Month: January 2020

Review: How to Read a Book (Mortimer Adler, Charles Van Doren)

As part of my research on how to bootstrap understanding in a field, I’m reading books that attempt to answer that question. You might think I should have started with that, but it was useful to get a sense of what problems I needed to solve before I looked for the solution. How to Read a Book (affiliate link) is generally very well regarded in this area and came with a strong recommendation from the CEO of Roam, who I would expect to have pretty good thoughts on learning structure. Nonetheless, I was quite disappointed. It took me a long time to put my disappointment into words, but with the help of someone on Facebook I finally figured it out: How to Read a Book is aimed at a narrower subset of books than it acknowledges. What subset, you might ask? I don’t have a great answer, because the authors clearly consider the subset to be the only books, or the only books worth reading, so they didn’t leave a lot of clues. 

What I can say is that it expects books to follow a rigid structure, and to have a single unifying point (what they call “the unity”). This seems to me to be setting up both the author and the reader to throw out a lot of information because they weren’t expecting to see it or couldn’t fit it into their existing frameworks- reading like a state, in essence. This is not the only thing that makes me think HtRaB is more about being able to understand a book than understand the world, although it’s the only one I can articulate.

How to Read a Book didn’t even attempt to answer my current most important question in reading: How do I know what to save or pay attention to? More attentive reading (including but not limited to note-taking) takes more time and more mental effort. Even if it was free, every additional memory or note eats up space in my brain or exobrain and makes it harder to find other thoughts when I look for them. But I don’t necessarily know how important a piece of information is when I read it. Good pre-reading might help me know how important it is to that particular work, but never to my life as a whole.

HtRaB acknowledges that different works have vastly different returns to attention and you should allocate your reading effort accordingly, but I don’t feel like it gave me guidance for choosing what to pay attention to, and I have a suspicion that if I pressed the point the authors’ answer would be extremely in line with the literary and scientific canon of the 1940s-1970s.

My favorite section of How to Read a Book is also the most mechanically detailed: the algorithm for pre-processing a book (explained in detail here). I don’t know if this was the most useful to me because it was the most detailed or because a teacher once told me skimming was immoral and I needed that to be challenged.

For the meat of reading, How to Read a Book suggests questions to ask but not how to determine the answer. To be fair, this is hard. As I work on my own guide to reading I’m intensely aware of how difficult it is to translate the intentions and external appearance of what I’m doing to inner workings comprehensible to many, or even to other people very similar to myself.  I suspect there are people for whom reading these questions causes something to click in their brain and they suddenly start reading better, and that’s great, but it makes the book lucky, not good. Which is nothing to be ashamed of: sometimes a stab at a hard problem is worth more than a perfect solution to an easy one.  But HtRaB’s stab did not happen to hit my particular problem, nor contain enough deep models to let me make the stab myself.

My overall impression is that this is one of those books that is helpful if you read it at the right time and pretty meh otherwise, and it was the wrong time for me. I also predicted it would be one of those books that’s notable for founding a genre but goes on to be surpassed by later books that learned from it, but when I looked at Amazon I found very little. There’s lots on speedreading, confusing memorization with learning, and  “how to study to pass a test designed by someone else”, and I may end up reading some of those because the field is that sparse, but they’re not what I actually want. So if there’s a work you or someone you trust likes that attempts to answer any of the following questions, please share it:

  1. How do you find the most likely sources of relevant or useful information?
  2. How do you get the most (useful) information out of a sources?
  3. How do you decide what information to save?
  4. How do you save it in a maximally useful way?

I’m also interested if you have opinions on any of the following:

  • Mind Mapping: Improve Memory, Concentration, Communication, Organization, Creativity, and Time Management
    • Kindle Unlimited
  • The Lifetime Learner’s Guide to Reading and Learning
  • Extend Your Mind: Praxis Volume 2
  • How to Take Smart Notes
  • Accelerated Learning for Expertise: Rapid Knowledge Acquisition Skills to Learn Faster, Comprehend Deeper, and Reach a World-Class Level (Learning how to Learn Book 6) Kindle Edition
  • The Self-Learning Blueprint: A Strategic Plan to Break Down Complex Topics, Comprehend Deeply, and Teach Yourself Anything (Learning how to Learn Book 3)
  • Writing to Learn
  • Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive
  • The Art of Reading

 

So many thanks to my Patreon supporters and the Long Term Future Fund for their support of this research.

