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Learning Is Remembering

• p-christ 4y ago
  I wrote this and would love to know what you think about it. Am particularly interested in hearing any reasons why it's wrong
  • going_ham 4y ago
    Thank you for writing it. I have been feeling something similar. The ability to truly understand requires the ability to know few terms and what they mean. I thought it was only me who felt it like so. Most of my friends who venture on creative tasks are able to recall a lot of things because of practice and without having to be distracted! But does it effect the field like programming? When programming, if I can remember the context, then I can easily search it (research paper, books, documentation, forums etc) Now, with Co-Pilot, isn't it effectively beneficial to understand a topic and develop a general problem solving framework for ourselves so that we can let the AI do it's thing? What are your opinions regarding it?
    • p-christ 4y ago
      Even with programming I would argue you'd be a much better programmer if you can remember more. Obviously sometimes you're going to have to look things up but the more you remember the more problems you'll be able to solve. Specifically you won't be able to solve a programming problem if the answer requires you combining over 4 things you don't have in your long-term memory (even if you can look them up). This is the main reason why Jeff Dean is a better programmer than me even though we both have access to google - he has more knowledge & experience of programming in his memory than me that means that even though we can both look things up he is able to solve way more problems than me. Co-pilot slightly changes the type of thing that's valuable to remember, but it doesn't change the importance of remembering things. I think, as you implied, co-pilot probably makes remembering some types of syntax or boilerplate less important.
      • going_ham 4y ago
        Ohh, that's a cool opinion!!! Thank you ^_^
  • vladsanchez 4y ago
    Slash-Dotted!? Site doesn't load. (shrug)
    • p-christ 4y ago
      how you mean? this link doesn't load for you? https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
      • vladsanchez 4y ago
        Just loaded, after 20 attempts. ;)
        • p-christ 4y ago
          hmmm very interesting, not sure why that could be happening! I can see loads of people are reading it now but i would have thought our server (arranged on vercel) could handle it
  • kardianos 4y ago
    Learning is memory, in a sense. More broadly learning the the physical structure that process leaves on your brain. When you truly learn, you do less remembering and more simulating. The process of simulating actions (multi-step addition algorithms in elementary school or wrote memorization of math-facts) is the process that changes the structure of your mind that isn't dependent on "memorization".
    • p-christ 4y ago
      that's really interesting, can you explain this bit a bit more? Or let me know what to google to learn more about this? "The process of simulating actions is the process that changes the structure of your mind"
      • kardianos 4y ago
        I would point you to two different motivating examples: * Childhood development. A child who has had early childhood adverse experiences mind is effected. A fMRI or chemical detection can see physical differences in the brain. But the brain is plastic (it can change) over time. Works on this subject have been published by Dr. Dan Siegel https://drdansiegel.com/books https://drdansiegel.com/books among others. The key insight here is that academic learning is not significantly different at a core aspect then behavioral learning. * Physical sports/martial arts depend on a reaction time much smaller then what is afforded by going through the full frontal cortex. "muscle-memory" isn't real (it isn't "memory" as you think of it). What you have in these cases are "short-circuits" (this implies structural changes) that are able to act before you are consciously aware of what is going on. The same applies to math facts and other fundamentals, you move things away from memory that needs to be retrieved and into reaction. Reading C-syntax for programmers or signing your name is something that has been turned into structure that doesn't need "memory". I think your initial premise is correct. We have limited memory. How do we overcome that? We write. Writing is important because with it we can overcome our natural memory limitations. You cannot think about complexities (well or clearly) if you cannot write. The danger of writing is that you can produce something that is both irrational and nearly impenetrable to the casual reader. For example: > Foucault's use of the concept is descriptive, that is, analytical and explanatory, and at the same time normative and critical: he describes the grip biopolitics have on individuals through technologies of power in a way that makes manifest the repression at work in these biopolitical processes. The above, taken directly from an "academic" published journal, could be said to have meaning. Unfortunately, each one of these words has an alternate meaning that is not normative to English, making the entire (actual) meaning opaque. "contecpt" "analytical", "explanatory", "normative", "critical", "biopolitics", "individuals", "technologies", "power", "manifest", "repression", "processes" are all defined differently then a standard English dictionary. So even if you can get past the convoluted sentence structure, the intended meaning will still elude you. But the answer to memory limitations is clear writing using common definitions of words. I bring this up because as you extend your memory beyond what it innately has, the more likely you are to fool yourself (and others) with sophistry.
  • synergy20 4y ago
    assuming our brain is a CPU, the 4-working-queue-short-memory is basically our L1-cache. We need L2 and hard drive for longer term memory, otherwise the system can not really function well. however long-term storage is just one vital factor, another one is the 'deep learning' neurons that understand the content it stores and more important to connect the dots among various neurons. we need both: understand and store. Neurons do both for us.
    • quarok 4y ago
      yes, we need understanding - the best way to get things into memory is to make connections between neurons through understanding. And this keeps it in memory for longer than if you just memorise it — and it will enable you to deploy the information in new contexts. My takeaway from this article is that if you only focus on understanding (and so do not commit it to memory), you cannot reason using this information in unfamiliar contexts later on, once you've forgotten it. So the best thing to do is to: 1. Make sure you understand something thoroughly 2. Test yourself on it using spaced repetition to ensure you keep it forever For transparency: I'm one of the cofounders of Save All (linked site) alongside Petros the author
  • anothernewdude 4y ago
    There's probably something to be said about batch sizes and stability.
  • sennraf 4y ago
    Creating a tool to help others learn is awesome. I think what the article misses is that there is a ton of knowledge we can't 'write down' and therefore memorization is not enough. For example learning to solve Integrals. Yes, there are some rules and tricks one can memorize which helps but I would argue the only way to get good at solving integrals is to interact, resp. solve them. Another point are second order effects of how one learns, for example curiosity and resilience. There might be a long time negative effect on motivation of a topic, when there is too much focus on 'memorization' (It certainly was that for me in my French class;)). I really enjoyed the 'bad reputation' part and agree that it is sadly viewed as not important enough by many.
