10 ms·

There was a really good chapter on his time in a biology lab in his book, "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". I have always remembered this quote: When it came

There was a really good chapter on his time in a biology lab in his book, "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". I have always remembered this quote: When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!" "Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

ItsMe000001 8y ago
I've been taking medical and biology related courses for the last five years or so, well over 1000 hours in lecture hours thus far - thanks to the Internet (a counterpoint to the "I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore" thread popular on HN right now). I concluded that while I find it all extremely interesting and exciting as far as anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, organic and biochemistry, genetics, statistics (which I had learned - and forgotten - before but now I actually found useful and therefore interesting for the first time), etc., I could never study medicine to become a doctor. All that rote learning! For a CS graduate, it's like learning everything there is about Oracle 9i. For years. By heart. Not even about databases in general, you learn the basics of course, but then you spend most of your time learning by heart every command and every setting of Oracle 9i. I'm sure it makes you an efficient doctor within the given system, and when trying to solve some example cases there sure is value in knowing pathways (real ones, e.g. neurological ones - where is the damage if the patient feels this and does not feel any of that?, as well as biochemical ones, but also organizational stuff like various ways invented to categorize broken bones, e.g. http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf). Quite frankly, I find most of it a waste of time. Right now I'm re-taking edX "Principles of Biochemistry" (https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry-harvardx-mcb63x-1 https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry-harvardx-...), and while it's a lot of fun I also feel it's quite a bit of a waste: From part III on it feels more and more useless. The course is done very well, and every bit is interesting, but how - WHY - am I supposed to learn soooo many paths in such great detail? What's the point? If I need it I can always look it up! No wonder that while there are several "Hello I'm new here, excited to start this course" messages in the forum every day there are only a handful of forum messages for the later sections of the course - after many months of running. I suspect >90% of people never get past part 3 (of 5). Because the brain just does not see the point of all this rote learning. If there was a larger project as context, a problem to solve! But just "here learn this" for no other reason than "it's interesting" (so are a trillion other pieces of information!!)... it does not work very well. Learning needs both a PUSH and a PULL. The teaching is mostly about push(ing knowledge into brains), but where is the pull (reasons other than abstract "you need to know")? Brain have their own ways of detecting actual need, and that comes from having to solve actual problems, not from being told "this is important". And learning millions of facts when you don't need them but know you can always learn them/look them up quickly at any time when you do actually need them is soooo demotivating.
- chatmasta 8y ago
  Yeah, totally with you on that. I knew lots of pre-Med majors in college and I could never wrap my head around how someone could enjoy such a masochistic form of learning. But the common thread of successful pre-Med majors is that they get straight A’s and are very successful memorizing everything. Medicine is basically all rote memorization, from pre-Med to the MCAT. It makes sense to select for doctors who are good at it, because they need to have a quickly queryable, but wide breadth of knowledge in their head at all times. Personally I’m happy to know that my doctor is able to memorize and collate so much information. But I do worry that the way he learns may also restrict his creativity and problem solving. Perhaps as AI moves into medicine, doctors won’t need to rely so much on their own memorization, and can focus their efforts on problem solving.
  - sykh 8y ago
    I think you underestimate the role of problem solving skill in medicine. It’s not all rote memorization. A good doctor is good at problem solving and has to have lots of information ready for instant recall.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I think medicine, being both a very old, and having a very complex subject, is guilty of a lack of abstraction. I tend to joke that if a doctor discovered a keyboard he would name it a negra quadrodepressus-hectomatrix. Accurate.. and semantically useless. That's how you name things when you have no clue about it's function. And medicine likes its superbly tough anatomical projection/cut of internals. Honestly I find it's a miracle how doctors can look at organs in every angle and still find their way (same for radiologists). Coming from CS with a taste for multistage compilation and the likes, I find no beauty in anatomy.. I need a little more principles and less description.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  EDIT/FOLLOW-UP (my edit right just disappeared a minute ago): Here is a link to example patient cases, which may help to see what kind of knowledge is useful. I was not trying to say it is all useless, when I had to solve sample cases e.g. in Medical Neuroscience (Coursera, huge course, great teacher) it sure helps to know the major pathways, and it would take too much time to have to look them up when the patient is in front of you. http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/collection/results.asp?subject_headings=physiology http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/collection/results.as...
sykh 8y ago
Feynman was wrong on his view. The same thing could have been said of him and physicists. Oh, you spent your time memorizing formulas when it could be looked up in 15 minutes. This is a nonsensical point of view for two reasons. People in areas of their expertise tend to know a lot in that area off the top of their head because they have encountered this stuff so much that it has become memorized. That memorized knowledge comes from experience not a memorization exercise. It’s also nonsensical because if you didn’t have a core set of knowledge memorized in your area of expertise and instead relied on spending 15 minutes looking up each fact necessary to understand a given situation you’d end up wasting your whole day just trying to understand the meaning of the problem.
- sametmax 8y ago
  It's true for formulas, but not for muscle names. You need to know what muscles do and their context, but names are just useful for communication, not analysis.
  - moccachino 8y ago
    Also true of street names, you just need to know physically where your town's various businesses are and where your people live. But still you kind of have to know most of the street names off the top of your head to function properly. Besides, I think most muscle names are literally just derived from their position on the body and their movement range, so their name and their function are closely linked.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      > But still you kind of have to know most of the street names off the top of your head to function properly. I know 10 street names in my city. The rest, I look up. Well, I used to, now I use the GPS. Note that I do think you are more efficient if you know the street names and where they are. But I also do think the time and energy requires to learn 100 street names and position in my city can be better used for something else.
skate22 8y ago
I forget the exact context, but I remember my elementry school math teacher telling us "you wont have a calculator with you at all times" when memorizing the times tables. While she may have been dead wrong on that one, i'm definitely glad I don't have to rely on looking up / deriving the basics for every domain.
epistasis 8y ago
I thought that was entertaining before I learned biology, but after knowing more it's far less entertaining. They didn't know a map of the cat, they knew a map of mammals. Evolution is really cool that way. Also perhaps it was easy to catch up because it wasn't that much knowledge.