Epistemic Spot Check: Children in Colonial America

Introduction

Once upon a time I started fact checking books I read, to see if they were trustworthy. I called this epistemic spot checking because it was not a rigorous or thorough investigation; just following up on things I thought were interesting, likely to be wrong, or easy to check. Eventually I became dissatisfied with this. It placed too much emphasis on a binary decision about a particular book’s trustworthiness, and not enough on building models. So I started working on something better. Something that used multiple sources to build robust models of the world. This book is part of that attempt

Children in Colonial America (affiliate link) is a compilation of chapters from many authors, all centered around what you would guess from the title. This lowers the predictive value of one chapter for assessing the credibility of the whole book, since they’re different authors, but has more than zero value. For purposes of this post, I’m going to look at three chapters. As usual, you can view all my notes in Roam here.

Claims

Chapter 1: Indian Children in Early Mexico

Claim: Mexico was ruled by Spain from 1521-1821, and was known as New Spain during this time (p28).
Verdict: True (source). This is not very impressive to get right, except that I originally recorded it as 1831 and briefly went very down on the chapter. So we know I can catch both embarrassingly obvious factual errors made in books, and my own  embarrassing typos.

 

Claim:  In the 1700s Mexico City had 112,000 people, mostly natives, the largest city in the Americas (p28).
Verdict: Highly defensible but unproven. This is almost exactly what wikipedia reports an inaccessible source reports a primary source recorded in 1793, although 112,926 rounds to 113k, not 112k. It’s not at all clear to me how good this census was, given that even modern censuses have a lot of problems.

Additionally, I’m not thrilled about her using one number to refer to the population throughout an entire century. According to wikipedia the population varied a lot, probably due to competition between disease and immigration, but possibly due to to changes in methodology.

This is still well over the recorded populations of various future-USA cities recorded in the same decade.  However that’s still sensitive to definitions- how do you draw the boundaries between a city and its surrounding farmland?

 

Claim: In the 1700s New Spain had 6m inhabitants.
Verdict: Right order of magnitude. This graph

which is originally from a Spanish-language work I read about here estimates about 1/3 lower than that, but admits that it’s order-of-magnitude at best.

 

Claim: Aztecs buried newborn’s umbilical cord under the hearth (girl) or battlefield (boy) (p29).
Verdict: Well justified (source 1, 2, 3). AFAICT everyone’s ultimate source for this is the Florentine Codex, which has all the problems noted above.

 

Claim:  “Children were the most apt to die in the epidemics because they had no natural immunity” (p36).
Verdict: Close enough. Ignores the fragility of old people and there are flukes like the Spanish Flu, but close enough.

 

Claim: “Probably the happiest moments for boys and girls were the processions, fireworks, and communal meals that took place about eight times a year in the Indian pueblos.” (p37), “another favorite time for Indian youngsters was the feast of the patron saint of their home towns.” (p38)
Verdict: I don’t know how the author could possibly know this with the information they have.

 

Claim: “The Jesuits were expelled by Charles III in 1767 from all of the Spanish territories, resulting in the exile of four hundred priests from New Spain, one-third of whom were teachers.” (p39).
Verdict: Probably wrong (evidence compiled in Roam). There was definitely an expulsion, but the more common number given for number of exiled priests was 678, and that comes from an enumerated census. It’s possible these were referring to different geographic areas, but the book specifically refers to New Spain, not just Mexico. It’s possible it was referring to just a subset of priests- but it specifically names priests and teacher priests. It’s possible they meant some third thing I haven’t thought of, or have a different sources, but in that case they really need to provide it.

