Is SparkNotes for posers?

In computing, there is the concept of Komolgorov complexity. Quoting Wikipedia, it is “the length of the shortest computer program (in a predetermined programming language) that produces [an] object as output.” An example: the text “abababababababababab” could be shortened to a description in plain english (“ab” 10 times), or a computer program that uses a loop to output “ab” 10 times. There are a myriad of ways to express the object “abababababababababab”; the Komolgorov complexity is the length of the shortest program that expresses it.¹

Let’s take this concept and apply it more generally to communication. If I wanted to express something (let’s say, my wish to schedule a meeting), there are a lot of ways I could do that — but some get the idea across faster than others.

In fact, there’s a word for the “Komolgorov complexity” of communicating in plain English — it’s “conciseness.”

Here’s a question. If my knowledge of Komolgorov Complexity is limited to having read the Wikipedia page on it, am I qualified to talk about it? Should I feel like a fraud if I use it in an analogy?

Let’s generalize that question. If you read a summary of a text, are you a fraud if you use the ideas from that summary in an essay or argument?

Nerd Clout

I was in a bookstore with a friend a few weeks ago when he stopped to point out a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations on the bookshelf. He was excited to see it. Asked why, he answered it was because Adam Smith was an influential economist, and The Wealth of Nations was an influential book.

Fair enough. I asked him if he was going to read it.

The Wealth of Nations was written in 1776. A PDF version I found online has an entire section dedicated to language differences between then and now. If a book is old enough to need translation into modern English, it will likely not be a riveting read.

Regardless, he said he would.

His answer surprised me. I would’t. Most of Adam Smith’s ideas have entered mainstream economics; those that haven’t are heterodox for a reason. In fact, they’re so widespread that you’d be hard-pressed to avoid them in an introductory economics course; open the first chapter of any economics textbook and you’ll be bombarded with talk of invisible hands and the diamond water paradox.

The kicker here is that the textbook probably explains Adam Smith’s ideas better than Adam Smith himself explained them. Put another way, the textbook is more concise.

I told my friend all this, and he nodded, before offering his rebuttal, which was, “if I don’t read Adam Smith, how will I pull up fancy quotes by him in an argument?” — which to his credit, was at least half sarcastic. I told him he could just look up a list of quotes, to which he asked, “Wouldn’t that make you a fraud?”

Would it?

SparkNotes

My friend was (mostly) joking about all the nerd clout he’d get from reading an economics text from 1776. But, the spirit of his response embodies something a lot of people believe: that fully reading a source text is strictly superior to reading a summary.

It’s certainly something high school English teachers believe. We’ve been warned countless times to NOT read the hated SparkNotes summary; because that would constitute fraud and we’d fail the reading quiz anyways, because questions would be written specifically to check details not included in the SparkNotes summary, and besides, SparkNotes was evil and bad, and undignified.

That didn’t stop me. I survived 4 years of high school English on scant more than SparkNotes.²

So let’s examine the claim that fully reading a source text is strictly superior to reading a summary. What did I really miss from using SparkNotes all through high school?

Conciseness over time

Imagine for a moment that you have a genius idea.

You sit down and decide to write a book to capture that idea, but the first draft sucks. You’re fumbling your thoughts and the words in your head are all jumbled; you know exactly what you mean but you’re struggling to communicate it to everyone else. After much refinement, you release a final draft.

What are the chances that your particular expression of your idea is the most concise one? Pretty slim.

When something important gets written, people interpret it; a lot. Aristotle’s work’s are still read and reinterpreted, millennia after they were originally written. A side effect of that interpretation is that people will find shorter, more concise ways to express your ideas; and unless you were an exceptionally good writer, chances are their formulations will be significantly shorter while expressing most of the same ideas.

The claim that fully reading a source text is strictly superior to reading a summary depends on a very flawed assumption — that the author of the source text expressed that idea in its shortest form. A related observation: the longer it has been since a text has been written, the more “distillable” that text is; there are far more summaries of the century-old ideas of Adam Smith than there are the recent ideas of Paul Krugman.

Over time, summaries of a text approach the “Komolgorov complexity”³ of the original text, or the most concise expression.

So should you read the summary or the actual text? Depends on how old the text is. The fact that SparkNotes entries only exist for books that are fairly old (or extremely popular) support this conclusion; there appears to be an age threshold beneath which a good summary is prohibitively difficult to write.

Hermeneutics

A quick disclaimer: I don’t mean to say nobody should read old books. The art of interpretation is a skill worth practicing for its own sake, which is why high school teachers are so pissy about SparkNotes; you might be getting most of the information, but you’ve cheated yourself out of the actual act of interpretation. Hermeneutics are important.

Besides, if nobody read old books, there’d be nobody to write better summaries of them. I’m sure my line of reasoning here has been used before to attack the humanities — why major in Literature or Philosophy when you can SparkNotes Dostoevsky and Plato? Of course, this ignores the fact that without experts in the humanities there’d be nobody to distill these ideas for everyone else. If anything, what I’ve said here reinforces the societal importance of the humanities.⁴

Conclusion

Should you read the summary instead of the source text? If the source text is old/popular enough to have a good summary available, and you’re not explicitly trying to practice interpretation, I think you should consider it.

Footnotes

[1] There’s an entire subculture of programmers who try writing the shortest program to solve a problem for recreation; they refer to it as “code golf.” StackExchange has its own board dedicated to it, and there have been entire languages made to optimize for program length.

[2] Not that that’s much of an achievement.

[3] In the loosest sense of the word. I’m sure I’ve trampled over much mathematical nuance.

[4] Note that societal importance and employability are very disjoint measures.