blue1Brown-style visualizations of the thing you’re learning about.
To give another example, say I’m learning about economics at the intro level. Typical textbooks will have questions about supply & demand curves, diminishing marginal utility, etc. My claim is that most people will build a deeper understanding of these concepts by having access to some sort of interactive models to probe in addition to the standard exercises at the end of the chapter.
How would this be different from a textbook with problems to work through? Or did you mean good visualization (of data, imbedded in the text) as the link demonstrates?
The latter. To be clear, exercises are great but I think they’re often not enough, in particular for topics where it’s harder to build intuition just by thinking. The visualizations in that post would be an example of a prototype of the sorts of visualizations I’d want for a data-heavy topic.
Regarding textbook problems,the subset of things for which textbook problems substitute for rather than complement interactive visualizations seems relatively small, especially outside of more theoretical domains. Even for something like math, imagine if an addition to exercises, your textbook let you play with 3Blue1Brown-style visualizations of the thing you’re learning about.
To give another example, say I’m learning about economics at the intro level. Typical textbooks will have questions about supply & demand curves, diminishing marginal utility, etc. My claim is that most people will build a deeper understanding of these concepts by having access to some sort of interactive models to probe in addition to the standard exercises at the end of the chapter.