Book reviews seem to be usually welcome on LW, and there are threads about learning from books; but AFAIK there is no object-level intro into how to cultivate a habit of asking yourself but what does it actually mean? when you read.
For example, when I recently opened a high-school botany textbook and tried to read it as someone who wants to get a technical understanding of botany from it, the first chapter had me stumped. Okay, so there are different branches of botany, all those special sciences about algae and lichens and mosses—but what does it mean? What questions do they deal with? How small or large are they in scope? How do algae people speak with moss people or—God forbid—ecology people? (Actually, they often don’t.) If ‘science begins when you begin working with numbers’, then when do botanists begin working with numbers? (Okay, cladistics or phytocoenology are rather hard to explain at the start, but there have to be simple examples.) From the very start the textbook teaches you to memorize words but not to look too closely at the things built from them.
I think such micro-reviews—of a chapter, of half a chapter—with informed commentary would be nice to have.
Book reviews seem to be usually welcome on LW, and there are threads about learning from books; but AFAIK there is no object-level intro into how to cultivate a habit of asking yourself but what does it actually mean? when you read.
For example, when I recently opened a high-school botany textbook and tried to read it as someone who wants to get a technical understanding of botany from it, the first chapter had me stumped. Okay, so there are different branches of botany, all those special sciences about algae and lichens and mosses—but what does it mean? What questions do they deal with? How small or large are they in scope? How do algae people speak with moss people or—God forbid—ecology people? (Actually, they often don’t.) If ‘science begins when you begin working with numbers’, then when do botanists begin working with numbers? (Okay, cladistics or phytocoenology are rather hard to explain at the start, but there have to be simple examples.) From the very start the textbook teaches you to memorize words but not to look too closely at the things built from them.
I think such micro-reviews—of a chapter, of half a chapter—with informed commentary would be nice to have.