37 ms·

We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make

496 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

mercora 6y ago
When trying to teach somebody how to do X i always avoid telling what exactly to do. instead i try to hint at my reasoning without giving the conclusion. otherwise i would probably just teach them to ask me what to do.
trey-jones 6y ago
The headline seems like the most obvious thing in the world to me. I'm glad it's proved by science, but I have never been able to find my way home without Google, if Google told me how to get here, or if my friend in the passenger seat did the navigating. As a parent, if I only do things for my kids instead of watching them do it themselves, then I will always be the one doing.
- stanmancan 6y ago
  Totally. Just recently I started showing my kid how to get somewhere they goes often. I lead the way the first 5 times and the 6th made them lead. They had no clue where to go, so instead I made them guess and if they were wrong I would correct them. 7th day they took me on their own without any assistance. I only did this because of what you said; anytime I rely on Google Maps to get me somewhere, I never really know where to go until I find my own way there. I think it’s similar to how teaching something makes you understand it better.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    You can get the same effect much less painfully by having your kid go there themselves, without you. When I was learning to drive, my dad was remarkably disturbed that, despite never having had to go anywhere myself, I didn't know how to go anywhere. So he made me try to find my way home while he sat in the passenger seat watching. In a totally predictable development, I ran a red light under stress and got a ticket, months before even getting a driver's license.
- reificator 6y ago
  > I have never been able to find my way home without Google, if Google told me how to get here, or if my friend in the passenger seat did the navigating. Are you able to say "I came from the west, I'm going to go west until I find a road I'm familiar with, and then follow that to an area I'm familiar with, and then get home from there"? I can understand not being able to find a place you've been before if you weren't navigating the first time, but to find it difficult to get back home seems very alien to me. But then I don't use a GPS very often.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    What if you go west and the road bends north and you don't see a familiar road? At some point you may go too far west and then going west makes your situation worse.
    - reificator 6y ago
      No I'm not saying to blindly go where no man has gone before. Just... just give it a try. I think you'll surprise yourself. Besides, having a GPS in your pocket at all times makes it safer to get lost than it was in the Rand McNally days.
      - trey-jones 6y ago
        For your original question, I guess it's a little bit hyperbolic to say that I can't find my way home. I like to think that my sense of direction is fine. It would be more accurate to say that I can't find my way to an unfamiliar place a second time, if I didn't manage my own navigation the first time.
        reificator 6y ago
        Yeah, that I totally get. I just wasn't sure if you were being literal about the other part, which would seem really weird to me.
      - pessimizer 6y ago
- Loughla 6y ago
  > if I only do things for my kids instead of watching them do it themselves, then I will always be the one doing. Honestly, if I had a dollar for every time a student (this is a college) who was unable to function in a classroom or public space, because their parents either bulldozed every obstacle, or (and this happens more than you'd think) did their actual homework for them starting at an early age, I'd have like $200. I know it doesn't sound like a lot. But, there are a number of parents who prescribe to the parenting tradition of - the child should never meet an obstacle, for fear of their self-esteem. This includes homework, negative feedback, or any extra-curricular the child is not immediately amazing at. By the time these kids get to me, they are literally unable to function as adults in a public space.
  - ekanes 6y ago
    > the child should never meet an obstacle, for fear of their self-esteem Right, and this does exactly the opposite! Self-esteem is built ONLY by meeting obstacles and overcoming them.
carlmr 6y ago
>The experiments also included “forced choice” trials in which the computer told participants which option to select. Here, though the subjects still pressed keys to make the instructed choices So was the choice forced? Or could they click another choice themselves? It's not quite clear from this wording. In the former case, there's no incentive to learn anything, since you can't change the outcome.
vlovich123 6y ago
> To help individuals with delusions, the current findings suggest, it may be more effective to examine their sense of control and choices than to try to convince them with contradictory evidence—which, over and over, has not been shown to work. Oh god. If that's true, you can't possibly do this at scale like you'd need for coronavirus things or global warming. I'm sure we all have delusions about something at some level. That's why trust in public institutions is critical and those institutions need to be above reproach in their conduct. That doesn't mean no bad conduct but an evidence-based belief that bad conduct is identified and punished. That could explain why American society has been crumbling. It's taken a beating on the trust aspect by abuses from those in power for a long time. More importantly there haven't really been meaningful reforms to address that abuse which has eroded the trust that was built up for so long. The "small government" movement has taken a long time but it's finally winning in America because it identified trust as the weak point & systematically kept attacking it & used media to amplify the fight. A countermovement did not form in time so here we are with so many decades of damage. I'm not sure if it's possible to rebuild that at this point.