    • Qualadore 4y ago
      The spacing effect can also be applied to solving problems, like "distributed practice" as opposed to "massed practice" with calculus homework [0]. Speaking completely personally, forgetting a lot of information is the easiest way to ruin my motivation to learn a topic. [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-022-09677-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-022-09677-2
  • GistNoesis 4y ago
    There are plenty of different way to learn, and the optimal probably depend on the material to learn. For example, in machine learning, there is something called stochastic gradient descent, where to learn you present a single random element at a time from the dataset. In the end it will have learned of all concepts, by becoming more and more confident in each individual concepts. For example to learn QM, you pick a random QM wikipedia article, and try to push through the article, even though there are some things you don't understand. Then you do the same thing, for a different unrelated QM article. For learning tennis, you don't learn specifically forehand, then learning backhand, but you alternate them at random so that you have a single unified way of playing with smooth transitions, instead of having to switch between different "modes" of thinking. Sure more memory can allow some speed-space trade-off in learning ability, but using your memory too much may make you miss some fluency that may have emerged. For example the old-school of machine learning was using databases and K-near neighbors, which used a lot of memory and was slow. But the new-school of machine learning are using constant memory algorithm and compressing the data in it, and it can learn to generate all the pictures in the world with only 4 Gb of weights. Learning is imagining, once you bootstrap your imagination, its bandwidth to synthesize new examples from which you can learn from, is much greater than the bandwidth of looking up new data material to learn from.
  • carapace 4y ago
    It's not bad, but you're limiting yourself "out the gate" so to speak. If you really want to explore memory and learning you must study and practice (self-)hypnosis. Most of what we think we know about how the brain and mind work is wrong. E.g. memory: "our working memory has a maximum capacity of roughly 4" is not an absolute rule. Your brain, right now as you read this, is tracking 100,000's of variables and recording a trace of everything you are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and doing. Almost all of this is done unconsciously, and for good reason. Anyhow, you can learn to have better "interfaces" to your automatic unconscious abilities and leverage them to e.g. remember instantly and durably any mathematical equation, etc. - - - - As an aside, the strategy you sketched out at the start of your article would be workable if you have great recall, however an even more better strategy would be to recapitulate the discoveries of physics in roughly historical order. Your understanding of quantum mechanics would be much deeper and richer, and you would be following a story (an epic story made up of so many fascinating smaller stories, and one that is still going on! Albeit things have calmed down this last century or so, but no one thinks we have reached the climax yet.) That would be the way to do it: start with the Greeks and the Alchemists and proceed to follow the trail(s) of how we as a species sussed out the mysteries of the physical Universe.
  • aappleby 4y ago
    Copy-pasting my top-level comment: I am utterly baffled that no response in this thread so far has taken issue with the statement "As you probably know intuitively, it won't work." For me, this _does_ work and I have proven it many many times over the years by adding entire categories of technical knowledge to my repertoire. And not superficially, either - I get paid very well to do things professionally that I taught myself by reading Wikipedia. If my experience were commonplace, the "it won't work" statement would be highly contentious in the comments here. Since it isn't, I guess I can deduce that I must be an outlier.
• totetsu 4y ago
  I mean .. its true if you limit your definition of learning..
  • p-christ 4y ago
    in what way is the definition limited / what should it be?
    • throwie_wayward 4y ago
      IMO, such a viewpoint about "learning" is limited to learning 'knowledge'; i.e. this sort of 'learning' is limited to repeating (replicating) facts external. I wonder, if learning is remembering, then what is "understanding"?? from my own viewpoint, learning is about something external; for example "what's the word for such and such concept?" ..in english or in spanish? point being that you need a corpus of consensus about what the specific linguistic-culture calls the learned concept. but then, what does it mean to understand? I think the way towards making sense of this (answering it) needs to consider learning of physical (do-able) actions. Because when considering such skills as learned/understood, the distinction between learn/understand seems to vanish. So then maybe understanding has more to do with having learned something to a proficiency level that allows one to teach (show/explain) to another how to do that action? finally, to throw a proverbial wrench into my own attempts to make sense, what does it mean to perceive something complicated, such as the meaning out of arbitrary alphabetic glyphs? how is the meaning out of a text understood? what did we have to learn to be able to do it? is it just a matter of knowing most of the contents of a dictionary??
      • thenerdhead 4y ago
        This is cognitive science in a nutshell. Most early philosophers argued exactly what "wisdom" means both externally and internally. Look to the Socratic philosophers for simplified explanations.
    • mohamez 4y ago
      I think learning mathematics for example is not about just "remembering".
• turpialito 4y ago
  Is the author Petros Christodoulou, the computer scientist cited here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mWdm_bkAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mWdm_bkAAAAJ&hl=en ?
  • p-christ 4y ago
    yes that's me, how comes?
    • Frummy 4y ago
      He's moving it from working memory to long term memory :D
      • p-christ 4y ago
        lol oh dear, sounds ominous
• mhb 4y ago
  It may also be interesting to consider this in the context of learning physical skills. When you're learning something new, there are a lot of things that you are doing wrong. A not-so-good coach will see them and start telling you things that you need to change. But you can't remember all these things. A good coach will find one key thing which you can keep in mind to work on. The Inner Game of Tennis frames this as a difference between the two selves. Maybe that could be considered through the lens of decreasing the number of things you need to remember in order to improve.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    yes! i think that's completely right, it takes so much energy & working memory to adapt to feedback that it's really easy to over-instruct people and give them too much feedback to handle.
  • barumrho 4y ago
    I’m glad you brought up this point. I think there are analogues to “muscle memory” when it comes to learning concepts, too. For example, I don’t remember all the techniques to compute integrals explicitly, but I know that I’ll be able to pick it up quickly, because of my “muscle memory”. I feel like this falls into “remembering”, but not “memorizing” when it comes to definitions.
  • mohamez 4y ago
    > Maybe that could be considered through the lens of decreasing the number of things you need to remember in order to improve. This! learning materials who master this way of information giving based on their importance is key to effective learning, and I think a lot of them don't give importance to it.
  • cratermoon 4y ago
    The best coaches I have worked with have cues they use instead of, or with, the explanations. Things like "pinch your shoulder blades" and "push the floor away". These give the practitioner an understanding of how it should feel, physically, without the need to go into details about which muscles and joints are involved.
