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Learning Is Remembering

saveall.ai

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Re: Learning Is Remembering

#101

Post by pfkurtz »

p-christ wrote: post #78
pfkurtz wrote: post #64

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…

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

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#102

Post by p-christ »

thrown_22 wrote: post #67

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 g…

why does that make it the worst possible example?

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#103

Post by p-christ »

O__________O wrote: post #87
p-christ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Largely because it explicitly narrows the context, but also because launching service like that increase odds of biases in my opinion.

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

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#104

Post by SpaceManNabs »

p-christ wrote: post #90
necessary wrote: post #69

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 辞書, 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…

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 th…

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).

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#105

Post by swantonb »

p-christ wrote: post #98
fairity wrote: post #96

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?

i wish school taught me how to learn instead of me having to wait until i was 25 and doing a free coursera course

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

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#106

Post by thrown_22 »

p-christ wrote: post #102
thrown_22 wrote: post #67

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 g…

why does that make it the worst possible example?

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#107

Post by carapace »

p-christ wrote: post #2

I wrote this and would love to know what you think about it. Am particularly interested in hearing any reasons why it's wrong

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#108

Post by swantonb »

tianshuo wrote: post #60

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 t…

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#109

Post by Hendrikto »

fairity wrote: post #96

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?

> 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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#110

Post by CitizenKane »

stakkur wrote: post #80

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 m…

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

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