When you’re assigned 30 pages of a textbook, the diligent students read them, then move on to other things. A truly inquisitive person would struggle to finish those 30 pages, because there are almost certainly going to be many more interesting threads they want to follow within those pages.
As a really straightforward example, let’s say you commit to reading a review article on cell senescence. Just forcing your way through the paper, you probably won’t learn much. What will make you learn is looking at the citations as you go.
I love going 4 layers deep. I try to understand the mechanisms that underpin the experiments that generated the data that informed the facts that inform the theories that the review article is covering. When I do this, it suddenly transforms the review article from dry theory to something that’s grounded in memories of data and visualizations of experiments. I have a “simulated lived experience” to map onto the theory. It becomes real.
I think that for anything except scholarship, those aren’t terrible. I’d attack them from the other side: They aren’t shallow enough. In industry, most often you often just want to find some specific piece of information, so reading the whole 30 pages is a waste of time, as is following your deep curiosity down into rabbit holes.
I agree with you. It’s a good point that I should have clarified this is for a specific use case—rapidly scouting out a field that you’re unfamiliar with. When I take this approach, I also do not read entire papers. I just read enough to get the gist and find the next most interesting link.
So for example, I am preparing for a PhD, where I’ll probably focus on aging research. I need to understand what’s going on broadly in the field. Obviously I can’t read everything, and as I have no specific project, there are no particular known-in-advance bits of information I need to extract.
I don’t yet have a perfect account for what exactly you “learn” from this—at the speed I read, I don’t remember more than a tiny fraction of the details. My best explanation is that each paper you skim gives you context for understanding the next one. As you go through this process, you come away with some takeaway highlights and things to look at next.
So for example, the last time I went through the literature on senescence, I got into the antagonistic pleiotropy literature. Most of it is way too deep for me at this point, but I took away the basic insights and epistemic: models consistently show that aging is the only stable equilibrium outcome of evolution, that it’s fueled by genes that confer a reproductive advantage early in life but a disadvantage later in life, and that the late-life disadvantages should not be presumed to be intrinsically beneficial—they are the downside side of a tradeoff, and evolution often mitigates them, but generally cannot completely eliminate them.
I also came to understand that this is 70 years of development of mathematical and data-backed models, which consistently show the same thing.
Relevant for my research is that anti-aging therapeutics aren’t necessarily going to be “fighting against evolution.” They are complementing what nature is already trying to do: mitigate the genetic downsides in old age of adaptations for youthful vigor.
That sounds more like a problem of the teaching style than school in particular. Instead of assigning textbook pages to be read, a better way is to give the students problems to solve and tell them that those textbook pages are relevant to solving the problem. That’s how my biology and biochemistry classes went. We were never assigned to read particular pages of the book.
a better way is to give the students problems to solve and tell them that those textbook pages are relevant to solving the problem. That’s how my biology and biochemistry classes went. We were never assigned to read particular pages of the book.
That does sound like a better way. Personally, I’m halfway through my biomedical engineering MS and have never experienced a STEM class like this. If you don’t mind my asking, where did you take your bio/biochem classes (or what type of school was it)?
I studied bioinformatics at the Free University of Berlin. Just like we had weekly problem sheets in math classes we also had them in biology and biochemistry. It was more than a decade ago. There was certainly a sense of not simply copying what biology majors might do but to be focused more on problem-solving skills that would presumably be more relevant.
School teaches terrible reading habits.
When you’re assigned 30 pages of a textbook, the diligent students read them, then move on to other things. A truly inquisitive person would struggle to finish those 30 pages, because there are almost certainly going to be many more interesting threads they want to follow within those pages.
As a really straightforward example, let’s say you commit to reading a review article on cell senescence. Just forcing your way through the paper, you probably won’t learn much. What will make you learn is looking at the citations as you go.
I love going 4 layers deep. I try to understand the mechanisms that underpin the experiments that generated the data that informed the facts that inform the theories that the review article is covering. When I do this, it suddenly transforms the review article from dry theory to something that’s grounded in memories of data and visualizations of experiments. I have a “simulated lived experience” to map onto the theory. It becomes real.
I think that for anything except scholarship, those aren’t terrible. I’d attack them from the other side: They aren’t shallow enough. In industry, most often you often just want to find some specific piece of information, so reading the whole 30 pages is a waste of time, as is following your deep curiosity down into rabbit holes.
I agree with you. It’s a good point that I should have clarified this is for a specific use case—rapidly scouting out a field that you’re unfamiliar with. When I take this approach, I also do not read entire papers. I just read enough to get the gist and find the next most interesting link.
So for example, I am preparing for a PhD, where I’ll probably focus on aging research. I need to understand what’s going on broadly in the field. Obviously I can’t read everything, and as I have no specific project, there are no particular known-in-advance bits of information I need to extract.
I don’t yet have a perfect account for what exactly you “learn” from this—at the speed I read, I don’t remember more than a tiny fraction of the details. My best explanation is that each paper you skim gives you context for understanding the next one. As you go through this process, you come away with some takeaway highlights and things to look at next.
So for example, the last time I went through the literature on senescence, I got into the antagonistic pleiotropy literature. Most of it is way too deep for me at this point, but I took away the basic insights and epistemic: models consistently show that aging is the only stable equilibrium outcome of evolution, that it’s fueled by genes that confer a reproductive advantage early in life but a disadvantage later in life, and that the late-life disadvantages should not be presumed to be intrinsically beneficial—they are the downside side of a tradeoff, and evolution often mitigates them, but generally cannot completely eliminate them.
I also came to understand that this is 70 years of development of mathematical and data-backed models, which consistently show the same thing.
Relevant for my research is that anti-aging therapeutics aren’t necessarily going to be “fighting against evolution.” They are complementing what nature is already trying to do: mitigate the genetic downsides in old age of adaptations for youthful vigor.
That sounds more like a problem of the teaching style than school in particular. Instead of assigning textbook pages to be read, a better way is to give the students problems to solve and tell them that those textbook pages are relevant to solving the problem. That’s how my biology and biochemistry classes went. We were never assigned to read particular pages of the book.
That does sound like a better way. Personally, I’m halfway through my biomedical engineering MS and have never experienced a STEM class like this. If you don’t mind my asking, where did you take your bio/biochem classes (or what type of school was it)?
I studied bioinformatics at the Free University of Berlin. Just like we had weekly problem sheets in math classes we also had them in biology and biochemistry. It was more than a decade ago. There was certainly a sense of not simply copying what biology majors might do but to be focused more on problem-solving skills that would presumably be more relevant.