I agree that How to Read a Book is quite underwhelming.
To me, How to Read a Book epitomizes the Modernist take on knowledge, implicitly assuming that the goal is to assemble all the facts together, discard the ones that aren’t true, and then figure out how they fit together so you can achieve your goals.
Of course, finding facts and figuring out if they’re true is important, but there are lots of other important things you might want from learning like understanding thinking styles and frames, generating frameworks, understanding how the knowledge fits into other frameworks, inferring intent, getting context, creating useful actions, etc. All of the things that Postmodernism and Metamodernism where trying to critique about the Modernist framework.
I haven’t found a great resource that does what How to Read a Book does for learning in a Meta-modern context, but I did make a video a while ago with all of the mental models, tools, and processes I’ve collected in this vein. I don’t normally recommend it to people because it’s almost 20 minutes, but you specifically might get a lot more than 20 minutes worth of value by watching it.
I agree that How to Read a Book is quite underwhelming.
To me, How to Read a Book epitomizes the Modernist take on knowledge, implicitly assuming that the goal is to assemble all the facts together, discard the ones that aren’t true, and then figure out how they fit together so you can achieve your goals.
Of course, finding facts and figuring out if they’re true is important, but there are lots of other important things you might want from learning like understanding thinking styles and frames, generating frameworks, understanding how the knowledge fits into other frameworks, inferring intent, getting context, creating useful actions, etc. All of the things that Postmodernism and Metamodernism where trying to critique about the Modernist framework.
I haven’t found a great resource that does what How to Read a Book does for learning in a Meta-modern context, but I did make a video a while ago with all of the mental models, tools, and processes I’ve collected in this vein. I don’t normally recommend it to people because it’s almost 20 minutes, but you specifically might get a lot more than 20 minutes worth of value by watching it.
Video is here if you’re interested.