[HN Gopher] Learning Is Remembering
___________________________________________________________________
Learning Is Remembering
Author : p-christ
Score : 334 points
Date : 2022-09-26 12:55 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (saveall.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (saveall.ai)
| victor106 wrote:
| saveall.ai looks really cool.
|
| I wish it were a paid product that I can download my cards from.
|
| I don't want to be in a position where I put in lot of effort to
| input my cards and then you shut it down.
|
| If the founder is here, do you plan to make this a paid service?
| If so, when? and will you provide the ability to export my cards?
| If this is not going to be a paid service do you plan to Open
| Source it?
| antman wrote:
| Learning is a graph. Remembering many modes will create the
| higher abstraction of learning the shape and the sometimes
| abstract properties of the graph.
|
| If you read a book you might not remember the previous pages, but
| if you start in the middle you wont understand anything.
|
| The nodes of knowledge might be forgotten, but its ok if you have
| the graph. The nodes of knowledge that were available to you
| initially might have been biased. Then you need to unlearn, that
| is often harder.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| You can remember something without fully understanding it. There
| is more to learning than just remembering.
| p-christ wrote:
| If you don't understand it then you don't remember the
| information that compromises an "understanding" of the thing
| okamiueru wrote:
| The words used make the whole thing very confusing.
| Understanding and remembering are two very different thing in
| cognitive literature. Understanding is deeper about
| connections, and remembering is more recollection of facts or
| knowledge. It is fair to say that you cannot understand
| something without having some knowledge, but you can
| certainly know a lot of facts without having the slightest
| understanding.
|
| It also poses wildly different challenges, where the metrics
| by which one is to judge the "degree of having attained
| knowledge" in the broader sense of the word, depends entirely
| on which of those aspects one value.
|
| Some literature refers to this dichotomy as "instrumental" or
| "relational" understanding. You see this very clearly in
| math, where students can recall the facts of equations, but
| they don't understand it.
|
| It can very well be that the author of this article is aware
| and appreciates this distinction. But, the phrase and title
| of "learning is remembering" will certainly evoke suspicion.
| Just because it is much easier to remember something one
| understand, does not mean that by remembering, one
| understands.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| In math people apply formulas they don't understand to
| numbers that they don't understand to get answers they don't
| understand.
|
| For some reason we then give them degrees and call them
| educated if they remember all those things they don't
| understand in an exam.
| mohamez wrote:
| I agree with the core idea of your comment, but I think the
| author is as far as I understood it think of learning as "fully
| understanding", so if you didn't fully understand it then you
| didn't learn it yet.
| fwbex wrote:
| I think the software that is promoted here is actually
| detrimental to "remembering".
|
| The core thesis here "Learning is intertwined with memory" was
| indeed hashed out by psychologists in the 1970 (Craik and
| Lockhart); It was precisely these two who put forth the
| "Levels/depth of processing" idea, which emphasized the
| importance of the encoding process. A more "meaningful" encoding
| enhances memory.
|
| The author not so secretly wants to sell us an app for spaced
| practice. And yes, spaced practice is indeed important and has
| been well studied in memory research. But I feel that the tool
| that they are selling is the antithesis of good learning,
| especially if you want to check "Quantum Mechanics" off of your
| list. If I got it right, the main difference of their app to Anki
| or any other flashcard program is that you do not need to spend
| so much time drafting your questions because an AI can do it for
| you. But this is precisely where deep encoding would come into
| play. You need to decide how to phrase that question and write it
| down! You need to draft that answer! The classic crib sheet
| phenomenon.
|
| Regarding computerized support for such human "deep learning" I
| can recommend "concept mapping" tools (VUE from Tufts or ihmc
| CmapTools). But a pen and paper is great, too.
| p-christ wrote:
| You review the AIs suggestions which itself is a form of
| encoding (that is arguably more powerful than the encoding you
| describe)
| falcolas wrote:
| Some other things to consider. A working memory of 7 is a median
| number for the population. Some folks will have a greater working
| memory (some outliers are in the 80+ range). Some folks will have
| a smaller working memory.
|
| Specifically, someone with ADHD (a topic close to my heart), the
| size of working memory is typically around 3 items. Related, long
| term memory is also a bit more chaotic for those with ADHD; when
| you can only have three linked concepts at a time in working
| memory, it's going to be encoded with fewer overall links data.
|
| That all is to say, if you're building a tool to help people
| remember things, don't just build it with the median in mind.
| skadamat wrote:
| Andy Matuschak's thinking / independent research work here is
| very relevant:
|
| - https://andymatuschak.org/
|
| - https://www.patreon.com/posts/71081197
|
| - Literally a related quantum computing / physics example (with
| Michael Nielsen): https://quantum.country/
| hintymad wrote:
| Maybe "remembering in long-term memory" means understanding,
| internalizing, and intuiting? I got the same problem as the
| author described when taking physical chemistry and linear
| algebra. All of sudden, there were so many concepts per page and
| the concepts were so abstract to use that my usual M.O of getting
| very good at derivation and proofs by manipulating equations
| stopped working. Only then did I realize that I needed explicitly
| focus on intuitively understanding each concept.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Given comments about using memorization for code etc, wanted to
| share this other article about how that can be incredibly
| effective:
|
| https://senrigan.io/blog/chasing-10x-leveraging-a-poor-memor...
| stakkur wrote:
| If storing information and creating associations between bits of
| it were 'learning', then databases would be very smart indeed.
|
| No, learning is not 'storing pieces of information in long-term
| memory and recalling them'. It's not the ability to recall
| information. At the very least, learning is information+behavior
| change+understanding+values and attitudes associated with the
| information. It's much more complex than memorization and recall.
| CitizenKane wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this and I've been certainly thinking along
| the same lines.
|
| To add to this, I've known many folks that can accomplish
| certain tasks almost automatically and creatively. If you asked
| them to recall exactly what they did to achieve it they
| couldn't. And this usually isn't action on concrete information
| either but on intuition alone.
|
| If humans worked primarily on memory we'd have been toast a
| long time ago. There's too much variation in the natural world
| to confront it solely on the basis of memory. I'd say we're
| more experientially oriented as opposed to memory oriented
| agigao wrote:
| I wish it hadn't pointed to another silver-bullet app at the end
| of the article.
| p-christ wrote:
| Why? I almost didn't include a link so am interested to hear
| your answer
| O__________O wrote:
| Per the author, they're launching a service called "Save All" --
| which is simplified version of spaced repetition; might be worth
| explicitly stating this in the intro or footer of the linked blog
| post.
| nkingsy wrote:
| Confused. Did the domain change? It's currently hosted on the
| product website. Seems like pretty clear, standard content
| marketing.
| p-christ wrote:
| thanks. and yeah the domain didn't change
| mohamez wrote:
| Yeah, the author mentioned it in a reply to a comment
| mentioning Anki.
| p-christ wrote:
| Are you saying we should mention it for our own business
| benefit? Or that it's bad to not state it in article for some
| other reason?
| [deleted]
| O__________O wrote:
| Largely because it explicitly narrows the context, but also
| because launching service like that increase odds of biases
| in my opinion.
| p-christ wrote:
| I didn't mention it in the article because the article is
| hosted on the same domain (with a link to it at very top of
| page) so thought it was quite obvious.
|
| Also I wanted it to stand alone as an essay to see what
| people thought. If i linked to the product within the
| article it would turn the whole article into an advert
| rather than an essay
| O__________O wrote:
| Okay, but you don't even mention spaced repetition until
| the end and only in a single sentence.
|
| And obviousness is relative; I did not even notice the
| logo and base domain, read the title and scanned the text
| for core concepts, spaced repetition again is only
| mentioned once, even though in my opinion it's literally
| both the topic and your solution to the issue; which was
| not obvious until I read your comments. Think if you were
| to ask random people who are not aware of the company,
| what the post is about -- then define spaced repetition
| and the reasoning behind the company's name, then ask
| people again what the post is about -- answers would be
| noticeably different; you could even hide the context and
| ask if concept of "save all" was mentioned on the page
| and what it means.
| p-christ wrote:
| Spaced repetition is not the topic. The topic is memory
| and there are many solutions to trying to remember more,
| spaced repetition is just one of them. There's also
| things like elaboration, dual coding, mnemonics, memory
| palaces etc.
| O__________O wrote:
| From the linked article:
|
| >> Well, new technologies (Save All link) leveraging
| techniques like spaced repetition mean it's much easier
| to remember what you learn so its time to rethink that.
| You don't have to forget what you learn anymore.
|
| Might be wrong, but at the point topic is covered and a
| single solution is presented, it becomes the topic.
| p-christ wrote:
| I wrote this and would love to know what you think about it. Am
| particularly interested in hearing any reasons why it's wrong
| aappleby wrote:
| Copy-pasting my top-level comment:
|
| I am utterly baffled that no response in this thread so far has
| taken issue with the statement "As you probably know
| intuitively, it won't work." For me, this _does_ work and I
| have proven it many many times over the years by adding entire
| categories of technical knowledge to my repertoire. And not
| superficially, either - I get paid very well to do things
| professionally that I taught myself by reading Wikipedia.
|
| If my experience were commonplace, the "it won't work"
| statement would be highly contentious in the comments here.
| Since it isn't, I guess I can deduce that I must be an outlier.
| synergy20 wrote:
| assuming our brain is a CPU, the 4-working-queue-short-memory
| is basically our L1-cache. We need L2 and hard drive for longer
| term memory, otherwise the system can not really function well.
|
| however long-term storage is just one vital factor, another one
| is the 'deep learning' neurons that understand the content it
| stores and more important to connect the dots among various
| neurons.
|
| we need both: understand and store. Neurons do both for us.
| quarok wrote:
| yes, we need understanding - the best way to get things into
| memory is to make connections between neurons through
| understanding. And this keeps it in memory for longer than if
| you just memorise it -- and it will enable you to deploy the
| information in new contexts.
|
| My takeaway from this article is that if you only focus on
| understanding (and so do not commit it to memory), you cannot
| reason using this information in unfamiliar contexts later
| on, once you've forgotten it.
