The Goal - Magic Textbooks

I think also we should start formalizing textbooks. If a textbook is formalized, you can create these very interactive textbooks, where you could describe the proof of a result in a very high-level sense, assuming lots of knowledge. But if there are steps that you don’t understand, you can expand them and go into details—all the way down the axioms if you want to. No one does this right now for textbooks because it’s too much work. But if you’re already formalizing it, the computer can create these interactive textbooks for you. It will make it easier for a mathematician in one field to start contributing to another because you can precisely specify subtasks of a big task that don’t require understanding everything.

- Terence Tao

While he was talking in the context of mathematics, this concept can be generalized.

Imagine if every subject had a comprehensive and interactive textbook which contained the entire knowledge of that subject up till the cutting edge.

And the textbook was made so that someone could easily progress from one concept to another. And that each concept in the textbook linked to the best available resources on the internet to learn that knowledge.

Let’s call these magic textbooks.

With magic textbooks, you will be able to pick up any subject that you want to learn about and learn all that you want to learn from it - no more, no less. The textbook will adapt to you. You won’t have to learn prerequisites that you already knew them. Or you could easily learn prerequisites if you didn’t knew them.

The textbooks will greatly increase the amount of useful knowledge that each individual human is able to learn by cutting any unnecessary knowledge.

Even if you’re not cutting any knowledge, it will still enable you to learn more by saving time. You will already have the best roadmap, which has been curated by many other people. And you will have the best resources of the internet available at your fingertips.

Being based on electricity instead of paper, magic textbooks will also be able to implement tools that will allow people to learn more. Tools like automatic spaced repetition, weakness detection, testing and more will help you to retain your knowledge.

It is my vision of Gangilon to build these magic textbooks. To empower self-study. To give the joy of knowledge to more people.

This will thus lead to an increase in new discoveries and progress in all the fields of knowledge. Which, I wager, will make the world a better place.

- Ibrahim