Septivium Learn about everything

Ask MetaFilter’s best introductory books

In Intro on 7 May 2009 with 25 comments

When talking about the Best Books I linked to this great Ask MetaFilter thread from 2007: What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?.

The whole thing’s worth a read but a while back I decided to go through, give it a squeeze, and extract the juicy bits: the books themselves. So below is a list of books, grouped into topics, as recommended by the thread.

This doesn’t list every book mentioned. I left out some where the topic was particularly narrow and I left out others where the poster give no impression of knowing anything about the field other than having read the single book they recommend.

And, of course, this is quite an arbitrary list of subjects and books — ask the same question of a different group of people and most of the list will no doubt be different (although the books that are the same… those will be the interesting ones). Anyway, here’s the list:

Most of the links are to the pages the original Ask MetaFilter posters linked to; I’ve added some where no link was given.

Alternatives to books

In Intro on 2 April 2009 with no comments

Apologies for the lack of updates recently. It’s a combination of being too busy but also running out of thoughts to post… expect the pace to be slower than it was.

Although I’m still keen on the idea of finding the very best books available on a given topic I thought today I’d discuss some other ideas.

Wikipedia

These days there’s no reason to restrict ourselves to traditional books at all. A friend suggested that an alternative to choosing a book or two on a subject could be to curate a route through Wikipedia. Once a topic has been chosen, a selection of relevant articles could be selected to cover it: a route through the millions of Wikipedia pages that would explain the subject, perhaps in increasing depth and detail. The material would be free, easily available and can be kept up to date.

It would be interesting to try this to see how comprehensive and thorough such an approach could be. I like that a traditional book is planned as a cohesive whole — it can’t cover everything but the author and editors will, ideally, cover all that needs to be covered within the book’s scope in equal detail. It is planned as a single unit and, if nothing else, will probably be more readable than a selection of disjointed Wikipedia articles.

But nonetheless, it’s a fascinating idea. Choosing which articles to include requires some knowledge of the domain, but so does choosing which books are the best ones to read.

Wikipedia books

The idea gets much more interesting given that it’s now possible to create your own custom book from Wikipedia pages. It’s extremely easy (here’s some simple instructions) to add pages to your personal list as you browse the site, re-order them, and then download a free printable PDF of your articles. You can then share the book with others so they can download it, or order a printed and bound version with even nicer formatting from PediaPress. This could be a fantastic thing for people like me who much prefer reading off paper rather than a screen.

I’ve only just discovered this and my mind is still reeling a little. I can create my own unique book on any topic under the sun, with any combination of chapters, with just a few clicks. It’s amazing.

Other free texts

It looks like there are some places aiming to create free books on specific topics. Wikibooks “is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit.” A quick scout around it shows that most of the books are incomplete and I’m not sure how actively things are progressing. It’s also not clear how the content would differ from a curated route through Wikipedia. But something to keep an eye on.

I recently also came across Open College Textbooks which aims to provide text books written by “experts” that are free to read online. It may not be much immediate use to Septivium’s project — there’s a limite range of topics and very few books are near finished yet — but it’s still an interesting development.

I’d be interested to know what you think bout the Wikipedia vs traditional books idea, and whether you have other ideas for alternative sources of knowledge.

The reading list: 3. How do we choose the books?

In Intro on 3 March 2009 with 2 comments

Once we’ve decided how many books to read and what topics need to be covered we need to choose the books themselves.

I touched on this problem in an earlier post about Best Books. We want to find the very best books on a particular topic. Ideally we need to find people who are widely read in a subject and can answer a question like “If I’m going to read three books about religion, what are they?” There is no single correct answer to such a question.

If we couldn’t find experts in every field there might be other ways of compiling lists of books. It may simply involve a lot of research to find what books are widely read and recommended. Or maybe there’s a way of compiling the reading lists for university courses and finding which books are the most popular for each subject (this is almost a website in itself…).

A related question is what level of education the books should be pitched at. Previously I linked to John Baez’s How to Learn Math and Physics page which includes a lot of recommended books. I studied maths until I was 18 but that was twenty years ago and it sounds like even the most introductory texts there would be hard going.

Maybe a good rule of thumb would be that books should be accessible to someone who’s educated to the equivalent of degree level but in a completely unrelated subject. Someone who’s ready to learn, has general intelligence, but hasn’t studied the subject in hand since they were in their mid-teens (which might be a long time ago).

Any thoughts on any of this, related to this or earlier posts, are more than welcome.

The reading list: 2. What subjects?

In Intro on 25 February 2009 with 7 comments

After trying to decide how many books to read, how do we divide them up between subjects? What needs to be covered in order to cover everything in the world ever as best we can?

