Learning Is Remembering

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.

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??

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!