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  It's not wrong, it just doesn't cover much breadth of learning nor how humans learn over time. Also it doesn't consider different learning styles. It's seeing learning as just chunks of conceptual information where that is reducing the problem too far. It's not just some simple "move from short term memory -> long term memory" to make more room. If it was, we would all optimize for that outcome. People would have written books about learning that glorified this concept. Teachers would be teaching it in schools to have students score better on tests. Learning is much more a lifelong mindset akin to the famous Socrates quote of "I know that I know nothing". Or even the idea that we change through the books we read / things we learn, but don't remember much of what we did. So I don't agree it is all about remembering because like GI Joe said, knowing is half the battle.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    Learning styles are basically a myth actually. It's been shown we all learn in roughly the same way. Check out some of the research mentioned here https://www.techlearning.com/news/busting-the-myth-of-learning-styles https://www.techlearning.com/news/busting-the-myth-of-learni... > People would have written books about learning that glorified this concept. There are lots of books on it actually. Make It Stick is my favourite book on this, you should try it!
    • thenerdhead 4y ago
      > Learning styles are basically a myth actually. You have a preference of how you learn, no? It's not a myth if there's perennial truth to it. > There are lots of books on it actually. Make It Stick is my favourite book on this, you should try it! I've read many titles including this one. Not everything is going to be "learned" with spaced repetition, interweaving, retrieval, and varied practice. These are great modern methods to learn effectively for the short-term, but are not by any means concepts you're going continue practicing past your formal education. (i.e. Anki flashcards for everything you want to learn)
      • p-christ 4y ago
        > You have a preference of how you learn, no? It's not a myth if there's perennial truth to it. I might have an emotional preference but there's no good evidence that different people learn better in very different ways
• Bakary 4y ago
  The good news is that memory techniques have never been as accessible as they are now. I am fully in agreement with the conclusions drawn in the article, but the bad news is that even with those techniques it can be a slog. Any Anki user will tell you that maintaining dedication and avoiding burn-out is your Achilles' heel, not the limits of your human ability. Understanding something for the first time (in the Feynman technique sense of being able to explain it well), and doing that multiple times per day, takes up a lot of mental energy even if you are smart and naturally talented. In conjunction with using memory techniques, we need to add dietary practices where we become much more selective with the information we take in. Places like HN give the illusion of learning (and to a great extent help broaden your mind about certain topics), but the actually utility of all that random knowledge butts up against the opportunity cost. There are already many more worthwhile pursuits than can be fit into your lifespan.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    Completely agree on Anki requiring too much effort, its the main reason why i'm making Save All (https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/). Save all is a simpler version of anki that use AI to try and make it less effortful
  • mohamez 4y ago
    All it takes then is just move from a method of remembering to another more efficient and enjoyable one, I can illustrate what I am trying to say using your Anki example by saying that once a language learner for example reaches a certain level in the language after acquiring a sized set of vocabulary, the learner can move to "abundant reading" as a way to memorize words through frequency as a more effective method of learning new vocabulary. So it's all about remembering, but what differs is how someone approaches it depending on their level and understanding of the topic they are trying to learn.
    • Bakary 4y ago
      This is definitely true. The snowball effect and the networking of information helps a lot. I'm trying to look at the problem with a wider lens, however. For example, if learning that language is actually something we want to do in opposition to all the things you could be doing. In the context of public education, since this is the theme the author focuses on, we don't just study certain topics, we study a certain spin on some topics that is determined by a range of government officials. In other words, you have to deal with severely limited energy and interest compared to all that is available in life so cutting chaff is probably even more important than boosting your ability to remember. In fact, selecting what to learn is life, just like a sculptor removes the parts of the marble that aren't in the end result.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• O__________O 4y ago
  Archive of page: https://web.archive.org/web/20220926125538/https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering https://web.archive.org/web/20220926125538/https://saveall.a...
• MoroCode 4y ago
  I agree with most of whats written here. I think there is a major point you're overlooking here. There is simply just too much information we're expected to know nowadays. You could argue that the amount of information we have to cram into our brains in such a short amount of time makes it very difficult to build good long term memories. High School and university curriculum's are forever expanding jamming more and more in the same period of time. Even in professional settings such as being a web developer or data scientist for example where new things are being invented by the second that then become the standard. At some point you'll need to offload long term memories to external sources. So while you may forget the actual content of what you need to know, you could for example remember what to google and the summary of the content you expect. Essentially our long term memories is transformed into pointers for external information banks. We only keep whats absolutely essential to perform our functions.
  • quarok 4y ago
    The problem is that if you don't commit information to long-term memory you can't use it reason effectively in other contexts, and you have to add it back to your short-term memory every time you look it up -- so outsourcing your memory to a knowledge bank is limiting the complexity of the tasks you can handle. So there might be more information you're expected to know in modern jobs -- but if you spend a bit more time consolidating rather than acquiring new information, you can build the foundations on which more advanced skills can rest. For transparency: I work with the OP
    • skadamat 4y ago
      A key point here is that our brains don't work like computer hard drives. Our brains are a lot closer to how, in biology, a single cell stores the entire DNA "data" that's needed to replicate but just using a few base pairs. We likely store information more in some type of loose graph structure, where we recall / "remember" something by re-creating links to that piece of information. There seems to be very very little "storage cost" for the billions of pieces of information we keep in our brains.
  • mistermann 4y ago
• buzzy_hacker 4y ago
  You can remember something without fully understanding it. There is more to learning than just remembering.
  • mohamez 4y ago
    I agree with the core idea of your comment, but I think the author is as far as I understood it think of learning as "fully understanding", so if you didn't fully understand it then you didn't learn it yet.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    If you don't understand it then you don't remember the information that compromises an "understanding" of the thing
    • okamiueru 4y ago
      The words used make the whole thing very confusing. Understanding and remembering are two very different thing in cognitive literature. Understanding is deeper about connections, and remembering is more recollection of facts or knowledge. It is fair to say that you cannot understand something without having some knowledge, but you can certainly know a lot of facts without having the slightest understanding. It also poses wildly different challenges, where the metrics by which one is to judge the "degree of having attained knowledge" in the broader sense of the word, depends entirely on which of those aspects one value. Some literature refers to this dichotomy as "instrumental" or "relational" understanding. You see this very clearly in math, where students can recall the facts of equations, but they don't understand it. It can very well be that the author of this article is aware and appreciates this distinction. But, the phrase and title of "learning is remembering" will certainly evoke suspicion. Just because it is much easier to remember something one understand, does not mean that by remembering, one understands.
