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Learning Is Remembering

saveall.ai

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Re: Learning Is Remembering

#151

Post by blackbrokkoli »

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…

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...

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#152

Post by Bakary »

kurthr wrote: post #113
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…

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 l…

Stroke order sounds like a burden to Westerners but it actually helps with memorizing characters, and makes your handwriting less awful.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#153

Post by jimmaswell »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #139
jimmaswell wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#154

Post by cocacola1 »

p-christ wrote: post #120
thenerdhead wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mode…

> 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

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#155

Post by petra »

cloogshicer wrote: post #116

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 - th…

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#157

Post by zackmorris »

colechristensen wrote: post #115
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…

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.

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#158

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

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".

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#159

Post by O__________O »

p-christ wrote: post #149
O__________O wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#160

Post by hintymad »

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.
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