|
| So the best thing to do is to: 1. Make sure you understand
| something thoroughly 2. Test yourself on it using spaced
| repetition to ensure you keep it forever
|
| For transparency: I'm one of the cofounders of Save All
| (linked site) alongside Petros the author
| sennraf wrote:
| Creating a tool to help others learn is awesome.
|
| I think what the article misses is that there is a ton of
| knowledge we can't 'write down' and therefore memorization is
| not enough. For example learning to solve Integrals. Yes, there
| are some rules and tricks one can memorize which helps but I
| would argue the only way to get good at solving integrals is to
| interact, resp. solve them.
|
| Another point are second order effects of how one learns, for
| example curiosity and resilience. There might be a long time
| negative effect on motivation of a topic, when there is too
| much focus on 'memorization' (It certainly was that for me in
| my French class;)).
|
| I really enjoyed the 'bad reputation' part and agree that it is
| sadly viewed as not important enough by many.
| Qualadore wrote:
| The spacing effect can also be applied to solving problems,
| like "distributed practice" as opposed to "massed practice"
| with calculus homework [0].
|
| Speaking completely personally, forgetting a lot of
| information is the easiest way to ruin my motivation to learn
| a topic.
|
| [0]
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-022-09677-2
| anothernewdude wrote:
| There's probably something to be said about batch sizes and
| stability.
| carapace wrote:
| It's not bad, but you're limiting yourself "out the gate" so to
| speak. If you really want to explore memory and learning you
| must study and practice (self-)hypnosis. Most of what we think
| we know about how the brain and mind work is wrong. E.g.
| memory: "our working memory has a maximum capacity of roughly
| 4" is not an absolute rule. Your brain, right now as you read
| this, is tracking 100,000's of variables and recording a trace
| of everything you are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting,
| touching, and doing. Almost all of this is done unconsciously,
| and for good reason.
|
| Anyhow, you can learn to have better "interfaces" to your
| automatic unconscious abilities and leverage them to e.g.
| remember instantly and durably any mathematical equation, etc.
|
| - - - -
|
| As an aside, the strategy you sketched out at the start of your
| article would be workable if you have great recall, however an
| even more better strategy would be to recapitulate the
| discoveries of physics in roughly historical order. Your
| understanding of quantum mechanics would be much deeper and
| richer, and you would be following a _story_ (an epic story
| made up of so many fascinating smaller stories, and one that is
| still going on! Albeit things have calmed down this last
| century or so, but no one thinks we have reached the climax
| yet.)
|
| That would be the way to do it: start with the Greeks and the
| Alchemists and proceed to follow the trail(s) of how we as a
| species sussed out the mysteries of the physical Universe.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| There are plenty of different way to learn, and the optimal
| probably depend on the material to learn.
|
| For example, in machine learning, there is something called
| stochastic gradient descent, where to learn you present a
| single random element at a time from the dataset. In the end it
| will have learned of all concepts, by becoming more and more
| confident in each individual concepts.
|
| For example to learn QM, you pick a random QM wikipedia
| article, and try to push through the article, even though there
| are some things you don't understand. Then you do the same
| thing, for a different unrelated QM article.
|
| For learning tennis, you don't learn specifically forehand,
| then learning backhand, but you alternate them at random so
| that you have a single unified way of playing with smooth
| transitions, instead of having to switch between different
| "modes" of thinking.
|
| Sure more memory can allow some speed-space trade-off in
| learning ability, but using your memory too much may make you
| miss some fluency that may have emerged. For example the old-
| school of machine learning was using databases and K-near
| neighbors, which used a lot of memory and was slow. But the
| new-school of machine learning are using constant memory
| algorithm and compressing the data in it, and it can learn to
| generate all the pictures in the world with only 4 Gb of
| weights.
|
| Learning is imagining, once you bootstrap your imagination, its
| bandwidth to synthesize new examples from which you can learn
| from, is much greater than the bandwidth of looking up new data
| material to learn from.
| going_ham wrote:
| Thank you for writing it. I have been feeling something
| similar. The ability to truly understand requires the ability
| to know few terms and what they mean. I thought it was only me
| who felt it like so. Most of my friends who venture on creative
| tasks are able to recall a lot of things because of practice
| and without having to be distracted!
|
| But does it effect the field like programming? When
| programming, if I can remember the context, then I can easily
| search it (research paper, books, documentation, forums etc)
| Now, with Co-Pilot, isn't it effectively beneficial to
| understand a topic and develop a general problem solving
| framework for ourselves so that we can let the AI do it's
| thing?
|
| What are your opinions regarding it?
| p-christ wrote:
| Even with programming I would argue you'd be a much better
| programmer if you can remember more. Obviously sometimes
| you're going to have to look things up but the more you
| remember the more problems you'll be able to solve.
|
| Specifically you won't be able to solve a programming problem
| if the answer requires you combining over 4 things you don't
| have in your long-term memory (even if you can look them up).
| This is the main reason why Jeff Dean is a better programmer
| than me even though we both have access to google - he has
| more knowledge & experience of programming in his memory than
| me that means that even though we can both look things up he
| is able to solve way more problems than me.
|
| Co-pilot slightly changes the type of thing that's valuable
| to remember, but it doesn't change the importance of
| remembering things. I think, as you implied, co-pilot
| probably makes remembering some types of syntax or
| boilerplate less important.
| going_ham wrote:
| Ohh, that's a cool opinion!!! Thank you ^_^
| vladsanchez wrote:
| Slash-Dotted!? Site doesn't load. (shrug)
| p-christ wrote:
| how you mean? this link doesn't load for you?
|
| https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
| vladsanchez wrote:
| Just loaded, after 20 attempts. ;)
| p-christ wrote:
| hmmm very interesting, not sure why that could be
| happening! I can see loads of people are reading it now
| but i would have thought our server (arranged on vercel)
| could handle it
| kardianos wrote:
| Learning is memory, in a sense. More broadly learning the the
| physical structure that process leaves on your brain. When you
| truly learn, you do less remembering and more simulating. The
| process of simulating actions (multi-step addition algorithms
| in elementary school or wrote memorization of math-facts) is
| the process that changes the structure of your mind that isn't
| dependent on "memorization".
| p-christ wrote:
| that's really interesting, can you explain this bit a bit
| more? Or let me know what to google to learn more about this?
|
| "The process of simulating actions is the process that
| changes the structure of your mind"
| rileyphone wrote:
| The mind, in this sense, is composed of mental models that
| we use to predict how our various actions might change the
| state of the world. A good example is driving a car [0] -
| when first learning, we lack an intuitive grasp on how
| turning the wheel might effect the car, but as we gain more
| experience we can simulate just how the car will respond
| right before we take the action, jarring us if we're wrong.
| This process can be applied to robots as well [1].
|
| 0. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S18770
| 5092...!
|
| 1. https://www.creativemachineslab.com/uploads/6/9/3/4/6934
| 0277...
| kardianos wrote:
| I would point you to two different motivating examples:
|
| * Childhood development. A child who has had early
| childhood adverse experiences mind is effected. A fMRI or
| chemical detection can see physical differences in the
| brain. But the brain is plastic (it can change) over time.
| Works on this subject have been published by Dr. Dan Siegel
| https://drdansiegel.com/books among others. The key insight
| here is that academic learning is not significantly
| different at a core aspect then behavioral learning.
|
| * Physical sports/martial arts depend on a reaction time
| much smaller then what is afforded by going through the
| full frontal cortex. "muscle-memory" isn't real (it isn't
| "memory" as you think of it). What you have in these cases
| are "short-circuits" (this implies structural changes) that
| are able to act before you are consciously aware of what is
| going on. The same applies to math facts and other
| fundamentals, you move things away from memory that needs
| to be retrieved and into reaction. Reading C-syntax for
| programmers or signing your name is something that has been
| turned into structure that doesn't need "memory".
|
| I think your initial premise is correct. We have limited
| memory. How do we overcome that? We write. Writing is
| important because with it we can overcome our natural
| memory limitations. You cannot think about complexities
| (well or clearly) if you cannot write.
|
| The danger of writing is that you can produce something
| that is both irrational and nearly impenetrable to the
| casual reader. For example:
|
| > Foucault's use of the concept is descriptive, that is,
| analytical and explanatory, and at the same time normative
| and critical: he describes the grip biopolitics have on
| individuals through technologies of power in a way that
| makes manifest the repression at work in these biopolitical
| processes.
|
| The above, taken directly from an "academic" published
| journal, could be said to have meaning. Unfortunately, each
| one of these words has an alternate meaning that is not
| normative to English, making the entire (actual) meaning
| opaque. "contecpt" "analytical", "explanatory",
| "normative", "critical", "biopolitics", "individuals",
| "technologies", "power", "manifest", "repression",
| "processes" are all defined differently then a standard
| English dictionary. So even if you can get past the
| convoluted sentence structure, the intended meaning will
| still elude you.
|
| But the answer to memory limitations is _clear_ writing
| using common definitions of words. I bring this up because
| as you extend your memory beyond what it innately has, the
| more likely you are to fool yourself (and others) with
| sophistry.
| p-christ wrote:
| > Writing is important because with it we can overcome
| our natural memory limitations.
|
| Very interesting. Is the theory here that by writing
| things out on a page we are then able to manipulate the
| ideas in our head without the usual limits of our working
| memory? Working memory is still limited but because all
| the information is so nearby and within view we can
| quickly put things in and out of our working memory so
| its limit doesn't impede us as much?
| User23 wrote:
| This was Socrates's position too as related in Meno[1]. I don't
| see any reference so I wonder if the author rediscovered that
| position independently.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno
| p-christ wrote:
| i had not seen this before, thank you very much for sharing!
| rentonl wrote:
| I've always felt there is... 1.) Things you know you know 2.)
| Things you don't know you don't know 3.) Things you know you
| don't know.