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      In math people apply formulas they don't understand to numbers that they don't understand to get answers they don't understand. For some reason we then give them degrees and call them educated if they remember all those things they don't understand in an exam.
• O__________O 4y ago
  Per the author, they’re launching a service called “Save All” — which is simplified version of spaced repetition; might be worth explicitly stating this in the intro or footer of the linked blog post.
  • mohamez 4y ago
    Yeah, the author mentioned it in a reply to a comment mentioning Anki.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    Are you saying we should mention it for our own business benefit? Or that it's bad to not state it in article for some other reason?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • O__________O 4y ago
      Largely because it explicitly narrows the context, but also because launching service like that increase odds of biases in my opinion.
      • p-christ 4y ago
        I didn't mention it in the article because the article is hosted on the same domain (with a link to it at very top of page) so thought it was quite obvious. Also I wanted it to stand alone as an essay to see what people thought. If i linked to the product within the article it would turn the whole article into an advert rather than an essay
        • O__________O 4y ago
          Okay, but you don’t even mention spaced repetition until the end and only in a single sentence. And obviousness is relative; I did not even notice the logo and base domain, read the title and scanned the text for core concepts, spaced repetition again is only mentioned once, even though in my opinion it’s literally both the topic and your solution to the issue; which was not obvious until I read your comments. Think if you were to ask random people who are not aware of the company, what the post is about — then define spaced repetition and the reasoning behind the company’s name, then ask people again what the post is about — answers would be noticeably different; you could even hide the context and ask if concept of “save all” was mentioned on the page and what it means.
• dejj 4y ago
  “[…] the purpose of memory isn’t to remember the past. The purpose of memory is to, at least in part, so that you don’t repeat the same errors that your repeated in the past [..]” – Jordan B. Peterson I like to think that Spaced Repetition learning pre-empts these errors, so we are apt to recall when we productively need that memory. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ6_cV_RtQU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ6_cV_RtQU
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • stuckinhell 4y ago
    Whoa. That quote is kind of amazing. My brother committed suicide, and sometimes memories of the past really haunt me. That quote is actually really comforting.
• criddell 4y ago
  I have a couple of questions... How do you trust your memory when (as I understand it), every time you recall something your brain changes in ways that can affect recall later? Is there a distinction between learning and knowing? For example, in my undergrad days I learned about Simpson's rule for numerical integration. I jammed enough of it into my memory to pass the test and quickly forgot all the details. Now, 30+ years later, I needed to calculate the volume of a pretty complex space. I remembered the existence of Simpson's rule but absolutely nothing else about it. Looking it up on Wikipedia I was able to re-learn it well enough to apply it in my job and move on to the next problem. If, over the past 30 years, I had been using flash cards to remember the details of Simpson's Rule, I would have wasted a lot of time. Re-learning it when needed also means I don't have to rely on my faulty, dynamic memory. For me, it seems like there's a sweet spot to remembering enough to know the concept and then relying on the internet to fill in the details as needed.
  • quarok 4y ago
    Firstly, in terms of the distinction between learning and knowing -- the thing that matters most is the strength of the encoding in the brain. If you just memorise something with 0 understanding, the connections in the brain aren't as strong -- so they disappear. Whereas if you know something thoroughly, the connections are much, much stronger. These strong connections are why when you go back and look at it, you recognise it and you know how to apply it - because you still have some of the residual memories from this strong encoding. But in the meantime, you probably haven't been able to apply it in an analogy for example. Secondly - there's a classic on the topic of Spaced Repetition written by Gwern.[0] Gwern calculated that, given the average amount of time you spend testing yourself on something, and the exponential increase in how long you remember it, if you would spend more than 5 minutes per 10 years looking something up, you should use spaced repetition to remember it. For transparency I work with OP on Save All. 0: https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
    • mistermann 4y ago
      > Firstly, in terms of the distinction between learning and knowing -- the thing that matters most is the strength of the encoding in the brain. I'd vote for the ability to perform a skilful epistemic analysis of the retrieved information being more useful. I prefer this because it can overcome any natural immutable shortcomings in the underlying process.
• saint_fiasco 4y ago
  I experienced this myself when I was a kid. I wanted to do mental arithmetic like my dad but I couldn't do multiplications for large numbers even after my dad explained how he did it. Turns out I had to memorize the time tables first, otherwise I would run out of swap space. If you want to experience this yourself but you already know the time tables, you could try to memorize log tables and then you can do those fancy arithmetic tricks that old school engineers used to do with slide rulers.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    yeah mental arithmetic and running out of swap space is such a relevant / good example of the phenomenon, might add that into the article
• Kalanos 4y ago
  learning is about connecting the dots, not just gathering dots. e.g. based on what i know, what should i learn next?
• stagger87 4y ago
  Related, the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve See plot with spaced repetition halfway down.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    yep that's the one! good old ebbinghaus
• skadamat 4y ago
  Andy Matuschak's thinking / independent research work here is very relevant: - https://andymatuschak.org/ https://andymatuschak.org/ - https://www.patreon.com/posts/71081197 https://www.patreon.com/posts/71081197 - Literally a related quantum computing / physics example (with Michael Nielsen): https://quantum.country/ https://quantum.country/
• tianshuo 4y ago
  Calling learning remembering, is like calling a computer a hard drive. Sorry, but, remembering is just one part, although important part of learning. There is loads of difference between remembering the words of a foreign language and fluently speaking it. The process of learning is complicated, eg. good teaching is not giving the final answers to learner, which should seem faster, but letting the learner arrive at their answers, even sometimes arriving at a wrong answer at first. And the point about reducing forgetting, that's also a terrible way of learning. If you want to minimize forgetting, that means you have to learn in baby steps, repeat everything using some kind of spaced repetition algorithm, and endure the pain of doing all this for a considerate amount of time. Instead, learning the content rapidly (meanwhile forgetting a lot of the content), getting a whole picture, and gradually gain more understanding repeating the process using different textbooks/courses, is a much more faster way of learning. The brain is more used to BFS (breadth-first-search) than DFS (depth-first-search), and the whole process is much more stimulating. This is because new knowledge needs to be encoded with connections to pre-existing knowledge, and most knowledge is intertwined together, for example in calculus, limits, derivatives, integrals, infinite series, etc. Learning limits in isolation of the whole picture, optimizing for less percentage of forgetting, often leaves learners confused, why am I even learning this, and what use is this for. Even though the percentage of forgetting is much higher in the latter holistic BFS process, the overall content mastered in the same month or week duration is higher. So forgetting is actually normal and you shouldn't panic when you forget things- since you will gain more understanding each time you learn and re-learn the content. For the last ten years, I've been making products for learning, and every day now and then, I'm still learning something new about learning.