Chapter 2: Colonizing Childhood: Religion, Gender, and Indian Children in Southern New England, 1600–1720

Claim: New England colonists used indentured servitude as a way to both extract labor and indoctrinate Native American children (p48).
Verdict: Seems likely but leaves out important facts, such as the fact that women were also forced to provide labor in New England, and native men were sold into slavery in the Bahamas (wikipedia).

It’s a little hard to tell what source the chapter is using for this- there’s a citation 80% of the way through a very long paragraph that lists several sources. The most relevant looking one, Colonizing the Children: Indian Youngsters in Servitude in Early Rhode Island, is focused 50-100 years later than this book, and mentions Christianity once. The Impact of Indentured Servitude on the Society and Culture of Southern New England Indians, 1680-1810 is also set later than this chapter.

 

Claim: “In a reflection of the importance of religious practice to the major transitions in an individual’s life, Indian parents and kin actively assisted children in cultivating relationships with a range of powerful supernatural entities.” (p49)
Verdict: Dubious and undifferentiated.

This quote is a stand-in for the numerous times the author talks about the importance of religion to Native New England children during colonial times. And I don’t doubt that it was, because it’s important to most if not cultures. It certainly was to the Puritan children that are the most natural comparison group. It’s ambiguous if the chapter means to claim the native children were especially religious, and if so, how we know that.

 

Claim: Edward Winslow reported Wampanoag beliefs about a deity who created life, Keihtan. (p51)
Verdict: True but waaaaaaay to much work to verify (source).

How could this take so long to verify, you might ask yourself? It’s just reporting that a dude said a thing, surely you just need to point to the page where he said it and everyone can go on with their day. Alternately, it’s a pretty distinct word, can’t you just google for it?

Yes, either one of those would be easy, but:

  1. The author continued their delightful pattern of putting all their citations in a single superscript that is almost, but not quite entirely, at the end of a paragraph, rather than where he’s asserting the thing.
  2. He spelled the damn name differently than Winslow.

The misspelling isn’t a big deal, phoneticizing a language that may not even have a written form is not easy, and this deity has lots of names. But the combination of the two meant I lost 45 minutes of my life to tracking down this simple fact that wasn’t even relevant to my interests.

 

Claim: English missionaries established Praying Towns, their version of missionary villages in the mid-1600s
Verdict: Obviously true. After the last one I’m just going to accept a tertiary source. There is some conflict among sources about when they started (notes in Roam), which I think is more about the definition of “start” than about when specific things actually happened.

 

 

Chapter 3: Imperial Ideas, Colonial Realities Enslaved Children in Jamaica, 1775–1834

Claim: Children accounted for a “significant” portion of the slave trade, especially compared to other  (p63).
Verdict: Vague but true (Roam notes). The exact number varies based on time, origin, and destination so it’s not clear how meaningful an average is, but 25% looks roughly correct.

More specifically: Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men? (Roam notes), a survey of mostly British vessels, reports 12-40% of imported slaves being children, depending on the era, based on a survey of ships that covers 8-10% of all slaves transported to the New World (my guess is this is based on the population that arrived alive, not who was on the boat when they left Africa, but it’s not specified).

Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade: data from French shipping and plantation records (Roam notes) finds an overall average of 26.6% children, varying from 9-43% using the standard definition of child in a slavery context at that time, which is “shorter than 4’4”.

26% or even 12% is not trivial, but it’s especially striking when compared to people arriving in the New World as indentured servants, which really were overwhelmingly adult and male, something like 70-90% (although the numbers aren’t quite comparable; I believe European immigrants use their actual birthdates to determine age, as opposed to height) (source: Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men? )

 

Claim: Children were historically used as sources of labor, including in Britain, in the 1700s and 1800s
Verdict: True, although very hard to find hard numbers for (Roam synthesis). The best estimate I could find was this summary article which cited multiple papers I could not access. It gives the following numbers for child participation in mining and textiles, which it claims were the most popular industries for children

The demographic distribution of Industrial-Revolution Great Britain is also very hard to find, but the following is implied to be the result of a census (source):

If you assume that 1/3 of children were between 10 and 15, and that all working children were between 10 and 15, that would make their labor force participation in mining and textiles (very) approximately equal to their proportion of population in 1860. Of course this is very rough- God knows what the demographics of children were during the Demographic Transition, and some children started working younger than 10. But this does suggestion that children as a whole were less likely to participate in work – at least, work outside the home; it’s not clear how they’re counting work on the family farm.