There is no correct answer to this and it could cause arguments that will never end. I barely know where to begin so let’s look at what’s taught in schools. Here’s the list of subjects taught in UK schools to 11-16 year olds:

I’m not sure that really helps. But it does make clear that Septivium’s reading list can’t teach us everything. Some things — Art, Languages, Music, PE, Science — require varying degrees of practical skills that we’re not going to learn from books. We can learn some Art History but we’re not going to learn to paint. We can learn about physics but we’re not going to be doing experiments. We can learn about the human body but we’re not going to schedule in some football.

So what can we learn? I may be wrong, but I think we’ll need to state some biases from the start. For example, while I want to learn about the history of the whole world, I’m probably more biased towards the history of Europe and the United States. I could imagine including a book that covers, say, the history of America, or Europe since 1945, but not one solely about the history of Botswana (sorry Botswanans, nothing personal).

Rather than just say “I have no idea about this, what do you think?” it might be more useful to have a starting point to rip apart and change. So, here’s my off-the-top-of-my-head first draft of a list of subjects:

Plenty of biases in there I’m sure. Not least hidden under “Literature” — I’m assuming this would mostly be English-language, although I see no reason why we couldn’t provide alternatives for people who want to study literature in other languages.

All of these topics should be broken down into smaller chunks, although many I don’t know well enough to know how. There are other topics missing. The implied structure could be different. We haven’t even begun to work out how to divide the total number of books between the topics.

That’s enough from me for now. I’d love to know (a) if you know of any useful examples of reading lists or topic lists that try to cover everything or (b) what changes you’d make to my sacrificial list above.

I’ve set up a wiki for this and future things. Feel free to edit the subject list there or post a comment below. (I’ve closed the wiki due to all the spam, sorry.) Thanks.

The reading list: 1. How many books?

In Intro on 21 February 2009 with 6 comments

There are perhaps three main questions to answer when creating Septivium’s reading list, a list of books to give someone a well-rounded education about everything:

  1. How many books do we need in order to cover “everything”?
  2. How do we choose what subjects are covered and in what proportions?
  3. How do we choose the books?

Today I’m going to look at the first of these. From this point on the haziness of my grand plan becomes apparent and I become increasingly grateful for any ideas from you…

I’ve pondered the question of “How many books do we need to learn about everything?” And you know what the answer is? It’s 96.

OK, there is no correct answer. You could read a single book for a reasonable overview. Or you could read a different book every day for the rest of your life and you’d keep finding gaps to fill in your knowledge.

But we need an answer even if there’s no single correct answer.

The first variable to set is how quickly readers should be expected to complete a book. We should be able to discuss books as we go, which means everyone reading at the same pace, like a book club. Which means we need to be realistic about how quickly books can be read. While some people could get through a few books a week others, with busy lives and/or slow reading speeds (that’s me), could take several months to finish a hefty volume.

I reckon that an aim of reading one book a month is reasonable. Some books will be shorter and easier than others but this seems like a manageable rate. It would require some commitment to keep up the pace but should also mean no one needs to disrupt their life too much to keep up. Also, tying the pace to a month is easy to remember: “The 25th already!? I’d better do some reading.”

Maybe there could be optional extra books for those speedy readers who find themselves twiddling their thumbs after a week.

So, this rate of a book a month has an effect on how many books will be in the entire list. Anyone starting the list should be able to imagine finishing it, and at twelve books a year I think that restricts the length a little — we don’t want people imagining the rest of their lives will be filled with this project.

To cut to the chase, here’s my current thinking. Based almost arbitrarily on reading about the septivium I thought that seven years, or a total of 96 books, would be a good total length.

I know, it sounds a lot doesn’t it. And maybe, as someone who took on an almost decade long project, I’ve gone too far. I think it would have to be broken into small chunks of maybe six months or a year each focused reasonably self-contained topics so that someone could say “This year I’m going to read twelve books on science.” Maybe by December they’ve had enough and that’s as far as they go, or they want to take a break for a bit. Fair enough. Or maybe they think “That was great, next year I’ll read about… history!”

So how does that sound? Seven lists of a dozen books each. Or maybe fourteen lists of six books each. Perhaps with optional extra books for the super keen. Learn about everything one small chunk at a time.

The seven ways

In Intro on 20 February 2009 with 1 comment

By now you might be wondering where the name Septivium comes from. Literally, it means “the seven ways” or “the seven roads” in Latin. In medieval universities there were two stages of education, the trivium followed by the quadrivium. Together these made up the septivium: “logic, the four liberal arts, natural sciences, and divinity” (ref). While I don’t aim to recreate the education system of the distant past it’s interesting to have a brief look at how a rounded education, as it was then, was structured.

The trivium consisted of:

(All descriptions by Sister Miriam Joseph, quoted at Wikipedia.)