  • swantonb 4y ago
    There's an old saying in Asian cultures about learning. - You do not truly understand until you "forget" what you've learned. I know, it's weird and opposite of what Feynman Said. But it makes sense.
    • mod 4y ago
      Does this mean you've internalized it? I think that generally is a characteristic of something who's mastered something. It does make sense, but I don't think it's strictly true. You can understand something without making it second nature.
• pfkurtz 4y ago
  Learning is as much forgetting as remembering. When I study something, I go for awhile, but eventually it becomes difficult, confusing, hard to see the forest for the trees. Particularly with technical information and skills like programming (or natural) languages. When I come back a little bit later, I find that I only remember the things that made sense; my confusions are forgotten, and there is fresh mental space and energy to master a bit more of the terrain before I need another break.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    Our subconcious mind often works on our problems while we aren't thinking about them, i that's more what's going on here than forgetting. your brain figured it out for you while you were doing something else
    • pfkurtz 4y ago
      That's sometimes true but I think my point still stands. When I'm studying a foreign language, I learn some words and they stick, but I'm exposed to a bunch more that I don't remember next time. I forget those meanings, but the ones that stuck are now vivid and with me, brighter. When I'm studying Kubernetes, I end up reading a ton of information that's irrelevant to the task at hand, and lots of it doesn't make that much sense because I'm new to it. The next day, when I come back, the things that I actually understood remain, ready to be the foundation for new learning, which they couldn't have been when they were mere data points in an overwhelmed brain. I don't remember the parts I was confused about yesterday, just this stuff that now makes sense.
    • pfkurtz 4y ago
      To unite our points, I might be thinking of something like: the immensity of sensory and cognitive data that pass through (sub)consciousness during the learning task are sifted and sorted in the unconscious while not learning; one might call the sifting "forgetting" and the sorting "figuring out".
  • agumonkey 4y ago
    I'm still staggered how potent a post effort pause can get. I can spend hours and days trying to improve something and not being able to see the easiest spots. I come back 4 days later and everything just jumps out as obvious as day. No confusion, no fatigue, lots of ideas, enthusiasm, creativity..
• abrax3141 4y ago
  Um, there’s like 300(0) years of research on this, and, really, it isn’t anything like this simple. For “recent” science you can start on volume 1 of the jep journal of learning and memory, which is like 50+ years of continuous monthly publication.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    Yeah some simplification is required to condense 300(0) years of research into a digestible article but is any of it misleadingly incorrect?
    • abrax3141 4y ago
      “Some simplification”, even if it is technically correct can be misleadingly incorrect in the sense that it misleads you into thinking that the object of analysis is simple, which is incorrect. Analogous example: A computer is a machine that you stick numbers into, and it does stuff to them, and other numbers come out. But you can only put in a limited number of numbers because it can only do stuff to a handful of them at a time. The rest need to get saved someplace else, called RAM. So machine learning is RAM lookup. Is that misleadingly incorrect in the sense I described?
• thrown_22 4y ago
  This is the worst possible example. Learning basic QM is 90% complex differential equations and 10% physical intuition. There is a reason why you generally don't get to introductory quantum mechanics until second year after (or while) you're doing calculus, differential equations and linear algebra. To quote a lecture I once saw: the deepest point of any state is a mine shaft somewhere. You don't find that shaft by gradient descent.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    why does that make it the worst possible example?
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      Because learning quantum mechanics isn't about learning quantum mechanics, it's about learning a bunch of maths to learn quantum mechanics. It doesn't matter how much of the wiki page you remember, without understanding a few key pieces you're wasting your time.
• necessary 4y ago
  As someone who has been using Anki for the past 4 years to learn Japanese and now Chinese, I've recently found that the initial "learning" step is not that hard. (i.e., given 辞書, I remember "dictionary") What is hard is keeping the content I've learned, _learned_, for more than a day. So now I'm wondering, is my initial "learning" process wrong? Since definitions are fairly simple and I find them easy to remember at first but hard to hold onto. And my process in Anki for New cards is to rep them like reviewed cards until I pass the card; so really, I'm just staring at the kanji + definition until I remember it. This brings me to my question: is there more Anki can do when it comes to learning new cards? Is there something we can do when learning new information that will help make it "sticky"? Especially in regards to "simple" facts, like basic kanji -> definition mappings, where there are no mechanics to understand, just simple mappings. Edit (an addition): Also, I love SRS, but I don't understand how it can be advertised as completely different than rote memorization. When you learn a new physical flashcard, you're learning it the same way as you would be when learning a new Anki card. The only difference is that Anki will show it to you again at a more efficient time in the future, rather than at some regular interval.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • 3pt14159 4y ago
    I learn a lot. The way I've learned best for me is to mimic children. Especially small children. They focus intently at seemingly incomprehensible complexity. Then they play with the small fragments they can get their hold on. "ba-ba-ba-ba" when they're learning to speak. They play. They combine two (or more) different things they're interested in into a single experiment which we think of more as play. Mushy food? I wonder what happens when I throw it on the floor? Oh look how it landed all funny! Look how mum and papa reacted! Grinding through cards learning languages never really did anything for me. Immersion and regular (but not exhaustive!) play stretched over time makes the neurons of my mind much more reliable.
    • biofox 4y ago
      Arguably, the whole point of play is learning.