 

Claim: “the age and social standing of the enslaved are two factors, among others, that would also influence attitudes and reactions to enslavement in the Americas.”
Verdict: Unverified by I believe it. The original source was inaccessible and verifying it was proving to require a lot of general reading that didn’t bear on my question, so I stopped after 15 minutes of trying.

 

 

Process Notes

I had a really hard time verifying anything interesting in Indian Children in Early Mexico, because all of the primary and deeper secondary sources are in Spanish or Nahuatl, neither of which I read. I say “sources”, but it appears there’s only one real source for any information on pre-Spanish Aztecs, which is one missionary (Bernardino de Sahagún), who wrote a general history of the Aztecs, known in English as either the Florentine Codex or The General/Universal History of the Things of New Spain. At least, that’s what everything I read seemed to be relying on, when they gave a source at all. Parts of the codex are available for free in English, but not the relevant ones. Even assuming I could read it, one dude whose official mission was very much to destroy Aztec culture and replace it with his own probably introduced biases to his reports of their culture.

Sometimes I would luck out and a source would be in English but inaccessible. What I could verify with English sources was pretty limited to names and dates.

Colonizing Childhood… brings up the question: how long should I spend verifying minor claims? There’s a fair number of claims I go into with the attitude of “this ought to be easy to find.” You could argue these are low value because it’s very unlikely the author screwed up a basic name or date- but if that’s true, it would be a very bad sign about the author/work if they did screw it up. And surprisingly often, there’s debate about even very simple facts. E.g., different sources listed different start times for Praying Towns. These sources didn’t differ in their facts, but in what they counted as the start- the first sermon or the first town incorporation. I wouldn’t have learned about those distinctions if I hadn’t looked up an “easy to find” fact.

Overall, I was really not impressed by how little context this chapter gave for the tribes it talked about, primarily the Wampanoag. I never would have guessed that they were only semi-sedentary (which is important context for the missionaries’ efforts to move them into Praying Towns) or matrilineal, if I hadn’t sought out other sources. It could be aimed at a more educated audience than me- but the book covers a really wide geographic and social range, and it seems unfair to expect people to be experts in all of them.

Imperial Ideas… was flat out a better chapter than the other two.

    1. It cited sources such that I could actually find them and match them to claims.
    2. It had a delightful pattern of making a general claim and then backing it up with specific instances. E.g.

      young African children were available for sale on the island. In 1792, in a letter reporting the sale of the slave cargo on the ship Ruby, the Jamaican merchant John Cunningham wrote, “I sold 129 slaves. . . . There were 45 boys and girls . . . many not more than 8 or 9 years of age.”9 Over 30 percent of the captives sold from this ship were children.

I found myself marking more claims as potential epistemic spot checks for Imperial Ideas… than I did for the other two chapters. In fact, notetaking was just easier and more free flowing with this chapter. I’m not sure how to operationalize this: punishing books for taking more effort to read has some obvious failure modes.

Actually this brings up something I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while, which is how Epistemic Spot Checks have changed my definition of easy. Time was a book’s easiness rating was based on how much effort I needed to put into understanding the author. It rewarded spoon feeding me conclusions and punished provoking certain kinds of thought. Now easiness is much more based on how much effort I have to put into verifying the author’s claims.

I originally didn’t record any notes from Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men? about indentured servitude, because it wasn’t strictly relevant to the question I was asking. Luckily I wrote this up the same night and noticed that it seemed worth including.

Verdict

Indian Children in Early Mexico got most of its basic facts right, or at least defensible, and had one probable error. I couldn’t verify anything interesting because of language barrier.