ItsMe000001 8y ago

I've been taking medical and biology related courses for the last five years or so, well over 1000 hours in lecture hours thus far - thanks to the Internet (a counterpoint to the "I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore" thread popular on HN right now). I concluded that while I find it all extremely interesting and exciting as far as anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, organic and biochemistry, genetics, statistics (which I had learned - and forgotten - before but now I actually found useful and therefore interesting for the first time), etc., I could never study medicine to become a doctor. All that rote learning! For a CS graduate, it's like learning everything there is about Oracle 9i. For years. By heart. Not even about databases in general, you learn the basics of course, but then you spend most of your time learning by heart every command and every setting of Oracle 9i. I'm sure it makes you an efficient doctor within the given system, and when trying to solve some example cases there sure is value in knowing pathways (real ones, e.g. neurological ones - where is the damage if the patient feels this and does not feel any of that?, as well as biochemical ones, but also organizational stuff like various ways invented to categorize broken bones, e.g. http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf). Quite frankly, I find most of it a waste of time. Right now I'm re-taking edX "Principles of Biochemistry" (https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry-harvardx-mcb63x-1 https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry-harvardx-...), and while it's a lot of fun I also feel it's quite a bit of a waste: From part III on it feels more and more useless. The course is done very well, and every bit is interesting, but how - WHY - am I supposed to learn soooo many paths in such great detail? What's the point? If I need it I can always look it up! No wonder that while there are several "Hello I'm new here, excited to start this course" messages in the forum every day there are only a handful of forum messages for the later sections of the course - after many months of running. I suspect >90% of people never get past part 3 (of 5). Because the brain just does not see the point of all this rote learning. If there was a larger project as context, a problem to solve! But just "here learn this" for no other reason than "it's interesting" (so are a trillion other pieces of information!!)... it does not work very well. Learning needs both a PUSH and a PULL. The teaching is mostly about push(ing knowledge into brains), but where is the pull (reasons other than abstract "you need to know")? Brain have their own ways of detecting actual need, and that comes from having to solve actual problems, not from being told "this is important". And learning millions of facts when you don't need them but know you can always learn them/look them up quickly at any time when you do actually need them is soooo demotivating.