• falcolas 4y ago
  Some other things to consider. A working memory of 7 is a median number for the population. Some folks will have a greater working memory (some outliers are in the 80+ range). Some folks will have a smaller working memory. Specifically, someone with ADHD (a topic close to my heart), the size of working memory is typically around 3 items. Related, long term memory is also a bit more chaotic for those with ADHD; when you can only have three linked concepts at a time in working memory, it's going to be encoded with fewer overall links data. That all is to say, if you're building a tool to help people remember things, don't just build it with the median in mind.
• stakkur 4y ago
  If storing information and creating associations between bits of it were 'learning', then databases would be very smart indeed. No, learning is not 'storing pieces of information in long-term memory and recalling them'. It's not the ability to recall information. At the very least, learning is information+behavior change+understanding+values and attitudes associated with the information. It's much more complex than memorization and recall.
  • CitizenKane 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing this and I've been certainly thinking along the same lines. To add to this, I've known many folks that can accomplish certain tasks almost automatically and creatively. If you asked them to recall exactly what they did to achieve it they couldn't. And this usually isn't action on concrete information either but on intuition alone. If humans worked primarily on memory we'd have been toast a long time ago. There's too much variation in the natural world to confront it solely on the basis of memory. I'd say we're more experientially oriented as opposed to memory oriented
• User23 4y ago
  This was Socrates’s position too as related in Meno[1]. I don’t see any reference so I wonder if the author rediscovered that position independently. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno
  • p-christ 4y ago
    i had not seen this before, thank you very much for sharing!
• quantum_state 4y ago
  Remembering is required for initial stage of learning. The whole point of learning is to understand things to remove remembering from the scene and be able to pull the knowledge from thin air. Therefore the title of the entry is misleading, very much so :-).
  • p-christ 4y ago
    Please explain how you can understand something without remembering the information that the understanding is made up out of?
    • anon2020dot00 4y ago
      Spaced repetition is already a well-understood and well-accepted idea. Why feel need to debate about it? The more important thing is the product which is SaveAI which is using AI to make the spaced repetition process much more efficient and effective. I never got into Anki because it seemed to me to be a tedious process to create decks but this new approach with using AI is much more attractive. But I guess people like to argue/exchange ideas and this post is getting much more traction compared to the Show HN.
• madiator 4y ago
  Learning is remembering and understanding. You have to progressively build layers of understanding (and be able to recall it quickly). This article focuses mostly on the second part, about remembering. You could recall things but you may not fully understand it, which is going to make it harder to learn. And of course, you might understand something, but eventually you will forget it (either few days or few years, depending on how often you use related memory). When you forget, it makes it hard to learn.
• nyc111 4y ago
  I think the Wikipedia system of learning mentioned in the article would work. I call it "just in time learning". You click the link, you read it, if you decide that it is useful then you learn it by repeating it and understanding its relation to what you already know.
• fairity 4y ago
  It seems like learning how to learn and learning what matters in the world (and therein how to be happy) are the two most important things to learn. Yet, for some reason, our standard school curriculum don't touch on either subject. Why not?
  • p-christ 4y ago
    i wish school taught me how to learn instead of me having to wait until i was 25 and doing a free coursera course
    • swantonb 4y ago
      Have you seen any SaaS or consumer products that focus on "how to learn?" and "digesting information" aspect?. I'm legit asking because my team is working on that exact idea with mental models and AI. If you are curious, we'd appreciate candid feedback from you. Just launched pre-beta on Product Hunt today. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/neble https://www.producthunt.com/posts/neble Thanks
      • p-christ 4y ago
        > Have you seen any SaaS or consumer products that focus on "how to learn?" and "digesting information" aspect? Yes Save All helps with that in a way https://saveall.ai/ https://saveall.ai/
  • jbaczuk 4y ago
    Reminds me of this article I just read: http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
    • foogazi 4y ago
      > There are now ways to get rich by doing good work, That sounds like different test too
  • Hendrikto 4y ago
• jjslocum3 4y ago
  The unsuccessful learning technique the author describes at the beginning of the article is essentially the LIFO "stack" data structure/algo: You learn until you encounter a gap in your understanding, upon which you push your current material onto the stack, fix the knowledge gap, then pop the parent from the stack (with additional pushing/popping along the way, as needed). Leaving the "working-memory-max=4" hypothesis aside (I'm sure it's all true), the "stack learning" paradigm has been hugely successful for me post-classroom, and (amusingly) specifically with Quantum Mechanics. About ten years ago, I tried to understand what QM was about, by doing exactly what the article describes, starting at Wikipedia's "Quantum Mechanics" page. I got the exact result described: no understanding of the material. However, the search eventually led me to ocw.mit.edu, where the same LIFO-based stack learning was super effective. Along the way, a refresher calculus course (also from OCW) got pushed onto then popped from the stack, as did the course "Vibrations and Waves" and the entire Walter Lewin lecture series (he has since been removed from OCW, but can be found on youtube).
• cloogshicer 4y ago
  There is a difference between remembering something (like a fact) and a deep understanding of a concept. Let me give you an example in programming: I sometimes have to google for the names of functions I've already used a hundred times. Sometimes extremely simple functions (just a while ago it was list.size() in Java), only because I can't remember the name of the function, but of course I understand the concept - the length of a list/array. I just can't remember if it's length(), or size() or count(), or whatever. This deep understanding feels quite different from simple memorization. It feels more like something in my body, similar to muscle memory or like playing a piano piece. It's something I feel I will never forget. I'd love to learn more about this kind of understanding. For years I've tried to find good reading about it, but much has been disappointing.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    I think it feels different because that knowledge is more deeply ingrained with what you already know. That knowledge has many connections and relationships with other knowledge you have. Whereas the name of a function is more like a leaf node, it isn't connected to very much and i think this is the source of the different feelings you describe. To expand on this a bit - our memories maintain "schemas" of knowledge and whenever we learn something new it gets slotted into our "schema". The better something fits into our schema the easier it is to remember. I think if you googled schemas you'll be able to find more material on this
    • cloogshicer 4y ago
      I'm not sure I agree. I think what I tried to describe above couldn't be classified as "knowledge" at all. To be honest, I think we (humans) don't understand this type of understanding very well. Which is somewhat ironic :-) Edit: But thanks for the suggestion about searching for schema, will definitely take a look!
