= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RobinZ comments on CogSci books - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (40)
In my experience, Internet searches are almost completely useless for locating proper educational material in engineering. I have to add the caveat that I am not good at searching the Internet, however, or at least not as good as some people I know.
What, specifically, are you seriously studying using Internet sources?
My reference case is computer science which went online earlier than many other domains, but I honestly cannot think of anything I've learned by reading any textbook during my entire life - all learning I ever get is by doing or by environmental absorption of contextually relevant small bits of information into my knowledge network.
You sound partly aware of this, but I think your reference case is likely to be injecting a heavy bias. I'd guess that computer science is better represented on Google than any other research discipline.
Even with respect to computer science though, I think the point is dead wrong. For example, take an awesome introductory textbook like Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation. You can work through that book doing all the exercises in a few weekends, and it is such a pleasure to read that it's hard to put it down. There's no way you could learn as much as efficiently by randomly jumping from topic to topic on Wikipedia and reading online resources.
A good textbook is still pretty much the greatest bargain in the known universe.
I assume this is only a matter of time, not anything fundamental - it happened earlier to computer science than to other disciplines, but it is probably more often than not true already, and will be nearly universally true in matter of years.
I agree that the information of almost all research disciplines is likely to eventually show up on Google, but as of 2010 - well, you'd have to take my nonfiction books from my cold dead hands!
Did you go to college?
Yes, I have MSc in Computer Science.
I mostly got through my classes by reading the textbooks... did you take Physics or Chemistry as an undergraduate?
I had physics and chemistry in high school, plus quite a bit of bioinformatics at university. No textbooks in either case.