- logicslave12 6y ago
  Small government is winning because big government is filled with crooks
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    So now the crooks are out of government swindling you through the market in a way you don't even see? Or are you saying people's propensity for taking advantage & criminality only happens in the context of government? Or are you saying that government crooks are more efficient at swindling larger amounts than the private market offers?
    - User23 6y ago
      Trillions are at stake over who controls the federal government, or even pieces of it. There's a reason why nobody spends $100 million a year to lobby Google but they do the government. The biggest crooks go where the biggest opportunity is, that's all.
crusso 6y ago
This effect is obvious for anyone who navigated before and after the age of personal GPS. When you engage in the decision-making process, you learn. When you rely on something to make choices for you, you don't learn.
- warent 6y ago
  This is very relevant to my personal experience. I've always had a very, very poor sense of direction. Even if I I've been down a road countless times, if I approach it from a different direction I can easily become lost and turned around, so I've just relied on my gps to get me anywhere. This is something I always figured must be due to something with how my brain is structured. Just a reality of how I've developed. Then one day I travelled to cuba on a whim. Spent a week there with no phone service. Within just a few days, I had most of Havana memorized and could easily navigate it without a map, even intuit where I was by the position of the sun. It's like I unlocked a new super power I never had. Then it hit me... the reason my sense of direction has always been so poor is because I offload that part of my brain onto machines.
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    This particular GPS example is slightly flawed. If you MRI cab drivers their brains are slightly different. Evolutionarily it makes sense why direction would be particularly important. My dad drove a cab in grad school to pay the bills, and even now his sense of direction (which should be relatively close since we share genetics) is relatively absurd; stuff like “I drove past this place 7 years ago I remembered it was a left turn here”. So we might be slightly off track with the GPS example.
    - godelski 6y ago
      Do we have MRIs of cab drivers before they became a driver? We need to decouple if that's a learned skill or not. Certainly there is some spectrum in native ability but it would make sense for the vast majority of people to have the basic ability but that they never hone the skill. There are people that are never about to write, but for practical purposes we expect everyone to be able to do it (after being taught). I think a lot of people attribute to "natural ability" what is often learned because many times it isn't obvious how those skills were learned. It's obvious everyone went to school to learn to read and write, it's not obvious a child learned navigation because their favorite game growing up was hide and seek.
ppeetteerr 6y ago
Hated school until I decided to go back. When that happened, I started getting straight As
- LordFast 6y ago
  People have to understand the "why" behind the education before they can be fully engaged with the material that others have constructed in the aid of learning. I believe education should be a life-long thing. Citizens should be allowed, and even encouraged to seek out educational programs when they feel like they need it, instead of society telling everyone when and where they must complete which programs before they are "certified". To take it one step further, I believe this type of forced certification process only helps create the ever-expanding footprint of idiocy we see in our world today.
  - ppeetteerr 6y ago
    Poverty can be a very strong incentive
    - LordFast 6y ago
      Totally agreed. What I said does not stand in conflict with poverty-motivated education. I believe everyone should get as much education as possible whenever they want.
wefarrell 6y ago
This is something I learned in my on and off side career as a sailing instructor. I used to start off as a navigator and walk people through a course, telling them exactly where to tack for an ideal path. Then I started setting buoys and letting them figure it out for themselves. Buoys start out perpendicular to the wind, which is not terribly challenging. When students do well enough and gained enough confidence I set them in line with the wind, which is incredibly difficult for someone new. I give them hints pointers, but I never make the decisions for them. Without fail, everyone screws up the upwind and downwind buoys on the first lap but they eventually make it around. Gradually they screw up less and less and start to get it.
- teachrdan 6y ago
  The secret to teaching well isn't to tell students what they should know, but to create an environment where students can't help but to learn what they should know. This is a perfect example.
moultano 6y ago
Given the replication crisis, these are the kind of results that I reflexively don't believe anymore. Has anyone read any of the studies? What are n and p for these results? What's the effect size?
- xondono 6y ago
  Same here. Statistically we have the odds in our favor. This study also has a lot of the particulars that went wrong with most studies, like having a lot of conditionals. Generally this means that this is an aggregation of several smaller studies. I will check the small print on this one before going with the “obvious” crowd.