      • p-christ 4y ago
        Understanding is just knowledge of how or why something works
• inphovore 4y ago
  Not really. There are different learning styles. I find memorization very difficult (poor passive recall), yet my comprehension is superior (aiding deduction.) I find many with “photographic memory” to be sadly inadequate at comprehending and exploiting interrelationships. There is something like dexterity which develops in the mind, an impression left which is not exactly remembering, yet definitely stored in the brain.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    Learning styles are a myth https://www.techlearning.com/news/busting-the-myth-of-learning-styles https://www.techlearning.com/news/busting-the-myth-of-learni...
    • inphovore 4y ago
      Myths are a myth I’m not speaking of trends, I’m speaking of the architecture of our minds. There are definitely differences in how various minds work, and these inconclusive pseudoscience studies making wild assertions are as junk science as the junk science they feed upon.
      • p-christ 4y ago
        > There are definitely differences in how various minds work Yes, but we still all learn in roughly the same way. The differences aren't big enough.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • jldugger 4y ago
    > I find memorization very difficult (poor passive recall), yet my comprehension is superior (aiding deduction.) So, the [learner's paradox](https://fs.blog/the-learning-paradox/ https://fs.blog/the-learning-paradox/) is that students do things that are easy and gratifying but have no lasting impact. Baseball players practicing batting should be practicing a random mix of pitch types but vastly prefer 'massed practice' sessions. I.e. 20 fastballs then 20 curveballs then 20 changeups or whatever. Yes, you can do very well on that 20th pitch, and perfecting it will be gratifying, but you come in tomorrow closer to pitch 1 than the person who mixed it up does. It's worth pointing out that "Photographic memory" isn't durable (typically), and may in some ways impair a person -- like a guitarist who's so good at listening and replicating a song they never bothered to learn sheet music, they may end up using short term memory as a crutch and commit fewer things to long term memory in a way that impairs them in later life, especially versus someone who had studied other similar networks of concept in the past.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ouid 4y ago
  no it isnt, come on. if learning were just remembering then the existence of wikipedia would mean that you already know quantum mechanics, but of course that contradicts the premise. There is something more you have to do other than literally be able access the information. at the very least an installation step is required.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    not sure you read the article
• victor106 4y ago
  saveall.ai looks really cool. I wish it were a paid product that I can download my cards from. I don't want to be in a position where I put in lot of effort to input my cards and then you shut it down. If the founder is here, do you plan to make this a paid service? If so, when? and will you provide the ability to export my cards? If this is not going to be a paid service do you plan to Open Source it?
  • p-christ 4y ago
    It is partly paid already, you can pay for faster life generation in the quiz. We're almost profitable & very well funded so we aren't going to be shutting down. If we ever did shutdown we would automatically export everyone's cards and send them to you, we also will probably be adding in an export feature for you to do that yourself early next year.
• antman 4y ago
  Learning is a graph. Remembering many modes will create the higher abstraction of learning the shape and the sometimes abstract properties of the graph. If you read a book you might not remember the previous pages, but if you start in the middle you wont understand anything. The nodes of knowledge might be forgotten, but its ok if you have the graph. The nodes of knowledge that were available to you initially might have been biased. Then you need to unlearn, that is often harder.
• nathias 4y ago
  no, not at all learning means you don't have to remember because you have understood it and can recreate it at will
• hintymad 4y ago
  Maybe "remembering in long-term memory" means understanding, internalizing, and intuiting? I got the same problem as the author described when taking physical chemistry and linear algebra. All of sudden, there were so many concepts per page and the concepts were so abstract to use that my usual M.O of getting very good at derivation and proofs by manipulating equations stopped working. Only then did I realize that I needed explicitly focus on intuitively understanding each concept.
• alexpotato 4y ago
  Given comments about using memorization for code etc, wanted to share this other article about how that can be incredibly effective: https://senrigan.io/blog/chasing-10x-leveraging-a-poor-memory-in-software-engineering/ https://senrigan.io/blog/chasing-10x-leveraging-a-poor-memor...
• theptip 4y ago
  This is true in as far as it goes with respect to short-term / working memory. But I think it glosses over the most important detail; long-term memory comprises many distinct sub-systems. "Remembering" is typically (IME) associated with explicit/conscious long-term memory processes, but I think the most important thing for learning complex domains like Quantum Mechanics is implicit memory, specifically procedural memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_memory#Implicit_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_memory#Implicit_memo... In order to understand higher-level concepts like the Schrodinger Equation, one must first thoroughly understand lower-level concepts, starting with mathematical theories like calculus, and physics models of energy. It's not possible to simply fill out an Anki card for these lower-level concepts and memorize the wikipedia page; one must practice performing those mathematical operations until they are unconscious like riding a bike. This is recursive; one can't understand higher-still domains like Quantum Chromodynamics or Quantum Chemistry until one has worked with the Schrodinger Equation (and other QM formulations) enough that it's deeply lodged in your procedural memory. This is why it takes ten years to train a physicist (and even then one could argue that physicist is at the beginning of their journey); one must spend undergraduate years working out a bunch of problems by hand, gradually layering new concepts on top of old ones. It's not like pushing a software engineer though a dev boot camp, where a dev can produce something that is simple but useful after a few months. There is no way of usefully abstracting away the lower levels of complexity in Physics. The other side of that observation is useful too; software bootcamps are possible because we successfully abstracted away a lot of complexity. Good abstractions (even when leaky) can be immensely valuable. Imagine having to do a PhD to have enough expertise to build a web application? I think this achievement is perhaps under-rated, particularly in this community that takes joy in peeling back the layers. I suppose the other observation I'd make is, don't overuse Anki; it's good for memorizing facts, but not necessarily helpful for procedural memory. You still need to practice doing the thing in order to master complex domains. (I'm open to the argument that having facts memorized might make the procedural acquisition faster, but I'm not certain that it's more effective than just spending the memorization time on focused procedural learning practice instead.)