| tianshuo wrote:
| Calling learning remembering, is like calling a computer a hard
| drive. Sorry, but, remembering is just one part, although
| important part of learning. There is loads of difference between
| remembering the words of a foreign language and fluently speaking
| it. The process of learning is complicated, eg. good teaching is
| not giving the final answers to learner, which should seem
| faster, but letting the learner arrive at their answers, even
| sometimes arriving at a wrong answer at first. And the point
| about reducing forgetting, that's also a terrible way of
| learning. If you want to minimize forgetting, that means you have
| to learn in baby steps, repeat everything using some kind of
| spaced repetition algorithm, and endure the pain of doing all
| this for a considerate amount of time. Instead, learning the
| content rapidly (meanwhile forgetting a lot of the content),
| getting a whole picture, and gradually gain more understanding
| repeating the process using different textbooks/courses, is a
| much more faster way of learning. The brain is more used to BFS
| (breadth-first-search) than DFS (depth-first-search), and the
| whole process is much more stimulating. This is because new
| knowledge needs to be encoded with connections to pre-existing
| knowledge, and most knowledge is intertwined together, for
| example in calculus, limits, derivatives, integrals, infinite
| series, etc. Learning limits in isolation of the whole picture,
| optimizing for less percentage of forgetting, often leaves
| learners confused, why am I even learning this, and what use is
| this for. Even though the percentage of forgetting is much higher
| in the latter holistic BFS process, the overall content mastered
| in the same month or week duration is higher. So forgetting is
| actually normal and you shouldn't panic when you forget things-
| since you will gain more understanding each time you learn and
| re-learn the content. For the last ten years, I've been making
| products for learning, and every day now and then, I'm still
| learning something new about learning.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >There is loads of difference between remembering the words of
| a foreign language and fluently speaking it.
|
| And alternatively put, there's a difference between learning to
| read, and learning to speak. Yet both would boil down to
| primarily rote memorization, as languages tend to do.
|
| Language is not a good example to prove your point on.
| connectsnk wrote:
| I 100% agree. This is true in my experience as well. Is your
| content available in English? If not, can you recommend some
| books for derivatives/ integrals or statistics please
| swantonb wrote:
| There's an old saying in Asian cultures about learning.
|
| - You do not truly understand until you "forget" what you've
| learned.
|
| I know, it's weird and opposite of what Feynman Said. But it
| makes sense.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| A less eloquent but probably more helpful translation/phasing
| might be:
|
| You have not truely mastered something until you've forgotten
| the step-by-step process of it (and presumably had to
| reconstruct it by doing it and paying attention to how you do
| so).
|
| (This is also why it can be hard to teach something you're
| very good at - often, you literally _don 't_ know (well,
| remember) "how to do it" in a form that's actually useful to
| them.)
| mod wrote:
| Does this mean you've internalized it?
|
| I think that generally is a characteristic of something who's
| mastered something.
|
| It does make sense, but I don't think it's strictly true. You
| can understand something without making it second nature.
| weekendvampire wrote:
| I think the point being made is that remembering is a huge if
| not key aspect of learning anything, and people underestimate
| the importance of memorization. Maybe that title is a bit
| misleading, could've been "No serious learning can happen
| without memorization" but that doesn't flow as well.
| thevardanian wrote:
| If anything the problem used to be that we overestimated the
| importance of memorization. Maybe it's changed now, but
| trying to free cognitive load is important. It's the same
| reason why literary societies beat oral ones. The emphasis on
| memorization was reduced.
| puchatek wrote:
| I think it flows pretty well, fwiw. Strikes a better balance
| between readability and ambiguity.
| p-christ wrote:
| yes exactly
| p-christ wrote:
| > eg. good teaching is not giving the final answers to learner,
| which should seem faster, but letting the learner arrive at
| their answers
|
| Why is that "good" teaching? ---> Its because if they arrive at
| the answer themselves then both the answer & the process for
| figuring it out will be more ingrained in their long-term
| memory!
|
| > Instead, learning the content rapidly (meanwhile forgetting a
| lot of the content), getting a whole picture, and gradually
| gain more understanding repeating the process using different
| textbooks/courses, is a much more faster way of learning.
|
| I agree to an extent. It's inefficient to try and remember
| everything beyond a point. But spaced repetition is very
| efficient e.g. with Save All it might only take you 5 minutes
| to remember something for 10 years... so it is much more
| efficient than you think to try and remember more things.
| rmah wrote:
| Your brain is neither BFS or DFS. Your brain is a biological
| neural network. It is associative, that is, your brain follows
| paths of relationships. The brain actually is "like calling a
| computer a hard drive" in that memory and processing is wrapped
| up in the same mechanism. "Thinking", "knowing" and
| "remembering" are not separate things for a brain, they are all
| flavors of the same thing.
|
| You wrote "learning limits in isolation of the whole picture,
| optimizing for less percentage of forgetting, often leaves
| learners confused". The is true. The reason is because, if you
| do it in isolation, you're not forming connections to related
| knowledge.
|
| The main split in brains is short-term memory vs long-term
| memory. And I suspect (speculating here) that forming more
| connections to items in long-term memory helps in moving a fact
| from short-term memory to long-term memory.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Learning is a lot of things, fact collection is one small part.
|
| Learning is mostly model building. Building a model to predict
| future sensory inputs from past sensory inputs. Building a
| model to predict future sensory inputs from past sensory inputs
| and control inputs.
|
| Learning is not just recording sensory inputs for future
| recall, it is taking them and building useful abstractions with
| them.
| zackmorris wrote:
| This is why abstraction is so important (came here to say the
| same thing).
|
| Wikipedia is factually correct but often lacks insight. It
| puts the learner at the wrong level of abstraction, limiting
| how much more can be learned.
|
| For example, a sine wave looks complex, and has a great deal
| of inherent complexity around stuff like transcendental
| functions. But it's just a spiral, the side view of a radius
| arm turning through time along the x axis with a period of 2
| pi radians and a radius of 1.
|
| But if readers don't know that, they get stuck at the
| abstraction of trigonometry instead of the far deeper
| relations between things like complex numbers and higher
| dimensions.
|
| That's why I think it's difficult to learn quantum mechanics
| without a teacher. It just ends of being a bunch of matrices
| and handwaving that makes little sense intuitively.
|
| This is why the debate around higher education is silly IMHO.
| Sure, someone can avoid college and get hands-on experience
| in application. But they'll miss out on the theory and
| abstraction that allows them to transcend their area of
| expertise. That's good enough for most people, but most
| likely won't result in true mastery. No schooling is not
| better than schooling if one wants to do important work.
| totetsu wrote:
| I mean .. its true if you limit your definition of learning..
| p-christ wrote:
| in what way is the definition limited / what should it be?
| mohamez wrote:
| I think learning mathematics for example is not about just
| "remembering".
| v-erne wrote:
| I was brought up with this distinction - my family always
| put more pressure on understanding than remebering but now
| after mamy years I start to suspect that there is really no
| difference between those two - understanding is probably
| just remembering proper models that are useful to solve
| problems that You want know how to solve.
| laszlokorte wrote:
| remembering vs understanding is uncompressed vs
| compressed storage:
|
| If I tell you a sequence of numbers: 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128
|
| And you try to remember them, having never seen these
| numbers before, you have to remember each individually
| and it will not be so easy.
|
| But if you, before trying to remember them, apply a
| little computing power to figure out that its a sequence
| of powers of two, starting from 2^0 going up to 2^7, then
| you have compressed the information I gave you. You
| understood (presumely) the source of the information and
| you will be able to remember the numbers much easier.
|
| One strategy I see people applying to unknown data they
| want to remember is to try to establish links to already
| known information or made up stories. For example when
| given the sequence of numbers above but not knowing about
| exponentials some people would try the follwing:
| * 1: the first number is one (as on the number line)
| * 2: the second number is two (same) * 4: I have
| four friends * 8: I ate lunch with my friends
| * 16: my sister was also there, she is 16 years old
| * 32: the house number of the restaurant was 32 *
| 64: we ate sushi, my dad also likes sushi, he is 64 years
| old * 128: one-two-eight sounds a bit like "want to
| eat" and yeah I also like to eat
|
| By doing so some people seem to achieve quit good memory
| of an unknown topic. But from my point of view they are
| only re-encoding the information to sort it into already
| existing bins in their memory instead of compressing it.
| The amount of information is not reduced but increased
| and it seems harder to reconstruct the original
| encoding/information. Additional without compressing the
| numbers to their generating algorithm it is not possible
| to use the "learned" knowledge for anything but reciting.
|
| This all leads to Solomonoff's theory of inductive
| inference.
| throwie_wayward wrote:
| IMO, such a viewpoint about "learning" is limited to learning
| 'knowledge'; i.e. this sort of 'learning' is limited to
| repeating (replicating) facts external.
|
| I wonder, if learning is remembering, then what is
| "understanding"??
|
| from my own viewpoint, learning is about something external;
| for example "what's the word for such and such concept?" ..in
| english or in spanish?
|
| point being that you need a corpus of consensus about what
| the specific linguistic-culture calls the learned concept.
|
| but then, what does it mean to understand?
|
| I think the way towards making sense of this (answering it)
| needs to consider learning of physical (do-able) actions.
| Because when considering such skills as learned/understood,
| the distinction between learn/understand seems to vanish.
|
| So then maybe understanding has more to do with having
| learned something to a proficiency level that allows one to
| teach (show/explain) to another how to do that action?
|
| finally, to throw a proverbial wrench into my own attempts to
| make sense, what does it mean to perceive something
| complicated, such as the meaning out of arbitrary alphabetic
| glyphs? how is the meaning out of a text understood? what did
| we have to learn to be able to do it? is it just a matter of
| knowing most of the contents of a dictionary??
| thenerdhead wrote:
| This is cognitive science in a nutshell. Most early
| philosophers argued exactly what "wisdom" means both
| externally and internally. Look to the Socratic
| philosophers for simplified explanations.
| [deleted]
| ouid wrote:
| no it isnt, come on. if learning were just remembering then the
| existence of wikipedia would mean that you already know quantum
| mechanics, but of course that contradicts the premise. There is
| something more you have to do other than literally be able access
| the information. at the very least an installation step is
| required.