7373737373 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
andrewljohnson 6y ago
Knowing this makes parenting a hell of a lot more fun.
jagged-chisel 6y ago
Here's how I want to learn something new: Give me a pre-made path to completion, allow me to experience the destination. Be available to answer questions about changes I might want to make; be knowledgeable enough to answer honestly about how my new choices might cause me problems later, and be willing to allow me to experience those problems first hand. How many times have I attempted to do something with web frontend that starts as a pre-made path, but then when I deviate slightly and break something, no one understands the breakage. I got off The One Path and now it's my problem. Very simple things like "I chose $TOOL to solve $PROBLEM because $TECHNICAL_REASON_OR_PERSONAL_PREFERENCE" would go a long way.
- shaded-enmity 6y ago
  How much are you willing to pay for those answers? What you're describing sounds similar to interactive courses and 1:1 couching.
- michael_j_ward 6y ago
  I've thought that wiki-style tutorials where you can branch and ask questions at specific decision points solve this. Lot's of effort goes into one-off tutorials. This is great but those go stale and are scattered throughout the internet. A wiki-style site to aggregate those that allows the community to maintain them and enrich them with Q&A and alternative implementations would be amazing.
HPsquared 6y ago
The brain might have a specific mechanism for remembering decisions, and what decisions were made.
ncfausti 6y ago
I'm wondering if this is the reason why when given assignments in class , if there are some directions on how to solve the problem (or some starter code), I usually have a harder time coming up with the solution. It feels like I'm severely constrained into thinking through what the person who came up with the instructions/code was trying to do and work within those boundaries, as opposed to freely thinking about how I would solve it.
- mettamage 6y ago
  I always had this with math, we always needed to do algebra, whereas I was much more interested in trial and error solutions. I mean I get it now, but at the same time, I think leaving 25 to 50% of all assignments to clever guesswork would've motivated me more, while still learning algebra.
chrismeller 6y ago
This is actually something that has really, really annoyed me on the job lately. A company I worked for had what I will call a “monkeys at typewriters” attitude. That, given requirements and (a ton of) restraints, their idiot monkeys could produce the code equivalent of Shakespeare. Perhaps not surprisingly, they never accomplished anything, despite having dozens of developers making a lot of money, and are now out of business. Now we could argue all day about markets and business moves, but I will practically guarantee you that the real reason is this attitude towards employees (and not just in IT - CSRs had to schedule their bathroom breaks, which I see as the non-tech equivalent). When you provide that many restrictions on people they rise to exactly that lowest common denominator and never, ever, any further. If by chance they learn a new skill, they immediately leave for a better job that at least let’s them wield that new skill. On the other hand, if you give employees something to try and accomplish, along with the freedom to ask questions, make mistakes, and ask for a review from a senior... yes, they F up from time to time, but they also grow and learn. In the end you have a better employee who is more able to handle any situation thrown at them, rather than simply being able to take Tab A and insert it into Slot B. This is equivalent to university professors getting the tenure track to me. Aside from the whole “never get fired” part, tenure is supposedly about giving them freedom to move, explore, learn, and yes, eventually teach others what they have learned.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gabereiser 6y ago
  Oh I wish I had more points for this...
- yboris 6y ago
  My favorite concept on this topic is CAR (Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness) from Self-determination theory [0] Giving people these at their job provides great satisfaction and better performance: - Competence: using your abilities at a task, experiencing mastery - Autonomy: having the ability to make decisions about the task - Relatedness: understanding how the task relates to something bigger that helps others [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory
fallingfrog 6y ago
“Choice tips the balance of learning: for the same action and outcome, the brain learns differently and more quickly from free choices than forced ones.” This makes sense; you have to think through why you are making the choice you are making if it’s a free choice- if it’s a forced choice, you don’t. You could, but why expend the effort if you don’t have to?
b0rsuk 6y ago
Wouldn't teaching by socratic method - asking them questions - be a great solution to this concern? It's almost the opposite of telling people what to do. I say almost because the questions typically try to point in a specific direction.
luckydata 6y ago
This article was really difficult to read.
elpakal 6y ago
This is truly fascinating. I'm raising two kids right now and I'm constantly battling myself over how much to let them learn on their own or just do cause Dad says. Obviously some things they can't learn on their own (don't jump off the building just trust me), but in terms of following their own dreams or interests this is fascinating to think about.
mcguire 6y ago