chatmasta 8y ago
Yeah, totally with you on that. I knew lots of pre-Med majors in college and I could never wrap my head around how someone could enjoy such a masochistic form of learning. But the common thread of successful pre-Med majors is that they get straight A’s and are very successful memorizing everything. Medicine is basically all rote memorization, from pre-Med to the MCAT. It makes sense to select for doctors who are good at it, because they need to have a quickly queryable, but wide breadth of knowledge in their head at all times. Personally I’m happy to know that my doctor is able to memorize and collate so much information. But I do worry that the way he learns may also restrict his creativity and problem solving. Perhaps as AI moves into medicine, doctors won’t need to rely so much on their own memorization, and can focus their efforts on problem solving.
- sykh 8y ago
  I think you underestimate the role of problem solving skill in medicine. It’s not all rote memorization. A good doctor is good at problem solving and has to have lots of information ready for instant recall.
agumonkey 8y ago
I think medicine, being both a very old, and having a very complex subject, is guilty of a lack of abstraction. I tend to joke that if a doctor discovered a keyboard he would name it a negra quadrodepressus-hectomatrix. Accurate.. and semantically useless. That's how you name things when you have no clue about it's function. And medicine likes its superbly tough anatomical projection/cut of internals. Honestly I find it's a miracle how doctors can look at organs in every angle and still find their way (same for radiologists). Coming from CS with a taste for multistage compilation and the likes, I find no beauty in anatomy.. I need a little more principles and less description.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ItsMe000001 8y ago
EDIT/FOLLOW-UP (my edit right just disappeared a minute ago): Here is a link to example patient cases, which may help to see what kind of knowledge is useful. I was not trying to say it is all useless, when I had to solve sample cases e.g. in Medical Neuroscience (Coursera, huge course, great teacher) it sure helps to know the major pathways, and it would take too much time to have to look them up when the patient is in front of you. http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/collection/results.asp?subject_headings=physiology http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/collection/results.as...

sykh 8y ago

Feynman was wrong on his view. The same thing could have been said of him and physicists. Oh, you spent your time memorizing formulas when it could be looked up in 15 minutes. This is a nonsensical point of view for two reasons. People in areas of their expertise tend to know a lot in that area off the top of their head because they have encountered this stuff so much that it has become memorized. That memorized knowledge comes from experience not a memorization exercise. It’s also nonsensical because if you didn’t have a core set of knowledge memorized in your area of expertise and instead relied on spending 15 minutes looking up each fact necessary to understand a given situation you’d end up wasting your whole day just trying to understand the meaning of the problem.

sametmax 8y ago
It's true for formulas, but not for muscle names. You need to know what muscles do and their context, but names are just useful for communication, not analysis.
- moccachino 8y ago
  Also true of street names, you just need to know physically where your town's various businesses are and where your people live. But still you kind of have to know most of the street names off the top of your head to function properly. Besides, I think most muscle names are literally just derived from their position on the body and their movement range, so their name and their function are closely linked.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    > But still you kind of have to know most of the street names off the top of your head to function properly. I know 10 street names in my city. The rest, I look up. Well, I used to, now I use the GPS. Note that I do think you are more efficient if you know the street names and where they are. But I also do think the time and energy requires to learn 100 street names and position in my city can be better used for something else.

skate22 8y ago

I forget the exact context, but I remember my elementry school math teacher telling us "you wont have a calculator with you at all times" when memorizing the times tables. While she may have been dead wrong on that one, i'm definitely glad I don't have to rely on looking up / deriving the basics for every domain.

epistasis 8y ago

I thought that was entertaining before I learned biology, but after knowing more it's far less entertaining. They didn't know a map of the cat, they knew a map of mammals. Evolution is really cool that way. Also perhaps it was easy to catch up because it wasn't that much knowledge.