| p-christ wrote:
| not sure you read the article
| dejj wrote:
| "[...] the purpose of memory isn't to remember the past. The
| purpose of memory is to, at least in part, so that you don't
| repeat the same errors that your repeated in the past [..]"
|
| - Jordan B. Peterson
|
| I like to think that Spaced Repetition learning pre-empts these
| errors, so we are apt to recall when we productively need that
| memory.
|
| [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ6_cV_RtQU
| [deleted]
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Whoa. That quote is kind of amazing. My brother committed
| suicide, and sometimes memories of the past really haunt me.
| That quote is actually really comforting.
| quantum_state wrote:
| Remembering is required for initial stage of learning. The whole
| point of learning is to understand things to remove remembering
| from the scene and be able to pull the knowledge from thin air.
| Therefore the title of the entry is misleading, very much so :-).
| p-christ wrote:
| Please explain how you can understand something without
| remembering the information that the understanding is made up
| out of?
| anon2020dot00 wrote:
| Spaced repetition is already a well-understood and well-
| accepted idea. Why feel need to debate about it?
|
| The more important thing is the product which is SaveAI which
| is using AI to make the spaced repetition process much more
| efficient and effective. I never got into Anki because it
| seemed to me to be a tedious process to create decks but this
| new approach with using AI is much more attractive.
|
| But I guess people like to argue/exchange ideas and this post
| is getting much more traction compared to the Show HN.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| It's not wrong, it just doesn't cover much breadth of learning
| nor how humans learn over time. Also it doesn't consider
| different learning styles. It's seeing learning as just chunks of
| conceptual information where that is reducing the problem too
| far.
|
| It's not just some simple "move from short term memory -> long
| term memory" to make more room. If it was, we would all optimize
| for that outcome. People would have written books about learning
| that glorified this concept. Teachers would be teaching it in
| schools to have students score better on tests.
|
| Learning is much more a lifelong mindset akin to the famous
| Socrates quote of "I know that I know nothing". Or even the idea
| that we change through the books we read / things we learn, but
| don't remember much of what we did.
|
| So I don't agree it is all about remembering because like GI Joe
| said, knowing is half the battle.
| p-christ wrote:
| Learning styles are basically a myth actually. It's been shown
| we all learn in roughly the same way. Check out some of the
| research mentioned here
|
| https://www.techlearning.com/news/busting-the-myth-of-learni...
|
| > People would have written books about learning that glorified
| this concept.
|
| There are lots of books on it actually. Make It Stick is my
| favourite book on this, you should try it!
| thenerdhead wrote:
| > Learning styles are basically a myth actually.
|
| You have a preference of how you learn, no? It's not a myth
| if there's perennial truth to it.
|
| > There are lots of books on it actually. Make It Stick is my
| favourite book on this, you should try it!
|
| I've read many titles including this one. Not everything is
| going to be "learned" with spaced repetition, interweaving,
| retrieval, and varied practice. These are great modern
| methods to learn effectively for the short-term, but are not
| by any means concepts you're going continue practicing past
| your formal education. (i.e. Anki flashcards for everything
| you want to learn)
| p-christ wrote:
| > You have a preference of how you learn, no? It's not a
| myth if there's perennial truth to it.
|
| I might have an emotional preference but there's no good
| evidence that different people learn better in very
| different ways
| cocacola1 wrote:
| Perhaps, but if you have a preference for one way of
| learning as opposed to another, you're probably more
| likely to stick with that preference and learn through
| keeping up the habit of learning via that preference. If
| it's a method you don't enjoy, you'll probably just drop
| that topic and not learn it - not necessarily because the
| topic itself was the issue, but how you went about
| learning it.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| A long time ago a professor described learning as "getting used
| to".
|
| Funny coincidence to the article, it was at the beginning of a
| lecture about quantum mechanics.
| mhb wrote:
| It may also be interesting to consider this in the context of
| learning physical skills. When you're learning something new,
| there are a lot of things that you are doing wrong. A not-so-good
| coach will see them and start telling you things that you need to
| change. But you can't remember all these things. A good coach
| will find one key thing which you can keep in mind to work on.
|
| The Inner Game of Tennis frames this as a difference between the
| two selves. Maybe that could be considered through the lens of
| decreasing the number of things you need to remember in order to
| improve.
| mohamez wrote:
| > Maybe that could be considered through the lens of decreasing
| the number of things you need to remember in order to improve.
|
| This! learning materials who master this way of information
| giving based on their importance is key to effective learning,
| and I think a lot of them don't give importance to it.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The best coaches I have worked with have cues they use instead
| of, or with, the explanations. Things like "pinch your shoulder
| blades" and "push the floor away". These give the practitioner
| an understanding of how it should feel, physically, without the
| need to go into details about which muscles and joints are
| involved.
| barumrho wrote:
| I'm glad you brought up this point. I think there are analogues
| to "muscle memory" when it comes to learning concepts, too. For
| example, I don't remember all the techniques to compute
| integrals explicitly, but I know that I'll be able to pick it
| up quickly, because of my "muscle memory". I feel like this
| falls into "remembering", but not "memorizing" when it comes to
| definitions.
| p-christ wrote:
| yes! i think that's completely right, it takes so much energy &
| working memory to adapt to feedback that it's really easy to
| over-instruct people and give them too much feedback to handle.
| [deleted]
| Bakary wrote:
| The good news is that memory techniques have never been as
| accessible as they are now.
|
| I am fully in agreement with the conclusions drawn in the
| article, but the bad news is that even with those techniques it
| can be a slog. Any Anki user will tell you that maintaining
| dedication and avoiding burn-out is your Achilles' heel, not the
| limits of your human ability. Understanding something for the
| first time (in the Feynman technique sense of being able to
| explain it well), and doing that multiple times per day, takes up
| a lot of mental energy even if you are smart and naturally
| talented.
|
| In conjunction with using memory techniques, we need to add
| dietary practices where we become much more selective with the
| information we take in. Places like HN give the illusion of
| learning (and to a great extent help broaden your mind about
| certain topics), but the actually utility of all that random
| knowledge butts up against the opportunity cost. There are
| already many more worthwhile pursuits than can be fit into your
| lifespan.
| mohamez wrote:
| All it takes then is just move from a method of remembering to
| another more efficient and enjoyable one, I can illustrate what
| I am trying to say using your Anki example by saying that once
| a language learner for example reaches a certain level in the
| language after acquiring a sized set of vocabulary, the learner
| can move to "abundant reading" as a way to memorize words
| through frequency as a more effective method of learning new
| vocabulary.
|
| So it's all about remembering, but what differs is how someone
| approaches it depending on their level and understanding of the
| topic they are trying to learn.
| Bakary wrote:
| This is definitely true. The snowball effect and the
| networking of information helps a lot.
|
| I'm trying to look at the problem with a wider lens, however.
| For example, if learning that language is actually something
| we want to do in opposition to all the things you could be
| doing. In the context of public education, since this is the
| theme the author focuses on, we don't just study certain
| topics, we study a certain spin on some topics that is
| determined by a range of government officials.
|
| In other words, you have to deal with severely limited energy
| and interest compared to all that is available in life so
| cutting chaff is probably even more important than boosting
| your ability to remember. In fact, selecting what to learn
| _is_ life, just like a sculptor removes the parts of the
| marble that aren 't in the end result.
| p-christ wrote:
| Completely agree on Anki requiring too much effort, its the
| main reason why i'm making Save All (https://saveall.ai/). Save
| all is a simpler version of anki that use AI to try and make it
| less effortful
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| I have a couple of questions...
|
| How do you trust your memory when (as I understand it), every
| time you recall something your brain changes in ways that can
| affect recall later?
|
| Is there a distinction between learning and knowing? For example,
| in my undergrad days I learned about Simpson's rule for numerical
| integration. I jammed enough of it into my memory to pass the
| test and quickly forgot all the details. Now, 30+ years later, I
| needed to calculate the volume of a pretty complex space. I
| remembered the existence of Simpson's rule but absolutely nothing
| else about it. Looking it up on Wikipedia I was able to re-learn
| it well enough to apply it in my job and move on to the next
| problem.
|
| If, over the past 30 years, I had been using flash cards to
| remember the details of Simpson's Rule, I would have wasted a lot
| of time. Re-learning it when needed also means I don't have to
| rely on my faulty, dynamic memory. For me, it seems like there's
| a sweet spot to remembering _enough_ to know the concept and then
| relying on the internet to fill in the details as needed.
| quarok wrote:
| Firstly, in terms of the distinction between learning and
| knowing -- the thing that matters most is the strength of the
| encoding in the brain. If you just memorise something with 0
| understanding, the connections in the brain aren't as strong --
| so they disappear. Whereas if you know something thoroughly,
| the connections are much, much stronger.
|
| These strong connections are why when you go back and look at
| it, you recognise it and you know how to apply it - because you
| still have some of the residual memories from this strong
| encoding. But in the meantime, you probably haven't been able
| to apply it in an analogy for example.
|
| Secondly - there's a classic on the topic of Spaced Repetition
| written by Gwern.[0] Gwern calculated that, given the average
| amount of time you spend testing yourself on something, and the
| exponential increase in how long you remember it, if you would
| spend more than 5 minutes per 10 years looking something up,
| you should use spaced repetition to remember it.
|
| For transparency I work with OP on Save All.
|
| 0: https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
| mistermann wrote:
| > Firstly, in terms of the distinction between learning and
| knowing -- the thing that matters most is the strength of the
| encoding in the brain.
|
| I'd vote for the ability to perform a skilful epistemic
| analysis of the retrieved information being more useful. I
| prefer this because it can overcome any natural immutable
| shortcomings in the underlying process.
| [deleted]
| p-christ wrote:
| > every time you recall something your brain changes in ways
| that can affect recall later?
|
| Yeah that phenomenon is called "proactive & retroactive
| interference".
|
| > For me, it seems like there's a sweet spot to remembering
| enough to know the concept and then relying on the internet to
| fill in the details as needed.
