Human’s nature is to forget things; we are not good at retaining long-term information that we do not use (people do spaced repetition to try though). People are good at recognizing information; so do active learning and active recall with some methods like “take smart notes” to build a personal information knowledge in an authentic part of you that reorganized information from other sources of information and interconnected them. So then one can reuse that for a late final work (instead of going from step 0) demonstrating one’s mastering of such information.

But I do really think that traditional books are BAD at this point of development of the socioeconomic system. Now, information technology (computer applications, etc) need to do the most for not only describing knowledge, but being more engaging (with what we know about the human mind), easier to search, to interconnect, interact with… etc, for active learning and active recall. Jupyter Notebooks for example, … Really, using some apps to learn e.g. play piano adapt to us humans wayy more so way more easy to learn. The problem: books do not adapt to humans, software engineering in UX/UI take adapting to humans (instead of the opposite) as a main principle. And and now have artificial intelligence (GPT, etc) that are way better than most people at active learning and active recall.

What I find most value for me though is your take on fiction books; I do not read them anymore as I think they are a total waste of time for me at this point, just as most other forms of attention economy. Now I see fiction books (or anything not technical) can be useful to inform one’s about human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness including living in this global socioeconomic system. Of course, all with the subjectivity of fiction.