"For example, when freely choosing between the two options, people learned more quickly from the symbols associated with greater reward than those associated with punishment, which removed points. Though that finding resembled a positivity bias, this interpretation was ruled out by trials that demonstrated participants could also learn from negative outcomes." So, a positivity bias implies that one cannot learn from negative outcomes? "But there was more to it. The experiments also included “forced choice” trials in which the computer told participants which option to select. Here, though the subjects still pressed keys to make the instructed choices, confirmation bias disappeared, with both positive and negative outcomes weighted equally during learning." Yes, confirmation bias disappears when it's not your decision that is being confirmed.
ZacharyPitts 6y ago
Every experienced old person ever trying to tell their teenagers about mistakes that could be made. It is quite difficult to get it through to the teenager. Experience at life comes through living, and making the same mistakes others have made.
- tolbish 6y ago
  Sometimes people actually do learn from others. Not everyone needs to be told "Refrain from X" to be able to make the connection that X is a poor life choice. We should be focusing on what factors set people apart in this way, rather than making blanket statements. That way we can learn from those who know how to learn.
greggeter 6y ago
Funny -- we're governed better for the same reason.
heimatau 6y ago
I actually disagree with this headline. It depends on the type of work. For example, learning 2+2=4, would be difficult to figure out on your own. Learning how to install plumbing into a building....umm...no. For certain fundamental concepts, this is not the way to learn. It might be the way to internalize ideas but not have the correct framework for a given task. As one becomes a highly skilled worker, creativity becomes paramount and it's through experimentation that one, whom has mastery, can decide what solution works best or not. This can't be taught in an explicit education but through a level of competence. Maybe the article qualifies this but...I suspect not in a clear way (click bait and...laziness).
- chaostheory 6y ago
  I agree and I feel it's due to the Paradox of Choice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
  - heimatau 6y ago
    Interesting connection. What are your thoughts on connecting these two together?
    - chaostheory 6y ago
      I thought you arrived at the same conclusion? With a very narrow and specific subject to focus your studying, it probably is easier left to your own devices to study. However if you’re studying a broader subject with many different paths as visible choices; you’ll most likely end up paralyzed and unable to progress until you start removing those choices one by one... slowing you down. This is how I feel when trying to learn React vs Rails
- arolihas 6y ago
  It seems like you haven’t read the article at all. I recommend you do so, it goes in a different direction than you may have surmised from the headline
tombert 6y ago
I'm not a psychologist, and this is anecdata so take what I say with a huge grain of salt, but I kind of feel like my life is sort of a testament to this. I'm just old enough to where my high school didn't have any kind of computer-science course, but I learned programming on my own as a kid because I thought it was fun. At that time, it always was a quick way to get most adults to think you're some kind genius :). I dropped out of college after ~2 years, in no small part because I've never liked being told what I need to learn, but because I had already taught myself programming, I was able to find work. I've tried to keep this mentality up throughout my all my life. It drives my wife crazy, but I'm constantly buying compsci or math books to try and learn a bit more and get just a little better at the theory of compsci, and hopefully becoming a better engineer in the process. I have no idea if I'm better than the "average" programmer, whatever that means, but I have managed to get good enough to where people ask me compsci theory questions at work, which is somewhat validating.
morla23 6y ago
kinda reminds me the policy gradidnt methods
SeriousM 6y ago
Offensive Security (OSCP Certification) formed the phrase "Try harder!" which is essentially "try smarter", "try differently" and "try again". They give you an environment where you can learn to hack (among other things) but don't force you a special direction. It gives the student all chances to fail and to grow. This is also the reason their courses are so valuable.
- kdbg 6y ago
  Unfortunately OSCP/PWK is their only course that has that open lab environment to learn through failure. In the other courses the lab is just a server or two running the vulnerable programs covered by the walk through in the course material.
grawprog 6y ago
I always find my biggest learning breakthroughs are when i'm left alone to do something. Whether it's the first time i've been left alone on a job or back when i was in school the first time working through something the first time after a lecture. The 'big learning moment' always came after i was to take something taught to me and work through a related problem by myself.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
This seems obvious to me - to learn something, you need to practice recalling it not storing it. You have to practice deciding which button to press to get the reward, not remembering which button to press to get the reward. More generally reading and re-reading material isn't as effective as trying to remember the material using flashcards. It's the same technique used in language systems like DuoLingo.
raymond_goo 6y ago
slightly offtopic: I am looking for a term that describes problem based learning. So for example in a tutorial you get presented with a problem and then the tutorial shows you how to solve it. I can't find the article that talked about this on the internet anymore. "problem based learning" also doesn't yield the thing I am looking for. Anyone knows what I am looking for ?