|
| I think i agree with you to an extent. For example, there is no
| point memorising all the digits of pie so that you can use it
| when programming, it's much more efficient to just remember
| what pie is at a vaguer higher level than to put the energy
| into memorising all its digits.
|
| But i would say that most people go too far the other way and
| only remember less than the efficient amount.
| madiator wrote:
| Learning is remembering and understanding. You have to
| progressively build layers of understanding (and be able to
| recall it quickly).
|
| This article focuses mostly on the second part, about
| remembering.
|
| You could recall things but you may not fully understand it,
| which is going to make it harder to learn.
|
| And of course, you might understand something, but eventually you
| will forget it (either few days or few years, depending on how
| often you use related memory). When you forget, it makes it hard
| to learn.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| I experienced this myself when I was a kid. I wanted to do mental
| arithmetic like my dad but I couldn't do multiplications for
| large numbers even after my dad explained how he did it. Turns
| out I had to memorize the time tables first, otherwise I would
| run out of swap space.
|
| If you want to experience this yourself but you already know the
| time tables, you could try to memorize log tables and then you
| can do those fancy arithmetic tricks that old school engineers
| used to do with slide rulers.
| p-christ wrote:
| yeah mental arithmetic and running out of swap space is such a
| relevant / good example of the phenomenon, might add that into
| the article
| emarsden wrote:
| In the 1600s, educators in Nuremberg (Germany) were proud of a
| pedagogical technique that they had developed, called the
| "Nuremberg funnel"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel). In this
| "hydraulic" model of learning, they were proud to have developed
| an effective technique for "pouring" knowledge into the empty
| brains of students. Centuries of research have shown that this
| model is flawed in many ways (as many commenters here have
| pointed out): people never have an "empty" mind and learning
| involves effortful integration of new concepts with existing
| knowledge; for the most important types of learning it requires
| application, exercises and social interactions.
|
| This author seems to believe in the Nuremberg funnel and the
| hydraulic model of learning, but simply with a limited "flow
| rate" for the brain. It's disappointing to see such as simple-
| minded idea, which has been so profoundly debunked by huge
| amounts of research, on the front page of HN.
| p-christ wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean. I agree that learning often
| requires things like applications and exercises, where did I
| imply otherwise?
|
| I'm saying the reason why applications and exercises are useful
| are that they lead to a change in your memory. Not that they
| aren't useful.
| jldugger wrote:
| > It's disappointing to see such as simple-minded idea, which
| has been so profoundly debunked by huge amounts of research, on
| the front page of HN.
|
| My read is that the author actually agrees with you. The author
| points out that all students have a starting non-empty state
| (long term memory), and the goal of learning is to build on top
| of that. It's just defining the space of "learnable" things as
| distance from long term memory. This doesn't seem that
| controversial?
|
| They even call out all the things you call out as effective:
|
| > Everything we know about learning efficiently is directly
| related to memory - "good" teachers, "good" explanations,
| images, diagrams, maths problems, essays, practical assignments
| all are good for learning because they help move things into
| your long-term memory.
|
| I suspect the thing upsetting you is the call out to spaced
| repetition?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'd offer a similar criticism. The problem with "our working
| memory has a maximum capacity of roughly 4 [ _chunks_ of
| information at once] " is that the units ("chunks" was
| original) winds-up undefined and moreover it tempts one just
| divide whatever a person seems to be able to process into four
| things and call them units.
|
| And the way I'd see your "funnel" criticism applying is that
| each student can easily begin with a different set of mental
| tools, some of which let them take an idea as one relatively
| small "chunk" and some of which might process the idea as
| several "chunks".
| pfkurtz wrote:
| Learning is as much forgetting as remembering.
|
| When I study something, I go for awhile, but eventually it
| becomes difficult, confusing, hard to see the forest for the
| trees. Particularly with technical information and skills like
| programming (or natural) languages.
|
| When I come back a little bit later, I find that I only remember
| the things that made sense; my confusions are forgotten, and
| there is fresh mental space and energy to master a bit more of
| the terrain before I need another break.
| p-christ wrote:
| Our subconcious mind often works on our problems while we
| aren't thinking about them, i that's more what's going on here
| than forgetting. your brain figured it out for you while you
| were doing something else
| pfkurtz wrote:
| That's sometimes true but I think my point still stands.
|
| When I'm studying a foreign language, I learn some words and
| they stick, but I'm exposed to a bunch more that I don't
| remember next time. I forget those meanings, but the ones
| that stuck are now vivid and with me, brighter.
|
| When I'm studying Kubernetes, I end up reading a ton of
| information that's irrelevant to the task at hand, and lots
| of it doesn't make that much sense because I'm new to it. The
| next day, when I come back, the things that I actually
| understood remain, ready to be the foundation for new
| learning, which they couldn't have been when they were mere
| data points in an overwhelmed brain. I don't remember the
| parts I was confused about yesterday, just this stuff that
| now makes sense.
| pfkurtz wrote:
| To unite our points, I might be thinking of something like:
| the immensity of sensory and cognitive data that pass through
| (sub)consciousness during the learning task are sifted and
| sorted in the unconscious while not learning; one might call
| the sifting "forgetting" and the sorting "figuring out".
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm still staggered how potent a post effort pause can get. I
| can spend hours and days trying to improve something and not
| being able to see the easiest spots. I come back 4 days later
| and everything just jumps out as obvious as day. No confusion,
| no fatigue, lots of ideas, enthusiasm, creativity..
| abrax3141 wrote:
| Um, there's like 300(0) years of research on this, and, really,
| it isn't anything like this simple. For "recent" science you can
| start on volume 1 of the jep journal of learning and memory,
| which is like 50+ years of continuous monthly publication.
| p-christ wrote:
| Yeah some simplification is required to condense 300(0) years
| of research into a digestible article but is any of it
| misleadingly incorrect?
| thrown_22 wrote:
| This is the worst possible example.
|
| Learning basic QM is 90% complex differential equations and 10%
| physical intuition.
|
| There is a reason why you generally don't get to introductory
| quantum mechanics until second year after (or while) you're doing
| calculus, differential equations and linear algebra.
|
| To quote a lecture I once saw: the deepest point of any state is
| a mine shaft somewhere. You don't find that shaft by gradient
| descent.
| p-christ wrote:
| why does that make it the worst possible example?
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Because learning quantum mechanics isn't about learning
| quantum mechanics, it's about learning a bunch of maths to
| learn quantum mechanics.
|
| It doesn't matter how much of the wiki page you remember,
| without understanding a few key pieces you're wasting your
| time.
| turpialito wrote:
| Is the author Petros Christodoulou, the computer scientist cited
| here:
| https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mWdm_bkAAAAJ&hl=en ?
| p-christ wrote:
| yes that's me, how comes?
| Frummy wrote:
| He's moving it from working memory to long term memory :D
| p-christ wrote:
| lol oh dear, sounds ominous
| nyc111 wrote:
| I think the Wikipedia system of learning mentioned in the article
| would work. I call it "just in time learning". You click the
| link, you read it, if you decide that it is useful then you learn
| it by repeating it and understanding its relation to what you
| already know.
| necessary wrote:
| As someone who has been using Anki for the past 4 years to learn
| Japanese and now Chinese, I've recently found that the initial
| "learning" step is not that hard. (i.e., given Ci Shu , I
| remember "dictionary") What is hard is keeping the content I've
| learned, _learned_, for more than a day.
|
| So now I'm wondering, is my initial "learning" process wrong?
| Since definitions are fairly simple and I find them easy to
| remember at first but hard to hold onto. And my process in Anki
| for New cards is to rep them like reviewed cards until I pass the
| card; so really, I'm just staring at the kanji + definition until
| I remember it.
|
| This brings me to my question: is there more Anki can do when it
| comes to learning new cards? Is there something we can do when
| learning new information that will help make it "sticky"?
| Especially in regards to "simple" facts, like basic kanji ->
| definition mappings, where there are no mechanics to understand,
| just simple mappings.
|
| Edit (an addition):
|
| Also, I love SRS, but I don't understand how it can be advertised
| as completely different than rote memorization. When you learn a
| new physical flashcard, you're learning it the same way as you
| would be when learning a new Anki card. The only difference is
| that Anki will show it to you again at a more efficient time in
| the future, rather than at some regular interval.
| Bakary wrote:
| To learn a word or character, you need to be able to understand
| it immediately and be able to form a sentence with it without
| delay (at least not more than the occasional "uh...").
| Remembering the meaning after some fiddling is not good enough.
|
| That has to be achieved by actually practicing the language,
| either via listening, speaking, or writing.
|
| Anki is there to help after that step by keeping you refreshed
| with the exact tones, strokes, multiple pronunciations or more
| ambiguous CJK characters etc. but it can't be the motor behind
| the process.
|
| For spaced repetition, although it is a form of rote
| memorization, the key insight is that memory is formed through
| recall, not review. The system then (purportedly) hits you at
| the very moment you are about to forget the card. It's counter-
| intuitive but it's easier to encode things in long term memory
| by recalling them at that point as opposed to when it's still
| fresh in your mind.
|
| This is analogous to studying in university via explaining
| things to yourself versus just highlighting and rereading the
| textbook. Every student knows the former is more effective.
| gernb wrote:
| A friend who is amazingly good at languages made the analogy,
| you can't read about how to play a musical instrument and get
| better at playing it. You actually have to play it.
|
| Anki might help some, maybe reading, but speaking and
| listening require actually speaking and actually listening.
| karatinversion wrote:
| The analogy can be taken too far; if you can recognise a
| note by sight on sheet music, you've learnt everything
| there is to directly memorise in paying an instrument. All
| the rest is practice. This is not the case in language
| learning. A language which is not closely related to one
| you already know has tens of thousands of words, the
| meanings of which can't be deduced from other things. There
| is no use to doing listening practice if you do not
| understand almost all the words being used; you will be
| stuck looking them up one at a time in a dictionary. It is
| also very difficult to correctly pick out words you don't
| know in a language you are new to.
| [deleted]
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| To answer your edit:
|
| I think you are understating the difference this "more
| efficient time" makes. SRS outclasses every other approach we
| have for long-term memorization by several zeroes.
|
| Bringing your car to the shop when the "check engine" light is
| on and bringing it into the shop after every single drive is
| superficially the same, but only one of them makes actual
| sense...