• aappleby 4y ago
  I am utterly baffled that no response in this thread so far has taken issue with the statement "As you probably know intuitively, it won't work." For me, this _does_ work and I have proven it many many times over the years by adding entire categories of technical knowledge to my repertoire. And not superficially, either - I get paid very well to do things professionally that I taught myself by reading Wikipedia. If my experience were commonplace, the "it won't work" statement would be highly contentious in the comments here. Since it isn't, I guess I can deduce that I must be an outlier.
  • 2devnull 4y ago
    Selection bias. People read “learning is memory” and choose not to waste their time reading the piece. If the headline is silly, usually the rest is too.
    • aappleby 4y ago
      Reasonable, but it's literally the first point the article makes. Of the fraction of commenters that did actually read the article, I still would've expected at least a few to object.
  • blakesley 4y ago
    Maybe you're really good at working with uncertainty? This article focuses on the number of new things overwhelming our working memory, but I'd argue another big problem is the difficulty of leveraging abstractions even if you don't understand them. In this exercise, both myself and the article get sidetracked in understanding the basis of all the abstractions as well, rather than just letting the abstractions be, with all of their uncertainty. But if I were better at the latter, I could see this approach working.
    • aappleby 4y ago
      I did the exercise mentioned and was happily bouncing around between 3 and 6 levels deep in Wikipedia before I thought I should come back to the article to see what else it said, at which point I became very confused. Perhaps "comfortable with knowing that I don't know things, yet proceeding anyway" is a better description.
• fwbex 4y ago
  I think the software that is promoted here is actually detrimental to "remembering". The core thesis here "Learning is intertwined with memory" was indeed hashed out by psychologists in the 1970 (Craik and Lockhart); It was precisely these two who put forth the "Levels/depth of processing" idea, which emphasized the importance of the encoding process. A more "meaningful" encoding enhances memory. The author not so secretly wants to sell us an app for spaced practice. And yes, spaced practice is indeed important and has been well studied in memory research. But I feel that the tool that they are selling is the antithesis of good learning, especially if you want to check "Quantum Mechanics" off of your list. If I got it right, the main difference of their app to Anki or any other flashcard program is that you do not need to spend so much time drafting your questions because an AI can do it for you. But this is precisely where deep encoding would come into play. You need to decide how to phrase that question and write it down! You need to draft that answer! The classic crib sheet phenomenon. Regarding computerized support for such human "deep learning" I can recommend "concept mapping" tools (VUE from Tufts or ihmc CmapTools). But a pen and paper is great, too.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    You review the AIs suggestions which itself is a form of encoding (that is arguably more powerful than the encoding you describe)
    • captaincaveman 4y ago
      Well shouldn't be too difficult to test these hypotheses, if the AI approach is better then actually run a study and show that!
• someweirdperson 4y ago
  A long time ago a professor described learning as "getting used to". Funny coincidence to the article, it was at the beginning of a lecture about quantum mechanics.
• agigao 4y ago
  I wish it hadn't pointed to another silver-bullet app at the end of the article.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    Why? I almost didn’t include a link so am interested to hear your answer
• rentonl 4y ago
  I've always felt there is... 1.) Things you know you know 2.) Things you don't know you don't know 3.) Things you know you don't know.
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  When I was 25, I had a scary stellar memory. I never used a calendar. Never missed any appointments. I could remember exactly what people said in meetings several months ago. I never forgot names. I still almost never forget names, but mostly my memory is gone. Well, because of life. My advice. Organize yourself. Use as much cognitive offloading as possible. Keep a diary, a document, wiki or whatever. Use calendars, reminders, alarms, Kanban boards and on. Make sure to understand concepts and how things really work. Practice how to spot what is important. Take your time on important things. Learn the tools. Use the tools. Learn how to pick the right tools.
• emarsden 4y ago
  In the 1600s, educators in Nuremberg (Germany) were proud of a pedagogical technique that they had developed, called the "Nuremberg funnel" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel). In this "hydraulic" model of learning, they were proud to have developed an effective technique for "pouring" knowledge into the empty brains of students. Centuries of research have shown that this model is flawed in many ways (as many commenters here have pointed out): people never have an "empty" mind and learning involves effortful integration of new concepts with existing knowledge; for the most important types of learning it requires application, exercises and social interactions. This author seems to believe in the Nuremberg funnel and the hydraulic model of learning, but simply with a limited "flow rate" for the brain. It's disappointing to see such as simple-minded idea, which has been so profoundly debunked by huge amounts of research, on the front page of HN.
  • p-christ 4y ago
    I’m not sure what you mean. I agree that learning often requires things like applications and exercises, where did I imply otherwise? I’m saying the reason why applications and exercises are useful are that they lead to a change in your memory. Not that they aren’t useful.
  • joe_the_user 4y ago
    I'd offer a similar criticism. The problem with "our working memory has a maximum capacity of roughly 4 [chunks of information at once]" is that the units ("chunks" was original) winds-up undefined and moreover it tempts one just divide whatever a person seems to be able to process into four things and call them units. And the way I'd see your "funnel" criticism applying is that each student can easily begin with a different set of mental tools, some of which let them take an idea as one relatively small "chunk" and some of which might process the idea as several "chunks".
  • jldugger 4y ago
    > It's disappointing to see such as simple-minded idea, which has been so profoundly debunked by huge amounts of research, on the front page of HN. My read is that the author actually agrees with you. The author points out that all students have a starting non-empty state (long term memory), and the goal of learning is to build on top of that. It's just defining the space of "learnable" things as distance from long term memory. This doesn't seem that controversial? They even call out all the things you call out as effective: > Everything we know about learning efficiently is directly related to memory - "good" teachers, "good" explanations, images, diagrams, maths problems, essays, practical assignments all are good for learning because they help move things into your long-term memory. I suspect the thing upsetting you is the call out to spaced repetition?
• husamia 4y ago
  I would argue memorizing idea is not learning. If you can memorize idea it doesn't mean you can explain it using different concepts.
• bitwize 4y ago
  How they describe learning quantum mechanics at the beginning is literally L. Ron Hubbard's Study Tech. It's how Scientology teaches you how to learn.
• peterhung 4y ago
  I think remembering is not the key to learning. Learning is understanding, in the sense mentioned in cloogschicer's comment + making connections with existing concepts: this is usually called "transfer". Transfer enables us to solve novel problems. Transfer is the real test, and probably the final goal, of learning.