Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

From the surprisingly good Aviation Instructor's Handbook [0]:

Learning Is an Active Process Learners do not soak up knowledge like a sponge absorbs water. The instructor cannot assume that learners remember something just because they were in the classroom, shop, or aircraft when the instructor presented the material. Neither can the instructor assume the learners can apply what they know because they can quote the correct answer verbatim. For effective knowledge transfer, learners need to react and respond, perhaps outwardly, perhaps only inwardly, emotionally, or intellectually.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...

> I'm looking for ways to "hack" my brain and get back into the habit of learning in my free time and wanting to figure things out

Please share anything you've found. For me:

- discovering Obsidian a year ago was a great boon. It led me to comb through millions of words of old person notes, remembering many different me's interest in different topics etc. When approaching a new topic, I now compulsively take detailed notes and then reform them into "evergreen notes" (google this term) although it's not the same effortless joy of my childhood.

- recently refinding old sites like wiki.c2.com has rekindled a great passion. The style of discussions, without marketing, status seeking, linking to blogs, medium articles etc. is also extremely pleasant and lets the content float up much better. Even modern communities which don't suffer from these problems still seem to have jaded userbases, who are just... Tired and not willing to really revel in their knowledge, but protectedly proactively avoid things.

- really calming myself down before engaging, e.g. closing my eyes for 10 mins in quiet, or just doodling on a paper, maybe stacking some 9 volt batteries into a tower and calmly approaching the topic, reading or such. In this way, reading can almost be like a reverse stream of consciousness. However life quickly knocks, taking me out of this (flow?) state. I recall some researchers discussing how children effortlessly play (so the opposite of the original topic about effortful learning...) experimenting, collecting data etc. to learn and develop their worldviews, but if you impose requirements or expectations on them, they learn slower and don't blossom.

> The core idea is trying my best to not kid myself: when my engagement with a piece of content is active and effortful then it’s learning, when it’s passive it’s entertainment. When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax.

This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but I disagree the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.)

I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with the risk for distraction, which is a real mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions.

The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with.

The possibility that the author may be missing a working understanding of this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34710830

Worked in eye-tracking research for a bit.

Things you learn;

- Small text is hard to read

- Making things hard to read means they get missed sometimes

- Making it the only thing on the screen makes people try to read it really hard

- Which makes them more likely to remember it later

I work in UI/UX design and this f*cked with my brain for a while. It's counter to everything we're being taught.

Human brains are fun.

Well, regarding this, I can’t speak to the theory behind it. But as a general rule, specifically when it comes to programming, I’ve always advocated that when presented with an example, someone should type the code in and not copy paste it. That the act of typing gives you time to briefly consider each element of the text and their relationships to each other, rather than as an opaque blob pasted all at once.

Sure, folks could just read the code, but inevitably people scan rather than read in detail. We all do that, and the cryptic nature of programming languages can just exacerbate it.

Typing naturally slows people down. It also provides a natural opportunity to make simple changes if they so desire.