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I learn a lot. The way I've learned best for me is to mimic
| children. Especially small children.
|
| They focus intently at seemingly incomprehensible complexity.
| Then they play with the small fragments they can get their hold
| on. "ba-ba-ba-ba" when they're learning to speak.
|
| They play. They combine two (or more) different things they're
| interested in into a single experiment which we think of more
| as play. Mushy food? I wonder what happens when I throw it on
| the floor? Oh look how it landed all funny! Look how mum and
| papa reacted!
|
| Grinding through cards learning languages never really did
| anything for me. Immersion and regular (but not exhaustive!)
| play stretched over time makes the neurons of my mind much more
| reliable.
| biofox wrote:
| Arguably, the whole point of play is learning.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| For some, yes. And their secondary benefit is joy.
|
| For others, no. It's joy. And their secondary benefit is
| learning.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Learning is often a byproduct of play, but the actual point
| of play is highly subjective to whoever is doing the
| playing. Although, in my experience, if you need to learn
| something, making it into a game is a highly effective and
| fun way to go about something that might otherwise be
| pretty dull.
| Olreich wrote:
| Anki is great for higher level learning as well. Instead of
| having just individual words, have full sentences or even
| paragraphs. If you can read it aloud and understand it, then
| you can mark it as learned, but if you need to use the
| definition or explanation for any of it, mark it as unlearned.
| Once you have a decent initial vocabulary and grammar, this is
| far more effective at pushing things into long-term memory.
| Most of language is contextual, so anything to increase the
| amount of context on an individual card will help with getting
| better holistic knowledge of the language.
| echelon wrote:
| Anki is great, but it doesn't hold a candle to full sensory
| integration. If you moved to Japan or China and rid yourself of
| English, you'd be forming all sorts of associations a white
| screen with text can't replicate.
|
| SRS is great for the characters -> definition pathway, but we
| need so much more. Listening, speaking, interacting, using the
| language to describe the world around us in conversation and
| navigate through it.
|
| Don't stop using Anki though.
| p-christ wrote:
| Yeah it needs to help you do better "encoding". This is what
| determines how sticky information is straight after learning
| it.
|
| One way that Save All (a company i run that's like anki,
| https://saveall.ai/) helps you with encoding is that it
| suggests alternative ways that we can quiz you on a card you
| just made. This helps you engage with the card a bit more as
| you're making it which makes it more sticky.
|
| Other than that a good way to also improve encoding is to link
| new knowledge to existing knowledge. Things like Roam help you
| do this with their backlinks
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I thought active and free recall were both superior to mixed
| encoding and interleaved practice. Is there a study linking
| more encoding to enhanced active recall? From what I
| understand, the suggestion is to add desirable difficulty
| (which I guess leads to better encoding, but different
| encodings dont nefessarily add desirable difficulty).
| p-christ wrote:
| Not sure about the relative importance, but save all also
| has active recall & interleaving. The encoding happens when
| you first learn something & create a card, and the active
| recall, spaced repetition & interleaving happens later when
| you review cards.
| kurthr wrote:
| It seems like you've gone pretty far. I assume you started with
| something like radicals (constructive strokes) and built up to
| more complex Kanji/pictograms. I know in speaking to native
| Mandarin speakers that they see stroke order in the characters
| and were intrigued that I don't see that in english. Often we
| just learn the sound/typed elements (e.g. pinyin), which I
| guess might be like modern asian kids.
|
| Have you looked at something like wanikani.com with the
| mnemonics or some of the more historical derivations of the
| different characters? Those might help build an internal story
| for why those characters mean what they do. As an adult, that
| helped me.
| Bakary wrote:
| Stroke order sounds like a burden to Westerners but it
| actually helps with memorizing characters, and makes your
| handwriting less awful.
| [deleted]
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| The answer is yes. I'm working on it with
| https://reader.manabi.io which aims to enrich memorization with
| more colorful contextual anchoring. Working on a SwiftUI
| rewrite with Anki integration currently.
| corderop wrote:
| Fluent Forever book has helped me a lot with Language learning.
| It shows you how to learn a language mainly using flashcards,
| apart from other things.
|
| I'm recommending you some things that have completely changed
| my experience using Anki for language learning:
|
| - Don't use translations. Use images instead. For learning how
| to say dictionary put a picture of a dictionary. It will be
| easier to remember. Also, you usually won't find a perfect
| translation for a word.
|
| - Use cloze cards for grammar. Instead of learning the rules,
| understand them and put four sentences with placeholders and
| repeat them. This process will make this way of constructing
| sentences stuck in your head.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| clozemaster.com is a website that does exactly this (your
| second point).
| O__________O wrote:
| Archive of page:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220926125538/https://saveall.a...
| nathias wrote:
| no, not at all learning means you don't have to remember because
| you have understood it and can recreate it at will
| Kalanos wrote:
| learning is about connecting the dots, not just gathering dots.
| e.g. based on what i know, what should i learn next?
| jjslocum3 wrote:
| The unsuccessful learning technique the author describes at the
| beginning of the article is essentially the LIFO "stack" data
| structure/algo: You learn until you encounter a gap in your
| understanding, upon which you push your current material onto the
| stack, fix the knowledge gap, then pop the parent from the stack
| (with additional pushing/popping along the way, as needed).
|
| Leaving the "working-memory-max=4" hypothesis aside (I'm sure
| it's all true), the "stack learning" paradigm has been hugely
| successful for me post-classroom, and (amusingly) specifically
| with Quantum Mechanics.
|
| About ten years ago, I tried to understand what QM was about, by
| doing exactly what the article describes, starting at Wikipedia's
| "Quantum Mechanics" page. I got the exact result described: no
| understanding of the material.
|
| However, the search eventually led me to ocw.mit.edu, where the
| same LIFO-based stack learning was super effective. Along the
| way, a refresher calculus course (also from OCW) got pushed onto
| then popped from the stack, as did the course "Vibrations and
| Waves" and the entire Walter Lewin lecture series (he has since
| been removed from OCW, but can be found on youtube).
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| When I was 25, I had a scary stellar memory. I never used a
| calendar. Never missed any appointments. I could remember exactly
| what people said in meetings several months ago. I never forgot
| names. I still almost never forget names, but mostly my memory is
| gone. Well, because of life.
|
| My advice. Organize yourself. Use as much cognitive offloading as
| possible. Keep a diary, a document, wiki or whatever. Use
| calendars, reminders, alarms, Kanban boards and on. Make sure to
| understand concepts and how things really work. Practice how to
| spot what is important. Take your time on important things. Learn
| the tools. Use the tools. Learn how to pick the right tools.
| MoroCode wrote:
| I agree with most of whats written here. I think there is a major
| point you're overlooking here. There is simply just too much
| information we're expected to know nowadays. You could argue that
| the amount of information we have to cram into our brains in such
| a short amount of time makes it very difficult to build good long
| term memories. High School and university curriculum's are
| forever expanding jamming more and more in the same period of
| time. Even in professional settings such as being a web developer
| or data scientist for example where new things are being invented
| by the second that then become the standard. At some point you'll
| need to offload long term memories to external sources. So while
| you may forget the actual content of what you need to know, you
| could for example remember what to google and the summary of the
| content you expect. Essentially our long term memories is
| transformed into pointers for external information banks. We only
| keep whats absolutely essential to perform our functions.
| quarok wrote:
| The problem is that if you don't commit information to long-
| term memory you can't use it reason effectively in other
| contexts, and you have to add it back to your short-term memory
| every time you look it up -- so outsourcing your memory to a
| knowledge bank is limiting the complexity of the tasks you can
| handle.
|
| So there might be more information you're expected to know in
| modern jobs -- but if you spend a bit more time consolidating
| rather than acquiring new information, you can build the
| foundations on which more advanced skills can rest.
|
| For transparency: I work with the OP
| skadamat wrote:
| A key point here is that our brains don't work like computer
| hard drives. Our brains are a lot closer to how, in biology,
| a single cell stores the entire DNA "data" that's needed to
| replicate but just using a few base pairs.
|
| We likely store information more in some type of loose graph
| structure, where we recall / "remember" something by re-
| creating links to that piece of information. There seems to
| be very very little "storage cost" for the billions of pieces
| of information we keep in our brains.
| mistermann wrote:
| > There is simply just too much information we're expected to
| know nowadays. You could argue that the amount of information
| we have to cram into our brains in such a short amount of time
| makes it very difficult to build good long term memories.
|
| I would also argue that the time we spend memorizing "facts",
| of questionable utility, takes away from the time that could be
| spent on learning better methodologies for thinking.
| aappleby wrote:
| I am utterly baffled that no response in this thread so far has
| taken issue with the statement "As you probably know intuitively,
| it won't work."
|
| For me, this _does_ work and I have proven it many many times
| over the years by adding entire categories of technical knowledge
| to my repertoire. And not superficially, either - I get paid very
| well to do things professionally that I taught myself by reading
| Wikipedia.
|
| If my experience were commonplace, the "it won't work" statement
| would be highly contentious in the comments here. Since it isn't,
| I guess I can deduce that I must be an outlier.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Selection bias. People read "learning is memory" and choose not
| to waste their time reading the piece. If the headline is
| silly, usually the rest is too.
| aappleby wrote:
| Reasonable, but it's literally the first point the article
| makes. Of the fraction of commenters that did actually read
| the article, I still would've expected at least a few to
| object.
| p-christ wrote:
| Maybe you already know quite a lot about physics? Or maybe you
| have an unusually large working memory and didn't go far enough
| down the wikipedia hole until you got lost?
|
| The working memory limit explained in the article must apply to
| you unless you have some sort of a very special form of
| photographic memory
| aappleby wrote:
| That's the thing though, I never get "lost".
|
| I've never studied quantum mechanics aside from snippets I
| picked up through pop science articles or such, so it's not
| like I started with a big body of knowledge already in place.
