Fractal Learning
reisub0.github.io
Fractal Learning
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Re: Fractal Learning
#2This is nicely put. It reminds me a bit of David Perkins's [0] "whole ballgame" approach (i.e. the best way to learn how to play baseball is to play a few games or approximations thereof, e.g. tee-ball; you'll struggle mightily at first, but you'll ultimately benefit by having a sense of how the game as a whole works, and it provides valuable context and motivation for subsequently working on specific skills like throwing the ball, swinging the bat, etc. And the ultimate result is greater mastery than if you had started from the skills and worked your way up to playing the game piecewise.) Fast.ai's pedagogy is based in part on this principle, and (as someone inclined to go down rabbit holes) it's been a huge help to me as I go through the course and book. [1]
I'd add too, recently released personal knowledge base apps (Obsidian, Roam, et al) are very well suited to fractal learning. I partition my notes into content (summaries) and concepts (with some Zettelkasten-style ephemeral notes mixed in). When I come across new concepts, I create a stub; then I fill it in when necessary with the necessary degree of detail, adding new details, revising, and forcing myself to make my account of it coherent as I encounter different facets of the concept in different books, articles, etc.
[0]: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/resources/making-learning-whole-ho...
Re: Fractal Learning
#3This isn't really a learning technique.
It's an analogy on learning. Every other day there's some blog post on HN about some analogy on some self improvement topic like learning, project management or complexity or whatever...
I'll tell you what learning isn't. Learning isn't coming up with new analogies for concepts you already completely understand over and over again.
I and pretty much everyone on this planet already knows what learning is, and unless you have a new learning technique, what is the point of comparing learning to a fractal? There's nothing new here.
I'm not trying to reprimand what this person wrote this but when you see some flavor of this on HN all the time it gets old.
Re: Fractal Learning
#4This doesn't sound very practical advice to me. It seems to be saying: Do a bit of breadth-first mixed with some depth-first. But whatever you do don't do only depth-first.
But maybe that is an important point. Don't dig too much into details try to get the overall picture so you can decide what you should focus on most.
Re: Fractal Learning
#5The starkest example to me of breadth first vs depth first learning are math geniuses. They typically ignore everything except mathematics to begin with and then hyper focus on a specific area of mathematics intensely. The most striking I know of is Peter Schulze who basically never attended an undergraduate class in mathematics and picked up Linear Algebra while he worked out the requirements to understand the Langlands Conjecture. He got awarded his bachelor by doing a 6 hour exam when he entered University.
Re: Fractal Learning
#6The starkest example to me of breadth first vs depth first learning are math geniuses. They typically ignore everything except mathematics to begin with and then hyper focus on a specific area of mathematics intensely. The most striking I know of is Peter Schulze who basically never attended an undergraduate class in mathematics and picked up Linear Algebra while he worked out the requirements to understand the Langl…
> He got awarded his bachelor by doing a 6 hour exam when he entered University.
I wanted to read more about that (I like such stories) but I couldn't find that story online. On Wikipedia it says that bachelor took him 3 semesters. Does anyone have the source?
Re: Fractal Learning
#7The starkest example to me of breadth first vs depth first learning are math geniuses. They typically ignore everything except mathematics to begin with and then hyper focus on a specific area of mathematics intensely. The most striking I know of is Peter Schulze who basically never attended an undergraduate class in mathematics and picked up Linear Algebra while he worked out the requirements to understand the Langl…
> He got awarded his bachelor by doing a 6 hour exam when he entered University. I wanted to read more about that (I like such stories) but I couldn't find that story online. On Wikipedia it says that bachelor took him 3 semesters. Does anyone have the source?
I might misremember it slightly, I got told this by a professor (he was one of his examiners) and people that knew him at Bonn in ~2010. He could also have been awarded the majority of the credit points towards the Bachelor at entrance.
Re: Fractal Learning
#8There's a quantum aspect to learning, if your learn speckles of everything, your 'energy' level doesn't go up. If you go breadth first, you have to cross some pragmatic, practical, real newness barriers, keep that in mind.
Re: Fractal Learning
#9This doesn't sound very practical advice to me. It seems to be saying: Do a bit of breadth-first mixed with some depth-first. But whatever you do don't do only depth-first. But maybe that is an important point. Don't dig too much into details try to get the overall picture so you can decide what you should focus on most.
That sounds pretty reasonable to me. You don't want to dive straight into depth-first because then you disappear down a rabbit hole with no context to tell you whether it's the right rabbit hole.
Start out with breadth-first until you have a feel for the lay of the land, then pick a direction to journey in.
Re: Fractal Learning
#10The starkest example to me of breadth first vs depth first learning are math geniuses. They typically ignore everything except mathematics to begin with and then hyper focus on a specific area of mathematics intensely. The most striking I know of is Peter Schulze who basically never attended an undergraduate class in mathematics and picked up Linear Algebra while he worked out the requirements to understand the Langl…
It should be "Scholze" of course.