496 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

When trying to teach somebody how to do X i always avoid telling what exactly to do. instead i try to hint at my reasoning without giving the conclusion. otherwise i would probably just teach them to ask me what to do.

trey-jones 6y ago

The headline seems like the most obvious thing in the world to me. I'm glad it's proved by science, but I have never been able to find my way home without Google, if Google told me how to get here, or if my friend in the passenger seat did the navigating. As a parent, if I only do things for my kids instead of watching them do it themselves, then I will always be the one doing.

stanmancan 6y ago
Totally. Just recently I started showing my kid how to get somewhere they goes often. I lead the way the first 5 times and the 6th made them lead. They had no clue where to go, so instead I made them guess and if they were wrong I would correct them. 7th day they took me on their own without any assistance. I only did this because of what you said; anytime I rely on Google Maps to get me somewhere, I never really know where to go until I find my own way there. I think it’s similar to how teaching something makes you understand it better.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  You can get the same effect much less painfully by having your kid go there themselves, without you. When I was learning to drive, my dad was remarkably disturbed that, despite never having had to go anywhere myself, I didn't know how to go anywhere. So he made me try to find my way home while he sat in the passenger seat watching. In a totally predictable development, I ran a red light under stress and got a ticket, months before even getting a driver's license.
reificator 6y ago
> I have never been able to find my way home without Google, if Google told me how to get here, or if my friend in the passenger seat did the navigating. Are you able to say "I came from the west, I'm going to go west until I find a road I'm familiar with, and then follow that to an area I'm familiar with, and then get home from there"? I can understand not being able to find a place you've been before if you weren't navigating the first time, but to find it difficult to get back home seems very alien to me. But then I don't use a GPS very often.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  What if you go west and the road bends north and you don't see a familiar road? At some point you may go too far west and then going west makes your situation worse.
  - reificator 6y ago
    No I'm not saying to blindly go where no man has gone before. Just... just give it a try. I think you'll surprise yourself. Besides, having a GPS in your pocket at all times makes it safer to get lost than it was in the Rand McNally days.
    - trey-jones 6y ago
      For your original question, I guess it's a little bit hyperbolic to say that I can't find my way home. I like to think that my sense of direction is fine. It would be more accurate to say that I can't find my way to an unfamiliar place a second time, if I didn't manage my own navigation the first time.
      - reificator 6y ago
        Yeah, that I totally get. I just wasn't sure if you were being literal about the other part, which would seem really weird to me.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
Loughla 6y ago
> if I only do things for my kids instead of watching them do it themselves, then I will always be the one doing. Honestly, if I had a dollar for every time a student (this is a college) who was unable to function in a classroom or public space, because their parents either bulldozed every obstacle, or (and this happens more than you'd think) did their actual homework for them starting at an early age, I'd have like $200. I know it doesn't sound like a lot. But, there are a number of parents who prescribe to the parenting tradition of - the child should never meet an obstacle, for fear of their self-esteem. This includes homework, negative feedback, or any extra-curricular the child is not immediately amazing at. By the time these kids get to me, they are literally unable to function as adults in a public space.
- ekanes 6y ago
  > the child should never meet an obstacle, for fear of their self-esteem Right, and this does exactly the opposite! Self-esteem is built ONLY by meeting obstacles and overcoming them.

carlmr 6y ago

>The experiments also included “forced choice” trials in which the computer told participants which option to select. Here, though the subjects still pressed keys to make the instructed choices So was the choice forced? Or could they click another choice themselves? It's not quite clear from this wording. In the former case, there's no incentive to learn anything, since you can't change the outcome.

vlovich123 6y ago

> To help individuals with delusions, the current findings suggest, it may be more effective to examine their sense of control and choices than to try to convince them with contradictory evidence—which, over and over, has not been shown to work. Oh god. If that's true, you can't possibly do this at scale like you'd need for coronavirus things or global warming. I'm sure we all have delusions about something at some level. That's why trust in public institutions is critical and those institutions need to be above reproach in their conduct. That doesn't mean no bad conduct but an evidence-based belief that bad conduct is identified and punished. That could explain why American society has been crumbling. It's taken a beating on the trust aspect by abuses from those in power for a long time. More importantly there haven't really been meaningful reforms to address that abuse which has eroded the trust that was built up for so long. The "small government" movement has taken a long time but it's finally winning in America because it identified trust as the weak point & systematically kept attacking it & used media to amplify the fight. A countermovement did not form in time so here we are with so many decades of damage. I'm not sure if it's possible to rebuild that at this point.