|
| It's hard for me to imagine what feeling "lost" in Wikipedia
| would be like. Maybe reading some article about a complex
| historical battle would do it - lists of people with
| important names would probably become a jumble without really
| clear identifiers of who did what and why.
| p-christ wrote:
| Ok how about this more difficult experiment to prove the
| hypothesis:
|
| I'm going to send you a wikipedia page written in chinese.
| You're going to read it once. For every chinese word you're
| allowed to look up the meaning on google translate once as
| you read. You're not allowed to do any other form of
| learning besides reading.
|
| Do you think in this case you'd also not get "lost"?
| aappleby wrote:
| I think I would get lost, but only due to the vocabulary
| and translation load and the "once" restrictions - not
| due to the content of the article itself.
|
| In practice I end up reading the same wiki articles
| dozens of times as I go up and down the link trees, with
| each pass connecting various ambiguous ideas together.
|
| If I could annotate the pages with arbitrary amounts of
| translation notes as I read them, I could probably get
| through the article though it would take a very long
| time.
| p-christ wrote:
| Ok but the point stands that there is a limit to your
| working memory. Your limit sounds a lot higher than most
| peoples but it is still limited otherwise you'd never get
| lost even if you could only read things once.
| aappleby wrote:
| I don't _feel_ like my working memory is particularly
| large, but that's also a hopelessly subjective
| assessment.
|
| Maybe it's more like my working memory can hold more
| things by aggressively discarding details until I need
| them - same capacity, but with better lossy compression.
| Not sure if I could measure that either, but it feels
| closer.
| [deleted]
| blakesley wrote:
| Maybe you're really good at working with uncertainty?
|
| This article focuses on the number of new things overwhelming
| our working memory, but I'd argue another big problem is the
| difficulty of leveraging abstractions even if you don't
| understand them.
|
| In this exercise, both myself and the article get sidetracked
| in understanding the basis of all the abstractions as well,
| rather than just letting the abstractions be, with all of their
| uncertainty. But if I were better at the latter, I could see
| this approach working.
| aappleby wrote:
| I did the exercise mentioned and was happily bouncing around
| between 3 and 6 levels deep in Wikipedia before I thought I
| should come back to the article to see what else it said, at
| which point I became very confused.
|
| Perhaps "comfortable with knowing that I don't know things,
| yet proceeding anyway" is a better description.
| theptip wrote:
| This is true in as far as it goes with respect to short-term /
| working memory.
|
| But I think it glosses over the most important detail; long-term
| memory comprises many distinct sub-systems. "Remembering" is
| typically (IME) associated with explicit/conscious long-term
| memory processes, but I think the most important thing for
| learning complex domains like Quantum Mechanics is implicit
| memory, specifically procedural memory.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_memory#Implicit_memo...
|
| In order to understand higher-level concepts like the Schrodinger
| Equation, one must first thoroughly understand lower-level
| concepts, starting with mathematical theories like calculus, and
| physics models of energy. It's not possible to simply fill out an
| Anki card for these lower-level concepts and memorize the
| wikipedia page; one must practice performing those mathematical
| operations until they are unconscious like riding a bike.
|
| This is recursive; one can't understand higher-still domains like
| Quantum Chromodynamics or Quantum Chemistry until one has worked
| with the Schrodinger Equation (and other QM formulations) enough
| that it's deeply lodged in your procedural memory.
|
| This is why it takes ten years to train a physicist (and even
| then one could argue that physicist is at the beginning of their
| journey); one must spend undergraduate years working out a bunch
| of problems by hand, gradually layering new concepts on top of
| old ones. It's not like pushing a software engineer though a dev
| boot camp, where a dev can produce something that is simple but
| useful after a few months. There is no way of usefully
| abstracting away the lower levels of complexity in Physics.
|
| The other side of that observation is useful too; software
| bootcamps are possible because we successfully abstracted away a
| lot of complexity. Good abstractions (even when leaky) can be
| immensely valuable. Imagine having to do a PhD to have enough
| expertise to build a web application? I think this achievement is
| perhaps under-rated, particularly in this community that takes
| joy in peeling back the layers.
|
| I suppose the other observation I'd make is, don't overuse Anki;
| it's good for memorizing facts, but not necessarily helpful for
| procedural memory. You still need to practice doing the thing in
| order to master complex domains. (I'm open to the argument that
| having facts memorized might make the procedural acquisition
| faster, but I'm not certain that it's more effective than just
| spending the memorization time on focused procedural learning
| practice instead.)
| fairity wrote:
| It seems like learning how to learn and learning what matters in
| the world (and therein how to be happy) are the two most
| important things to learn. Yet, for some reason, our standard
| school curriculum don't touch on either subject. Why not?
| p-christ wrote:
| i wish school taught me how to learn instead of me having to
| wait until i was 25 and doing a free coursera course
| swantonb wrote:
| Have you seen any SaaS or consumer products that focus on
| "how to learn?" and "digesting information" aspect?. I'm
| legit asking because my team is working on that exact idea
| with mental models and AI.
|
| If you are curious, we'd appreciate candid feedback from you.
| Just launched pre-beta on Product Hunt today.
|
| https://www.producthunt.com/posts/neble
|
| Thanks
| p-christ wrote:
| > Have you seen any SaaS or consumer products that focus on
| "how to learn?" and "digesting information" aspect?
|
| Yes Save All helps with that in a way
|
| https://saveall.ai/
| jbaczuk wrote:
| Reminds me of this article I just read:
| http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
| foogazi wrote:
| > There are now ways to get rich by doing good work,
|
| That sounds like different test too
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > learning how to learn
|
| This is taught, at least at German schools. It's just that
| nobody pays attention.
|
| > learning what matters in the world (and therein how to be
| happy)
|
| This is way too subjective to be part of a curriculum. Trying
| would border on indoctrination.
| fairity wrote:
| > This is taught, at least at German schools. It's just that
| nobody pays attention.
|
| Interesting, is the curriculum anywhere online? Curious to
| take a look.
|
| > This is way too subjective to be part of a curriculum.
| Trying would border on indoctrination.
|
| I see it as the opposite of indoctrination. Teaching students
| how to choose their own values (and how happiness is a
| function of your values) gives them more freedom not less.
| You wouldn't want to push any specific value framework, but
| you do want to teach students that it's possible to choose
| your own adventure, instead of getting indoctrinated by your
| society's prevailing values. A curriculum such as:
|
| - What are values?
|
| - The connection between happiness and values
|
| - Value traits (e.g. extrinsic vs intrinsic, behavioral vs
| situational)
|
| - Value prioritization and hierarchies
|
| - Different cultures and their distinct value frameworks
|
| - Practical applications (e.g. learning how to change your
| values; trying out different values for a day/week)
| cloogshicer wrote:
| There is a difference between _remembering_ something (like a
| fact) and a deep _understanding_ of a concept.
|
| Let me give you an example in programming: I sometimes have to
| google for the names of functions I've already used a hundred
| times. Sometimes extremely simple functions (just a while ago it
| was list.size() in Java), only because I can't remember the
| _name_ of the function, but of course I understand the _concept_
| - the length of a list /array. I just can't remember if it's
| _length()_ , or _size()_ or _count()_ , or whatever.
|
| This deep understanding _feels_ quite different from simple
| memorization. It feels more like something in my body, similar to
| muscle memory or like playing a piano piece. It 's something I
| feel I will never forget.
|
| I'd love to learn more about this kind of understanding. For
| years I've tried to find good reading about it, but much has been
| disappointing.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > google for the names of functions
|
| Copilot is a lifesaver here. I almost never have to google
| function names anymore because it just fills them in for me,
| while usually generating exactly the code I wanted around it.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| I've resisted co pilot and auto complete because when
| interview time comes and you have to write code outside of
| your toolset, you'll realize you haven't committed things so
| well to memory. This bit me earlier on in my career after
| working in visual studios for a long time. I now code almost
| exclusively in vim.
|
| I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but before you go into
| technical parts of interviews I would recommend you do some
| coding without all the bells and whistles tools.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Not saying that your advice in any way wrong, but it's a
| bit sad that the only thing holding people back from such a
| productivity multiplier, innovation or even completely new
| way of coding is the _inane interview process of this
| industry_...
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| Completely agree.
| diffxx wrote:
| The paradox of copilot is that anyone who is skilled
| enough that they can be responsibly trusted to use it
| doesn't need it.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Why would you give up such big productivity multipliers
| just to make the rare event of interviewing a little
| easier? If an interview is coming up then just spend a few
| days practicing, or just don't - I've never had an
| interview go badly because I didn't memorize
| java.util.date.
| puchatek wrote:
| Great. If i ever feel like my impostor syndrome could use a
| bump I'll be sure to throw Copilot into the mix.
| missingdays wrote:
| If only there was a way to know which methods the object has.
| We could call such concept something like auto-discovery or
| magic-completion.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I use that too, but Copilot is just better much of the
| time.
| have_faith wrote:
| Reminds me of Feynman's anecdote about the names of a bird.
|
| > See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany
| it's called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung
| ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still
| know nothing about the bird. You only know something about
| people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and
| teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during
| the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds
| its way.
| son_of_gloin wrote:
| The name is first and foremost a way to attach that deeper
| knowledge of the bird to a symbol so it can be communicated
| to others. The name is necessary, but usually tells you very
| little about the thing it refers to.
| rhodin wrote:
| Counter-anecdote time from Murray Gel-Mann, who did think
| names were important [1]
|
| [1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/05/remembering-
| murr...
| taeric wrote:
| I don't think anyone in computers can purport to names
| being important. Shell's sort, Bloom's filter, awk, c++,
| Java vs JavaScript....
|
| The number of names that are misleading or almost willfully
| obtuse is absurdly high. (I'm actually cheating for folks
| in my list, as I typically see it just shown as shell sort
| and bloom filter. Which hides that it is named for
| someone.)