Colonizing Childhood: Religion, Gender, and Indian Children in Southern New England, 1600–1720 also seems fine, although it was more a jumble of facts than a cohesive thesis, and the closest thing it had to a thesis seemed to indicate a specialness that was not backed up by facts.

Imperial Ideas, Colonial Realities Enslaved Children in Jamaica, 1775–1834 was pretty great. It backed up its claims better than the other two and provoked more thought in me.

 

Many thanks to my Patreon patrons and the Long Term Future Fund for funding this post.

My Favorite Gifts This Year

Preface

This year I upgraded my phone (Thanks Mom and Dad), which necessitated a whole bunch of other purchases. Technology has reached that stage where upgrading is not an unmitigated good, and despite the fact that my new phone is way better, I kept being annoyed by small things.

The phone loads google maps in less than 40 seconds, but doesn’t have a windows button (which I adapted to in a week). The volume buttons are on the correct side, but auto-adjusting brightness wasn’t enabled by default (which took 60 seconds to fix). The new phone was USB-C instead of micro-USB, so all my old chargers were useless for it but still had to be kept around for all my other devices. And my existing bluetooth headphones didn’t work with the phone (and have never worked with my laptop) so I had to buy new ones (and by “I”, I mean “they were also gifts from my parents”).

The headphones themselves not Pareto improvements over the old ones. Their lowest minimum volume is not too loud, but the sound quality isn’t as good (which I stopped noticing after a week). The controls are better, but at first I misread the instructions and thought they were worse.

My aunt got me Hamilton tickets for Christmas, which was incredibly generous and thoughtful, but the new Aaron Burr wasn’t as good as Leslie Odom, Jr. in ways that weakened his performance of my favorite song.

My point is, I am surrounded by generous people giving me expensive, useful things, but none of them gave me that feeling of sheer delight gifts gave me when I was a child. The small flaws loomed too large.

There were four exceptions, which I believe escaped this trap by only being expected to do at most two things.

Gifts That Succeeded At One Thing

Links are affiliate links when possible

Sleep-compatible headphones ($20)

I sometimes like to fall asleep to podcasts. Despite being critical to my process, my boyfriend objected to playing Welcome to Night Vale loud enough for me to hear over the fan and ear plugs I also consider critical.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I solved this with a pair of headphones designed to be worn during sleep. You do have to fiddle with them sometimes and I wouldn’t want to sleep in the exact same position for hours with them in the wrong spot, but they get the job done, and the audio is astonishingly high quality for $20. You get exactly what you paid for with the mic, to the point I wish they hadn’t included it, but that is fine because I didn’t get these to take phone calls on. The top volume is pretty quiet, as I discovered when I tried to use them on an airplane, but again, $20. These have succeeded far beyond what I thought was possible at letting me fall asleep to podcasts while sharing a bed.

I’ve had this since August and am still delighted with it.

Dual Charger/Battery  ($35)

As mentioned above I now need to keep both micro-USB and USB-C charger on hand. I also managed to lose my two tiny portable chargers, not that they would have helped because they only had micro-USB and iPhone out.

Enter the Dual PowerCore Fusion 5000, which:

  1. Has USB ports instead of built in cords, so I can change the output
  2. Has multiple ports, so I can charge multiple thing at once.
  3. Can charge itself and devices at the same time, removing the need to juggle.
  4. By combining two devices gives me one less thing to lose track of.

I’ve only had this one for a month, so it’s still possible it will catch fire or otherwise turn out to be inadequate, but I’m very pleased right now.

Bombas Classic Marl Socks ($12)

To be fair, I am made unusually happy by well thick, fitting socks. My previous favorite was Smartwool Saturnsphere, on which I have spent low-hundreds of dollars, but after two years my old ones can no longer meet my standards and the model is no longer produced in acceptable colors. I got a pair of these Bombas (affiliate link) socks for Christmas and was delighted: they’re incredibly…what’s a word that means “tight” but has only positive connotation? Like having your feet hugged all day, without being restrictive. I’m only waiting to see how they age before ordering a dozen and tossing my old socks.

