5 ms·

This guy seems to be searching for that magic pillow that you put the book under and sleep upon and later wake up with all the information & learning you were a

This guy seems to be searching for that magic pillow that you put the book under and sleep upon and later wake up with all the information & learning you were after downloaded and integrated into your person. He says the key to getting there is better understanding our cognitive learning models. But ask anyone who has mastered 'learning' (plenty such people exist) and they won't confess to you any magic pill. Each time you want to learn something substantial or new, you've got to roll up your sleeves and do the crazy hard work to take new ideas and information and bring them into your present map of the world in a way that results in a new coherent map of the world. For any self-reflecting person, this is an internal transformation process. It's not a "medium problem"; no new medium is going to make that internal process any easier. And books and pen & paper & lectures etc are all dynamic tools that are each optimal at various times during a learning process. And I would venture to say that you simply cannot do better than a book at building up and presenting a coherent thesis that can be used by someone in their learning process to move from one position of perception and understanding to another. That learning (re-constructing your internal models) is hard seems (to me) prima facie a necessary thing. A magic pillow to get from A to B in a snap is just magical/fetish thinking. Whenever I've gone from an 'A' to a 'B'... to really be able to master it, to wield it, to truly _know_ it... when I look back with self-reflection I do not see 'B' as this static plane ... the whole process to get there is the 'B'. So focusing on the medium is such a silly thing here, imo.

andymatuschak 7y ago
(Author here) You might be amused to learn that I actually have looked into prospects for technologies around learning in one's sleep. Unfortunately, things don't look great. But you might enjoy this paper, on learning smell–sound associations during sleep: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3193 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3193 To your central point: you're right that effortful engagement is a hugely important ingredient for learning, so we shouldn't aspire to simply remove effort. But do you think that there's nothing that can be done in an explanatory artifact to support the knowledge construction process you're describing? To make it any easier, at all? Just as an intuition pump, imagine comparing 1. Euclid's Elements, with no figures; 2. Euclid's Elements with figures. Does the latter addition ease knowledge construction? If so, why wouldn't we expect it to be possible to take more steps of the same kind?
- wellpast 7y ago
  Thanks for your reply. The Euclid’s Elements example seems possibly a good anchor for discussion. However I think the difficulty/effortfulness/dynamism of the learning process should signal that the communication/teaching side of the process is only going to be more effortful/dynamic/etc. In other words whether or not to present Euclid with diagrams and how and when to present them seems to be such a context-sensitive concerns that any generalized approach is going to miss the mark. As a learner/reader or teacher/writer I don’t think you can do better than to be equipped with some tools (words, drawing devices, audio, gestures, cinema) and then dynamically utilize these to reach your listener/“student”. But any thesis that doesn’t respect that this as an extremely dynamic & context-sensitive process is going to fail I think.
  - wellpast 7y ago
    I think there’s a parallel to art. And effective teaching being like art. You can’t formalize the artists process — or dictate a medium preference — without taking away the artist’s effectiveness.
  - andymatuschak 7y ago
    Yep, I think we're aligned on all this! One lens on my aspirations is to create a "stable" of "moves" like "including figures" which can be applied contextually to better align with the way readers think and learn.
swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
This is incredibly insightful. I have two friends who primarily youtube, but their subject interests are cars. Believe it or not, youtube contains an extreme wealth of car related knowledge from top gear all the way down to how-to's on maintenance/uprades of very specific models of vehicles. They're extremely knowledgeable about their crafts in ways that other mediums wouldn't be able to convey. Now I'm sure reading would help advance their understanding, but in the same way that a purely book read mechanic might also benefit from a deep dive into the massive knowledge base that a platform that is able to host long-tail content like youtube can convey.
- trickstra 7y ago
  I also learn a lot of things from youtube videos. However, with this source one needs to be extra careful about the veracity of the information in it. Even if videos were the most effective way of learning it wouldn't be very helpful if we got caught in flat-earth videos or similar.
kpennell 7y ago
I think he was just getting at how odd/interesting/dissapointing it is that we don't retain more of all the stuff we read (and might even be really interested in). I remember being enthralled while reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus...but then trying to tell others about it and realizing how little I knew... "the americas were much more populated/advanced than people think it was" "the world lost more cultures in the 17th century than all other centuries" etc. little factoids but could not really explain much else or why the book was so COOL

andymatuschak 7y ago

(Author here) You might be amused to learn that I actually have looked into prospects for technologies around learning in one's sleep. Unfortunately, things don't look great. But you might enjoy this paper, on learning smell–sound associations during sleep: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3193 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3193 To your central point: you're right that effortful engagement is a hugely important ingredient for learning, so we shouldn't aspire to simply remove effort. But do you think that there's nothing that can be done in an explanatory artifact to support the knowledge construction process you're describing? To make it any easier, at all? Just as an intuition pump, imagine comparing 1. Euclid's Elements, with no figures; 2. Euclid's Elements with figures. Does the latter addition ease knowledge construction? If so, why wouldn't we expect it to be possible to take more steps of the same kind?

wellpast 7y ago
Thanks for your reply. The Euclid’s Elements example seems possibly a good anchor for discussion. However I think the difficulty/effortfulness/dynamism of the learning process should signal that the communication/teaching side of the process is only going to be more effortful/dynamic/etc. In other words whether or not to present Euclid with diagrams and how and when to present them seems to be such a context-sensitive concerns that any generalized approach is going to miss the mark. As a learner/reader or teacher/writer I don’t think you can do better than to be equipped with some tools (words, drawing devices, audio, gestures, cinema) and then dynamically utilize these to reach your listener/“student”. But any thesis that doesn’t respect that this as an extremely dynamic & context-sensitive process is going to fail I think.
- wellpast 7y ago
  I think there’s a parallel to art. And effective teaching being like art. You can’t formalize the artists process — or dictate a medium preference — without taking away the artist’s effectiveness.
- andymatuschak 7y ago
  Yep, I think we're aligned on all this! One lens on my aspirations is to create a "stable" of "moves" like "including figures" which can be applied contextually to better align with the way readers think and learn.

swagasaurus-rex 7y ago

This is incredibly insightful. I have two friends who primarily youtube, but their subject interests are cars. Believe it or not, youtube contains an extreme wealth of car related knowledge from top gear all the way down to how-to's on maintenance/uprades of very specific models of vehicles. They're extremely knowledgeable about their crafts in ways that other mediums wouldn't be able to convey. Now I'm sure reading would help advance their understanding, but in the same way that a purely book read mechanic might also benefit from a deep dive into the massive knowledge base that a platform that is able to host long-tail content like youtube can convey.

trickstra 7y ago
I also learn a lot of things from youtube videos. However, with this source one needs to be extra careful about the veracity of the information in it. Even if videos were the most effective way of learning it wouldn't be very helpful if we got caught in flat-earth videos or similar.

kpennell 7y ago

I think he was just getting at how odd/interesting/dissapointing it is that we don't retain more of all the stuff we read (and might even be really interested in). I remember being enthralled while reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus...but then trying to tell others about it and realizing how little I knew... "the americas were much more populated/advanced than people think it was" "the world lost more cultures in the 17th century than all other centuries" etc. little factoids but could not really explain much else or why the book was so COOL