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| At least Shell invented the sort named after him. In the
| sciences you have Stigler's Law (no scientific discovery
| is named after its original discoverer).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
| mcguire wrote:
| On the other hand, to the point of the article, you can't get a
| deep understanding of a concept without remembering the
| concept, other concepts that it relates to, and how.
| p-christ wrote:
| I think it feels different because that knowledge is more
| deeply ingrained with what you already know. That knowledge has
| many connections and relationships with other knowledge you
| have. Whereas the name of a function is more like a leaf node,
| it isn't connected to very much and i think this is the source
| of the different feelings you describe.
|
| To expand on this a bit - our memories maintain "schemas" of
| knowledge and whenever we learn something new it gets slotted
| into our "schema". The better something fits into our schema
| the easier it is to remember. I think if you googled schemas
| you'll be able to find more material on this
| cloogshicer wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. I think what I tried to describe above
| couldn't be classified as "knowledge" at all.
|
| To be honest, I think we (humans) don't understand this type
| of understanding very well. Which is somewhat ironic :-)
|
| Edit: But thanks for the suggestion about searching for
| schema, will definitely take a look!
| p-christ wrote:
| Understanding is just knowledge of how or why something
| works
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Intuitively, I don't believe it's that simple. But I'd
| love to learn more about it.
| svnt wrote:
| The keyword embodied may be fruitful -- there is a lot of
| noise around the term but embodied understanding is closer
| to what you want, I think. You may have to relax some ideas
| about how things work for a while in order to
| absorb/integrate it.
|
| The knowledge defined in the article is very rational and
| reductionist in its presentation. I don't mean that
| derogatorily, but it does mean it can't account for all the
| emergent features of our existence. The reductionist
| approach can be useful as a set of signposts for locating
| reliable mechanistic constraints.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Thank you for that keyword! A quick search brought me to
| the wikipedia article [1], which sounds quite promising.
|
| I agree completely with your analysis of the article by
| the way. Beautifully said!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I think you've touched on two different ideas:
|
| (1) That a deeper understanding of something can make it
| simpler/easier to remember. One way to look at this is that you
| remember a model of the world. That complexity of that model
| determines the quantity of information you need to remember. If
| you can find a simpler model, your mind needs to store less
| information to cover everything you need to know.
|
| (2) That a concept and its name are different things. You
| understand the concept of an array-length-giving function, but
| you don't remember the name attached to it. It could go the
| other way: you could know there is a function with a certain
| name but not remember what it does. Or you could know what it
| does and what it's named. (This seems at least tangentially
| related to linguistic relativity
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity), a.k.a.
| the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The question is basically to what
| degree our minds build ideas on words/language and to what
| degree we form ideas independently of language.)
| tpoacher wrote:
| It's interesting you mention playing the piano as an example,
| because that's a very good example of how the opposite of what
| you're saying is true. Try to learn a piano piece simply by
| playing it many times, and it'll never happen. However, try to
| commit the notes intentionally to memory, and reading the notes
| becomes unnecessary very quickly. Same with trying to memorize
| text; if you read without explicitly trying to memorize it, you
| can read it infinite times and never manage to recite it back.
|
| I think your example about list.size doesn't contradict this.
| It's the difference between "familiarity recognition" memory vs
| "consolidation and retrieval".
|
| You do not bother committing "size()" because it's unnecessary
| (or because there's a lot of interference from other languages
| which do the same thing, hence the cost of committing that fact
| for later retrieval is not worth doing so).
|
| But you _have_ committed the "concept" to memory, and this can
| be retrieved even without the need for the label.
|
| "Understanding" is only part of the equation. But I do
| generally feel that "having the basic building blocks readily
| available helps you build complex understanding on top of them,
| which then helps you consolidate the complex stuff better" is
| probably the main direction, rather than "understanding a
| complex concept helps you better remember the basic building
| blocks that made it up in the first place".
|
| This is also why anki works so well for learning theoretical
| subjects (even if it _has_ traditionally been more popular for
| pure memorization tasks, like language learning)
| whatshisface wrote:
| You still have to remember your understanding. That's something
| you realize when it has been a long time since you took a class
| on something back in college.
| [deleted]
| XCSme wrote:
| I have the same feeling, "knowledge" is more about knowing what
| is available, what options are there and broadly what each
| option does. You don't have to remember exactly how each option
| works, just know that it exists. When you need it, you can just
| search how it works, but knowing what to search for is crucial.
| jldugger wrote:
| > There is a difference between remembering something (like a
| fact) and a deep understanding of a concept.
|
| This is basically the Searl argument against AI, right?
| petra wrote:
| My guess: the concept of "a length of an array" is the thing
| you use to think with when you need it.
|
| Why?
|
| Because it is a single entity(through abstraction). And because
| it is a single entity and you use it a lot, it gets connected
| to many other concepts.
|
| And because you've solved problems with it,it has more
| emotional value.
|
| This means you can more easily retrieve it and it has more
| "meaning"/context to you.
|
| list.length gets used less often and it just a concrete
| implementation of the concept so maybe it's just linked to the
| concept.
|
| And it's also more complex to remember and use because it's
| made of 10 items.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's even harder to remember specific standard library
| functions after learning several programming languages. I know
| the languages themselves but still have to look this stuff up
| every time. One reason why Ruby is such an ergonomic language
| is there are aliases for all those names: you can guess length,
| size and count and chances are all three will work.
| vain_cain wrote:
| I immediately thought of the book "Thinking, fast and slow"
| from reading your comment. I don't know if you're familiar with
| it, but it talks about two "Systems" that guide our thinking.
| From the description of the book: "System 1 is fast, intuitive,
| and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more
| logical."
|
| The more you do something, or think about something - the more
| it becomes a "System 1" operation(fast, intuitive). Like typing
| on a keyboard for example, when you first started using a
| keyboard you had to think about every letter you want to hit,
| but now you probably don't even think about it for a
| millisecond. I guess what I'm trying to say is: Intuitive
| understanding = Action * Repetition.
|
| Read the book if you haven't, it might be the kind of material
| you're looking for. I'm not a big fan of psychology and I think
| it's 90% mumbo jumbo, but this book hit a few nails for me.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion! I've actually read TFS, and I
| _would_ even consider myself a "fan" of psychology, I
| definitely don't think it's mumbo jumbo. But in my opinion
| the book was quite shallow, only scratching on the surface of
| the matter.
|
| Edit: To clarify, shallow is maybe the wrong word. I think
| the book gets its main point across very well, and it's a
| good point. But the majority of the book is just further
| evidence supporting that main point. Which is fine, but I
| wish it would develop this main point a bit further. The book
| could be summarized in a short paper and wouldn't lose too
| much of its value, in my opinion.
| arolihas wrote:
| Note that there is quite a bit of shaky evidence used to
| further that point.
|
| https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-
| pe...
| Certified wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of paper by Bestsy Sparrow [1] where
| she hypothesizes that "Our brains rely on the Internet for
| memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a
| friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through
| knowing information itself than by knowing where the
| information can be found." [2]
|
| From the papers Abstract:
|
| "No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things
| we want. We can "Google" the old classmate, find articles
| online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue.
| The results of four studies suggest that when faced with
| difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers
| and that when people expect to have future access to
| information, they have lower rates of recall of the information
| itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it."
|
| [1] Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having
| Information at Our Fingertips -
| https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1207745
|
| [2] https://news.columbia.edu/news/study-finds-memory-works-
| diff...
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| > I sometimes have to google for the names of functions I've
| already used a hundred times
|
| This is why I have always been terrified of having to do a
| standard 'whiteboard' coding interview, and really don't want
| to ever participate in administering them to others. I know if
| I was ever tested in this way, I would be unable to remember
| the basic function names in languages I have used daily for
| years... and yet I have developed sophisticated software tools
| in these languages with a large global userbase. I fear that in
| an interview people would decide I am a fraud, and couldn't
| have really done what I have done when it appears I actually
| don't even remember the basics. But my mind just doesn't work
| that way, I can't remember length vs size either, even if I can
| design a complex algorithm, and turn it into a good piece of
| software under the actual conditions of work in the real world.
| TheFreim wrote:
| > This is why I have always been terrified of having to do a
| standard 'whiteboard' coding interview
|
| I too don't like the idea of these, but in the case where
| you're solving a problem in front of someone I feel like as
| long as you explain your thought process you'd be generally
| fine. If you can't remember whether the method is length() or
| size() or something else just pick one and explain what
| you're doing. Intelligent interviewers would likely
| understand that you're familiar with the concepts and would
| be able to accept your result or let you compile/execute and
| fix the issue.
| gmadsen wrote:
| back when whiteboards were a thing, most were not testing
| exact syntax..
| bradjohnson wrote:
| I've written plenty of whiteboarding interviews in something
| resembling Java and decided that I needed a tuple class,
| which for most purposes doesn't really exist in Java. So I
| just used the concept of a Tuple. I can say that most people
| on a whiteboarding interview panel don't really care if you
| borrow abstractions of ideas, the most I've been asked to do
| is define an interface for these implementations.
|
| Honestly if they care that much about rote memorization of
| syntax, it's a red flag.
| inphovore wrote:
| Not really.
|
| There are different learning styles. I find memorization very
| difficult (poor passive recall), yet my comprehension is superior
| (aiding deduction.)
|
| I find many with "photographic memory" to be sadly inadequate at
| comprehending and exploiting interrelationships.
|
| There is something like dexterity which develops in the mind, an
| impression left which is not exactly remembering, yet definitely
| stored in the brain.
| p-christ wrote:
| Learning styles are a myth
| https://www.techlearning.com/news/busting-the-myth-of-learni...
| inphovore wrote:
| Myths are a myth
|
| I'm not speaking of trends, I'm speaking of the architecture
| of our minds.
|
| There are definitely differences in how various minds work,
| and these inconclusive pseudoscience studies making wild
| assertions are as junk science as the junk science they feed
| upon.
| p-christ wrote:
| > There are definitely differences in how various minds
| work
|
| Yes, but we still all learn in roughly the same way. The
| differences aren't big enough.
| [deleted]
| stagger87 wrote:
| Related, the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve
|
| See plot with spaced repetition halfway down.
| p-christ wrote:
| yep that's the one! good old ebbinghaus
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