The quadrivium comprised:

Wikipedia suggests these four years of study gained the student an MA (presumably the trivium was a BA?).

In her 1947 essay, ‘The Lost Tools of Learning’, the English author Dorothy L. Sayers wrote about the importance of the trivium as a preparation for learning: “The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to ’subjects’ at all.” In an age where education is focused increasingly on gaining marks in exams much of Sayers’ essay still seems relevant as she talks of the need for children to learn about learning itself. They should be able to evaluate the texts they read, connect ideas from one subject to another, take part in debate and form a coherent argument, and, ultimately, continue to learn.

While I don’t plan to devote a comparable chunk of Septivium’s schedule to this kind of thing it does suggest that maybe some time should be spent on broader topics outside of the usual academic subjects: how to read, learn, reason, argue, etc.

The Best Books

In Intro on 19 February 2009 with 4 comments

For years, long before the idea for this site, I’ve been mildly obsessed by the idea of the “Best Books”. For any given topic, I imagine, there must be a single Best Book to read. If you’re going to read a single book about something, which should it be?

I expect this question is easier to answer for some subjects than others. Maybe it’s also easier if the subject is narrow. For example, if you want a good overview of typography then The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst (Amazon US, UK) is usually suggested as the Best Book. But what if you want to learn about the history of the world in one book? There are such books but in a single volume they will probably be necessarily sketchy or else lean toward a particular period or region (for English-language books, probably Western civilisation).

Breaking a large topic into smaller chunks isn’t necessarily easy either. If you wanted to cover all of history in two books, is that easier? Maybe it’s even harder. What about three books? Six? Ten? How would you best break the subject up into smaller ones? Is it better to read one brilliant, but narrow, book over two or three broader ones?

Years ago I came across CanonicalTomes.org, a site which now only exists at archive.org. It enabled anyone to contribute names of books to a directory of subjects with the aim of finding the “definining works” for each one. It’s very patchy but there are some interesting books there and it suggests one way of gathering this kind of information.

In 2007 someone on Ask Metafilter asked What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?. Again, there’s some fascinating reading in there in a vast array of topics, from the broad to super specific. It also makes apparent the importance of the book-suggesting-person’s qualifications (in the loosest sense of the word) — some posters are obviously well read and suggest a single book after reading well around the topic. Others suggest a title with no backup information and, unless many others agree with them, I wouldn’t take their advice without further research; maybe this is the only book they’ve read on the subject and they’ve missed better ones.

An example of the well-read book-suggester is John Baez on his page How to Learn Math and Physics. I know nothing about him but his recommendations for books on these topics make it clear he knows what he’s talking about (as far as I can tell). No doubt others with similar levels of knowledge would suggest different titles but having to choose between suggestions from several well-read people is a good problem to have.

Often, without access to experts in a particular domain, finding out the Best Book on a topic is, like finding the answer to many difficult subjects online, a case of research, reading many points of view, and triangulating the right answer as best you can.

If you have ideas for how to find out the Best Books for many different domains, I’d love to hear them.

Welcome to Septivium

In Intro on 18 February 2009 with 2 comments

Welcome to this new site.

What’s it all about? I’ll describe the two thoughts that combined to lead me here.

First, I’m all too often aware of the gaps in my knowledge of the world. Like you, I’m reasonably well educated but we all suffer from our limited time in school coupled with education’s narrowing of our focus as we progress. At age fourteen I stopped studying history, biology and chemistry. At sixteen, geography, physics and English literature. And these are only areas of knowledge that fall within conventional school subjects — some topics aren’t on conventional curriculums.

Of course, like yours, my knowledge has increased since I left full-time education but only in a haphazard manner, picking up bits and pieces through newspapers, books, magazines, TV, etc. This is better than nothing but it lacks the structure that even the most vaguely organised learning provides. New facts and concepts land in a void dotted with clusters of random bits and pieces picked up over the years, rather than contributing to a coherent view of how the world works.

On to the second thought. A possible solution occurred to me when I came across The Personal MBA. The site provides a reading list of business books which, along with some real world business experience, aims to give people an education similar to an MBA without the huge cost. The books and other topics can be discussed in the online community. This really excited me — I wanted to start reading and I’ve never previously wanted to do an MBA.

And then I thought… couldn’t something like this work for a broader topic than business? A topic as broad as… everything?

How about a reading list featuring the very best books on dozens of topics, allowing readers to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, connect the dots between disparate subjects, and discuss these ideas with fellow readers around the world.

Get a degree in everything.

So that was, and is, the general idea. In the next few posts I’ll elaborate on some of the related thoughts I’ve had, and discuss some of the many unresolved problems and questions involved.

If this idea intrigues you I’d love to hear your thoughts at any point. And if you know someone else who might be interested, please point them this way. Thanks.


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