UPDATE 2020-06-16: These socks developed a hole in the heel either 6 or 3 months in (I have two identical pairs bought at different times). From the hole, it looks like I stepped on something sharp, rather than the fabric wore out. Bombas replaced them immediately for free. I just had to answer some questions and send in a photograph.

Super Comfy Sweater ($40)

This had two jobs: be comfy, and don’t show cat hair. It succeeds at both admirably, except that sometimes it is so comfy I can’t take it off when I leave the house and thus leave the house covered in cat hair, when the whole point of having indoor sweaters is to not do that.

I suspect this level softness won’t survive the first washing, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it right now.

 

Cassette Tape Thoughts

“The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.”

Excerpt From: Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren. “How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.” (affiliate link).

This really stuck with me. More properly, it stuck with me the second time I read it. This turns out to be really important, and meta.

The difference between the first time I read it and the second was that I had four more months of reading books while specifically thinking about how to get the most out of them. My attitude towards How to Read a Book when I first read it was kind of like a cassette tape.* It would teach me Good Reading and then I could do it and Read Better. I didn’t have an idea of what problems I wanted it to solve- neither what axes I wanted to improve on, nor what my blocks were. If I’d succeeded at reading the book at this time, it would have given me the ability to parrot its ideas, but not actually apply them.

[*I fear a cassette tape really is a better metaphor than modern music playing equipment, which is pretty defined by its flexibility and adaptation to the user. Younger readers: imagine something heavily DRMed so you have to sit through all the commercials and can’t skip around within it]

Four months later, I know what my biggest problem is: how to identify what information to record and what to let go of. I am really excited for any insights HTRAB has into that.  And because I know that, whatever I learn from HTRAB won’t be something I parrot back on a test, it will be incorporated into my own models, and I’ll be able to explain every part of them, adjust plans and outputs to accommodate changes in inputs, etc.

I previously talked about how both detail-focused and detail-entwined books were harder to extract value from. Over on LessWrong, John Wentworth suggested this was a gears based problem: books that were just lists of details were like describing gears without detailing how they worked together. Books that entwined their details too much were mashing multiple gears together without disambiguating them. The latter corresponds to what  Adler and Van Doren describe as cassette tapes.

What epistemic spot checks were previously doing could be described as “determining if the cassette tape is good”, and what I am aiming for now (more after conceiving of it this way) is understanding and investigating a book’s gears. This involves both seeing how the gears fit together, and verifying that the gears are “real”, meaning they reflect actual reality.

Call for Volunteers

3.5 years ago I started semi-methodically checking the claims of books I read, to assess truthiness. A few months ago I identified flaws in the system and started working to find/create solutions. This should be old hat to regular readers.

What I haven’t talked about yet is how the project has grown: I’m now trying to create a research method that enables you to bootstrap from zero knowledge in a field to competence, without trusted experts. I’m further trying to teach this method to others. I’m fortunate enough to have received funding for this from the Long Term Future Fund that will cover most although probably not all of my expenses, so many thanks to them.

Finding a research method that dramatically improved on my old one went much faster than I thought- within a week of starting to use Roam, certain obfuscated problems became obvious and then solved. That’s great for me, but the lack of struggle actually makes it harder to identify flaws in the method or teach it to others, because I don’t know what needs explaining.

What I am looking for now is test subjects to teach this research method to, with the understanding that early subjects will be helping me more than I am helping them, as they teach me where my research or teaching methods fall flat. If this calls to you, please fill out this form.

What’s in it for you? Some combination of:

  1. Contributing to the creation of a method that lets people learn more with less time and effort
  2. Learning that method for yourself.

Early students will get more of 1, late students more of 2. You can indicate your preference on the form.

The most useful test subjects will be those who already have research projects (including their own epistemic spot checks) ready to go or in progress. It is something of a time commitment to actually use these methods and introspect on the experience, so I’d be surprised if people were willing to put in the time purely as a favor to me. But I also expect a fairly high drop out rate and especially early on, time teaching is valuable even if it doesn’t get used. So if you’re not sure what kind of commitment you can make, please just be honest on the form and I’ll prioritize as I can.