The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition • Hacker News Board

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#91

Post by happy-go-lucky » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 3:10 PM UTC

FT_intern wrote: post #27

tucaz wrote: post #2

TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. I like the message, but not the messenger. Articles like this, in my point of view, fail to delivery their messages in a better way because they are simply too long and with too much noise for my taste. The point he is trying to get across could be explained in a simpler way with…

A few extra points to add: - expanding on repeating: Enumerate and solve/memorize every permutation of a problem/theorem/etc. (ex: in f = ma, what happens if m is high and a is low and the reverse). Each case becomes a subroutine (or a chunk) in your brain that quickly fires once memorized. - explaining your understanding of a topic does not translate to the ability of applying that understanding to an actual applica…

Yes, the title is misleading and the author is verbose, but the gist of the story is corroborated :)

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#92

Post by kaitai » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 3:55 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #73

sn9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Not surprising as she didn't come up with the ideas herself. She stumbled on the underlying principles and did research like anyone else on the terminology scientific experts in learning use to talk about those principles.

> The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Yet neither of these folks seem to be doing primary research in the particular area they are teaching the course in. Oakley's peer-reviewed resume on this is quite scarce: http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html Sejnowski is similarly light: http://www.salk.edu/scien…

I don't think this is the right metric for weighing these claims. As a mathematician, I do not do primary research in calculus or linear algebra...

...but teaching those classes pays the bills.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#93

Post by kafkaesq » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 5:18 PM UTC

Number Twelve: What was the Treaty of Adrianople?

Number Six (looking puzzled, but answering automatically): September... 1829.

Number Twelve: Wrong. I said "What," not "When." You need some special coaching.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_(The_Prisoner)

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#94

Post by sfink » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 6:40 PM UTC

Bleh. It was a good life story, but you could write out the conclusions either way, and the article is mostly successfully defeating a strawman. She makes a good point: if you define "understanding" narrowly, such as "whatever it takes to score well at Common Core", then it is important to realize that it is inadequate. Fluency is missing, and important.

But it's really just playing with definitions. I'll attack the contrapositive strawman: rote repetition and practice is useless if you don't first understand. You can memorize multiplication tables and the algorithm for multiplying multiple digit numbers, and yet make orders of magnitude mistakes without batting an eye. 40x25=100, right?

I would say that you need to understand the basics, then gain fluency, and from that gain an understanding of the depths and nuances. And I think her life story could back that description up just as well as it backs up hers.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#95

Post by sfink » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 6:50 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #60

Reading this, I'm finding a few elements matching my own learning process critically missing. Yes. Memorisation and repetition are useful. But of and by themselves, they are not enough , at least not for a deep understanding. That Ms. Oakley is a linguist makes the omission particularly glaring to me: it's finding a systemic understanding , that is, understanding the knowledge's grammar . I've picked up a few skills…

Yes, this resonates with me. I thought the article lumped together multiple different types of understanding, and attacked an "understanding first" approach by using a very limited definition. From the specific examples in the article, you can see that practice is useful to gaining a systemic understanding. But there's a bit of a claim that repetition leads to useful understanding, which is simplistic. Juggling the terms of F=ma is not what I would call repetition. It is practice, certainly, but to me repetition pretty strongly implies the absence of tweaking things according to the understanding you have so far. And that, I would assert, is a very slow and ineffective way of building up knowledge and deep understanding. (It will works, but only because our brains will get bored and sense patterns and start inferring some level of understanding no matter what. Although I'd gamble that a disinterested student who only needs to make it through all 50 problems on a worksheet will be pretty successful in avoiding any learning.)

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#96

Post by noobermin » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

JadeNB wrote: post #88

noobermin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Shrednicki[0]'s book, a pre-print is freely available online (or was 4 or so years ago). A class in Grad school solidified it for me, specifically because they related it back to physics, like the standard model. If you're going to start learning QFT, I suggest you try to understand time-dependent perturbation theory as much as possible. Also, be sure you have a handle on special relativity and scattering theo…

For what it's worth, that PDF says "Please DO NOT DISTRIBUTE this document. Instead, link to http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/∼mark/qft.html " (which has a link to the PDF).

Fair enough. Unfortunately, I can't edit the comment now.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#97

Post by bsder » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 7:49 AM UTC

kaitai wrote: post #92

bsder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Yet neither of these folks seem to be doing primary research in the particular area they are teaching the course in. Oakley's peer-reviewed resume on this is quite scarce: http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html Sejnowski is similarly light: http://www.salk.edu/scien…

I don't think this is the right metric for weighing these claims. As a mathematician, I do not do primary research in calculus or linear algebra... ...but teaching those classes pays the bills.

But you do not claim to be an expert on teaching or to have "The BEST Way To Learn Linear Algebra".

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#98

Post by sn9 » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #73

sn9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Not surprising as she didn't come up with the ideas herself. She stumbled on the underlying principles and did research like anyone else on the terminology scientific experts in learning use to talk about those principles.

> The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Yet neither of these folks seem to be doing primary research in the particular area they are teaching the course in. Oakley's peer-reviewed resume on this is quite scarce: http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html Sejnowski is similarly light: http://www.salk.edu/scien…

Being an expert in something doesn't require being an author of a peer-reviewed journal article on the subject.

Journal articles are written to communicate information to those who couldn't perform the experiment/research themselves, either because they have their own research areas (overlapping or not) or because they simply aren't researchers.

No one person is going to have enough depth and breadth to satisfy your requirements. Not even textbook authors would meet them.

Scientists, as part of their training, learn to quickly dissect papers written by others and assimilate the information to the point where they can often make modifications and create experiments that improve on the original or answer a related question not addressed by the first. This is not dissimilar to the way that programmers can take a program written by another and modify/extend it.

You're weirdly focused on this "argument from ultimate authority" instead of simply evaluating the claims and the data that support them. Googling a few of the terms in the article that you're unfamiliar with would be a more useful way to spend your time.

Though first, if you're going to make an informed criticism of a scientist's publication record, you might do well to have enough experience with searching for publications to know that a world-class scientist doesn't always have all of his publications on his website. That was a highlight reel of decades of research [0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Sejnowski%20TJ

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#99

Post by SamBam » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #72

SamBam wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... the author wrote a book on the topic, and teaches a fairly famous course on it. I'd hope you'd give those credentials at least as much weight as some HN self-proclaimed expert.

> ... the author wrote a book on the topic, and teaches a fairly famous course on it. Sadly, that doesn't automatically mean anything from a correctness perspective. Educational methodology, in particular, tends to be absolutely rife with fads more than fact and immediately sets off my alerts. This is doubly problematic when someone touts how popular their course is instead of how effective it is.

Context: You disparage someone as simply touting their personal anecdote, and ask if anyone around here is a "real" expert.

If someone had replied "why yes, actually I just wrote a book on the topic, and I teach a huge course on it," would you have accepted that person as being "versed" in the topic?

Can we at least agree that the author is actually more qualified than you seem to give credit for in your original post?