logicslave12 6y ago
Small government is winning because big government is filled with crooks
- vlovich123 6y ago
  So now the crooks are out of government swindling you through the market in a way you don't even see? Or are you saying people's propensity for taking advantage & criminality only happens in the context of government? Or are you saying that government crooks are more efficient at swindling larger amounts than the private market offers?
  - User23 6y ago
    Trillions are at stake over who controls the federal government, or even pieces of it. There's a reason why nobody spends $100 million a year to lobby Google but they do the government. The biggest crooks go where the biggest opportunity is, that's all.

crusso 6y ago

This effect is obvious for anyone who navigated before and after the age of personal GPS. When you engage in the decision-making process, you learn. When you rely on something to make choices for you, you don't learn.

warent 6y ago
This is very relevant to my personal experience. I've always had a very, very poor sense of direction. Even if I I've been down a road countless times, if I approach it from a different direction I can easily become lost and turned around, so I've just relied on my gps to get me anywhere. This is something I always figured must be due to something with how my brain is structured. Just a reality of how I've developed. Then one day I travelled to cuba on a whim. Spent a week there with no phone service. Within just a few days, I had most of Havana memorized and could easily navigate it without a map, even intuit where I was by the position of the sun. It's like I unlocked a new super power I never had. Then it hit me... the reason my sense of direction has always been so poor is because I offload that part of my brain onto machines.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  This particular GPS example is slightly flawed. If you MRI cab drivers their brains are slightly different. Evolutionarily it makes sense why direction would be particularly important. My dad drove a cab in grad school to pay the bills, and even now his sense of direction (which should be relatively close since we share genetics) is relatively absurd; stuff like “I drove past this place 7 years ago I remembered it was a left turn here”. So we might be slightly off track with the GPS example.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Do we have MRIs of cab drivers before they became a driver? We need to decouple if that's a learned skill or not. Certainly there is some spectrum in native ability but it would make sense for the vast majority of people to have the basic ability but that they never hone the skill. There are people that are never about to write, but for practical purposes we expect everyone to be able to do it (after being taught). I think a lot of people attribute to "natural ability" what is often learned because many times it isn't obvious how those skills were learned. It's obvious everyone went to school to learn to read and write, it's not obvious a child learned navigation because their favorite game growing up was hide and seek.

ppeetteerr 6y ago

Hated school until I decided to go back. When that happened, I started getting straight As

LordFast 6y ago
People have to understand the "why" behind the education before they can be fully engaged with the material that others have constructed in the aid of learning. I believe education should be a life-long thing. Citizens should be allowed, and even encouraged to seek out educational programs when they feel like they need it, instead of society telling everyone when and where they must complete which programs before they are "certified". To take it one step further, I believe this type of forced certification process only helps create the ever-expanding footprint of idiocy we see in our world today.
- ppeetteerr 6y ago
  Poverty can be a very strong incentive
  - LordFast 6y ago
    Totally agreed. What I said does not stand in conflict with poverty-motivated education. I believe everyone should get as much education as possible whenever they want.

wefarrell 6y ago

This is something I learned in my on and off side career as a sailing instructor. I used to start off as a navigator and walk people through a course, telling them exactly where to tack for an ideal path. Then I started setting buoys and letting them figure it out for themselves. Buoys start out perpendicular to the wind, which is not terribly challenging. When students do well enough and gained enough confidence I set them in line with the wind, which is incredibly difficult for someone new. I give them hints pointers, but I never make the decisions for them. Without fail, everyone screws up the upwind and downwind buoys on the first lap but they eventually make it around. Gradually they screw up less and less and start to get it.

teachrdan 6y ago
The secret to teaching well isn't to tell students what they should know, but to create an environment where students can't help but to learn what they should know. This is a perfect example.

moultano 6y ago

Given the replication crisis, these are the kind of results that I reflexively don't believe anymore. Has anyone read any of the studies? What are n and p for these results? What's the effect size?

xondono 6y ago
Same here. Statistically we have the odds in our favor. This study also has a lot of the particulars that went wrong with most studies, like having a lot of conditionals. Generally this means that this is an aggregation of several smaller studies. I will check the small print on this one before going with the “obvious” crowd.

