Dialoguing with books

Hey Book, can I change your mind?

When I was a programmer, I had a freedom to change every bit of the code I was reading. Why aren’t we using the same technique with books?

Programmers not only write code. We do quite a bit of reading to understand the code, and we do quite a bit of rewriting as well. I was sure that I was rewriting the code to improve. Now, I’m pretty certain hat that was not about improving the code, because every other developer wanted to rewrite my rewrites again.

Now I sure that I was doing that to understand the code. I was trying to align my mental model of the system with the system described in code. I had a dialogue with code. I could change the name of the variable, because I thought that new name better reflects the meaning of the variable, just to later revert the change because I understood why the original name was better, through better understanding of the system and context. It is true for other common refactoring techniques: extracting method, sub/super classes and interfaces, moving method between object.

In other words, I was distributing and extending my cognition to the external world by conducting some epistemic actions, if you know what I mean. By the way, I’m pretty sure I do something very similar when I move bits and pieces on my wireframes in Figma. Anyhow…

Why don’t we do the same with books? Why not refactor books? Why don’t we have dialogue with books? Tell them what we know, change their minds, get our mind changed.