HOISTED From My Archives: "My Reading Difficult Books" Lecture
From the time I taught the “Smith, Marx, & Keynes” History of Economic Thought course designed by Ravi Bhandari…
LECTURE NOTES: On Reading Big, Difficult Books…
Knowledge system and cognitive science guru Andy Matuschak writes a rant called Why Books Don’t Work <https://andymatuschak.org/books/>, about big, difficult books that take him six to nine hours each to read:
Have you ever had a book… come up… [and] discover[ed] that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?… It happens to me regularly…. Someone asks a basic probing question… [and] I simply can’t recall the relevant details… [or] I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea… though I’d certainly thought I understood…. I’ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment…
However, he goes on to say:
Some people do absorb knowledge from books… the people who really do think about what they’re reading.… These readers’ inner monologues have sounds like: “This idea reminds me of…,” “This point conflicts with…,” “I don’t really understand how…,” etc. If they take some notes, they’re not simply transcribing the author’s words: they’re summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing…
But:
Unfortunately, these tactics don’t come easily. Readers must learn specific reflective strategies… run their own feedback loops… understand their own cognition… [what] learning science calls “metacognition”…. It’s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them…
These points have strong relevance for you students in U.C. Berkeley’s “Econ 105: History of Economic Thought: Do We Live in a Smithian, Marxian or a Keynesian World?” For the core of the course is an assisted reading of three very big books that are damnably difficult to digest: Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Capital, and John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. For it is a principal task of a successful modern university to teach people how to read such things.
These are all big, difficult, flawed, incredibly insightful, genius books. They each have a lot in them that is right. They also each have a lot in them that is wrong. Marx, especially, is wrong, often. But even where he is wrong, he is wrong in ways that are productive—reading him makes you smarter even and perhaps especially where you must disagree, and where history since he wrote has proven that he had little clue as to what was really going on in the world around him.
Indeed, it might be said that one of the few truly important key competencies we here at the university have to teach—our counterpart or the mediæval triad of rhetoric, logic, grammar and then quadriad of arithmetic, geometry, music and astrology—is how to read and absorb a theoretical argument made by a hard, worthwhile, flawed book.