Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learning Is Remembering

saveall.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 241 posts

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#201

Post by michaelcampbell »

corderop wrote: post #143
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…

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 usuall…

clozemaster.com is a website that does exactly this (your second point).

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#202

Post by rhodin »

have_faith wrote: post #172
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…

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 d…

Counter-anecdote time from Murray Gel-Mann, who did think names were important [1]

[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/05/remembering-murr...

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#203

Post by puchatek »

jimmaswell wrote: post #137
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…

> 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.

Great. If i ever feel like my impostor syndrome could use a bump I'll be sure to throw Copilot into the mix.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#204

Post by gmadsen »

_yb2s wrote: post #197
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…

> 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 d…

back when whiteboards were a thing, most were not testing exact syntax..

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#205

Post by emarsden »

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#206

Post by bradjohnson »

_yb2s wrote: post #197
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…

> 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 d…

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#207

Post by puchatek »

weekendvampire wrote: post #93
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…

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.

I think it flows pretty well, fwiw. Strikes a better balance between readability and ambiguity.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#208

Post by rmah »

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…

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#209

Post by p-christ »

emarsden wrote: post #205

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 (…

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.

Re: Learning Is Remembering

#210

Post by a1369209993 »

swantonb wrote: post #108
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.

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.)

Post reply on HN