7373737373 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

andrewljohnson 6y ago

Knowing this makes parenting a hell of a lot more fun.

jagged-chisel 6y ago

Here's how I want to learn something new: Give me a pre-made path to completion, allow me to experience the destination. Be available to answer questions about changes I might want to make; be knowledgeable enough to answer honestly about how my new choices might cause me problems later, and be willing to allow me to experience those problems first hand. How many times have I attempted to do something with web frontend that starts as a pre-made path, but then when I deviate slightly and break something, no one understands the breakage. I got off The One Path and now it's my problem. Very simple things like "I chose $TOOL to solve $PROBLEM because $TECHNICAL_REASON_OR_PERSONAL_PREFERENCE" would go a long way.

shaded-enmity 6y ago
How much are you willing to pay for those answers? What you're describing sounds similar to interactive courses and 1:1 couching.
michael_j_ward 6y ago
I've thought that wiki-style tutorials where you can branch and ask questions at specific decision points solve this. Lot's of effort goes into one-off tutorials. This is great but those go stale and are scattered throughout the internet. A wiki-style site to aggregate those that allows the community to maintain them and enrich them with Q&A and alternative implementations would be amazing.

HPsquared 6y ago

The brain might have a specific mechanism for remembering decisions, and what decisions were made.

ncfausti 6y ago

I'm wondering if this is the reason why when given assignments in class , if there are some directions on how to solve the problem (or some starter code), I usually have a harder time coming up with the solution. It feels like I'm severely constrained into thinking through what the person who came up with the instructions/code was trying to do and work within those boundaries, as opposed to freely thinking about how I would solve it.

mettamage 6y ago
I always had this with math, we always needed to do algebra, whereas I was much more interested in trial and error solutions. I mean I get it now, but at the same time, I think leaving 25 to 50% of all assignments to clever guesswork would've motivated me more, while still learning algebra.

chrismeller 6y ago

This is actually something that has really, really annoyed me on the job lately. A company I worked for had what I will call a “monkeys at typewriters” attitude. That, given requirements and (a ton of) restraints, their idiot monkeys could produce the code equivalent of Shakespeare. Perhaps not surprisingly, they never accomplished anything, despite having dozens of developers making a lot of money, and are now out of business. Now we could argue all day about markets and business moves, but I will practically guarantee you that the real reason is this attitude towards employees (and not just in IT - CSRs had to schedule their bathroom breaks, which I see as the non-tech equivalent). When you provide that many restrictions on people they rise to exactly that lowest common denominator and never, ever, any further. If by chance they learn a new skill, they immediately leave for a better job that at least let’s them wield that new skill. On the other hand, if you give employees something to try and accomplish, along with the freedom to ask questions, make mistakes, and ask for a review from a senior... yes, they F up from time to time, but they also grow and learn. In the end you have a better employee who is more able to handle any situation thrown at them, rather than simply being able to take Tab A and insert it into Slot B. This is equivalent to university professors getting the tenure track to me. Aside from the whole “never get fired” part, tenure is supposedly about giving them freedom to move, explore, learn, and yes, eventually teach others what they have learned.

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gabereiser 6y ago
Oh I wish I had more points for this...
yboris 6y ago
My favorite concept on this topic is CAR (Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness) from Self-determination theory [0] Giving people these at their job provides great satisfaction and better performance: - Competence: using your abilities at a task, experiencing mastery - Autonomy: having the ability to make decisions about the task - Relatedness: understanding how the task relates to something bigger that helps others [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory

fallingfrog 6y ago

“Choice tips the balance of learning: for the same action and outcome, the brain learns differently and more quickly from free choices than forced ones.” This makes sense; you have to think through why you are making the choice you are making if it’s a free choice- if it’s a forced choice, you don’t. You could, but why expend the effort if you don’t have to?

b0rsuk 6y ago

Wouldn't teaching by socratic method - asking them questions - be a great solution to this concern? It's almost the opposite of telling people what to do. I say almost because the questions typically try to point in a specific direction.

luckydata 6y ago

This article was really difficult to read.

elpakal 6y ago

This is truly fascinating. I'm raising two kids right now and I'm constantly battling myself over how much to let them learn on their own or just do cause Dad says. Obviously some things they can't learn on their own (don't jump off the building just trust me), but in terms of following their own dreams or interests this is fascinating to think about.

mcguire 6y ago

"For example, when freely choosing between the two options, people learned more quickly from the symbols associated with greater reward than those associated with punishment, which removed points. Though that finding resembled a positivity bias, this interpretation was ruled out by trials that demonstrated participants could also learn from negative outcomes." So, a positivity bias implies that one cannot learn from negative outcomes? "But there was more to it. The experiments also included “forced choice” trials in which the computer told participants which option to select. Here, though the subjects still pressed keys to make the instructed choices, confirmation bias disappeared, with both positive and negative outcomes weighted equally during learning." Yes, confirmation bias disappears when it's not your decision that is being confirmed.

ZacharyPitts 6y ago

Every experienced old person ever trying to tell their teenagers about mistakes that could be made. It is quite difficult to get it through to the teenager. Experience at life comes through living, and making the same mistakes others have made.

tolbish 6y ago
Sometimes people actually do learn from others. Not everyone needs to be told "Refrain from X" to be able to make the connection that X is a poor life choice. We should be focusing on what factors set people apart in this way, rather than making blanket statements. That way we can learn from those who know how to learn.

greggeter 6y ago

Funny -- we're governed better for the same reason.

heimatau 6y ago

I actually disagree with this headline. It depends on the type of work. For example, learning 2+2=4, would be difficult to figure out on your own. Learning how to install plumbing into a building....umm...no. For certain fundamental concepts, this is not the way to learn. It might be the way to internalize ideas but not have the correct framework for a given task. As one becomes a highly skilled worker, creativity becomes paramount and it's through experimentation that one, whom has mastery, can decide what solution works best or not. This can't be taught in an explicit education but through a level of competence. Maybe the article qualifies this but...I suspect not in a clear way (click bait and...laziness).

chaostheory 6y ago
I agree and I feel it's due to the Paradox of Choice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
- heimatau 6y ago
  Interesting connection. What are your thoughts on connecting these two together?
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    I thought you arrived at the same conclusion? With a very narrow and specific subject to focus your studying, it probably is easier left to your own devices to study. However if you’re studying a broader subject with many different paths as visible choices; you’ll most likely end up paralyzed and unable to progress until you start removing those choices one by one... slowing you down. This is how I feel when trying to learn React vs Rails
arolihas 6y ago
It seems like you haven’t read the article at all. I recommend you do so, it goes in a different direction than you may have surmised from the headline

tombert 6y ago

I'm not a psychologist, and this is anecdata so take what I say with a huge grain of salt, but I kind of feel like my life is sort of a testament to this. I'm just old enough to where my high school didn't have any kind of computer-science course, but I learned programming on my own as a kid because I thought it was fun. At that time, it always was a quick way to get most adults to think you're some kind genius :). I dropped out of college after ~2 years, in no small part because I've never liked being told what I need to learn, but because I had already taught myself programming, I was able to find work. I've tried to keep this mentality up throughout my all my life. It drives my wife crazy, but I'm constantly buying compsci or math books to try and learn a bit more and get just a little better at the theory of compsci, and hopefully becoming a better engineer in the process. I have no idea if I'm better than the "average" programmer, whatever that means, but I have managed to get good enough to where people ask me compsci theory questions at work, which is somewhat validating.

morla23 6y ago

kinda reminds me the policy gradidnt methods

SeriousM 6y ago

Offensive Security (OSCP Certification) formed the phrase "Try harder!" which is essentially "try smarter", "try differently" and "try again". They give you an environment where you can learn to hack (among other things) but don't force you a special direction. It gives the student all chances to fail and to grow. This is also the reason their courses are so valuable.

kdbg 6y ago
Unfortunately OSCP/PWK is their only course that has that open lab environment to learn through failure. In the other courses the lab is just a server or two running the vulnerable programs covered by the walk through in the course material.

grawprog 6y ago

I always find my biggest learning breakthroughs are when i'm left alone to do something. Whether it's the first time i've been left alone on a job or back when i was in school the first time working through something the first time after a lecture. The 'big learning moment' always came after i was to take something taught to me and work through a related problem by myself.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

This seems obvious to me - to learn something, you need to practice recalling it not storing it. You have to practice deciding which button to press to get the reward, not remembering which button to press to get the reward. More generally reading and re-reading material isn't as effective as trying to remember the material using flashcards. It's the same technique used in language systems like DuoLingo.

raymond_goo 6y ago

slightly offtopic: I am looking for a term that describes problem based learning. So for example in a tutorial you get presented with a problem and then the tutorial shows you how to solve it. I can't find the article that talked about this on the internet anymore. "problem based learning" also doesn't yield the thing I am looking for. Anyone knows what I am looking for ?