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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

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.
p-christ 4y ago
Maybe you already know quite a lot about physics? Or maybe you have an unusually large working memory and didn't go far enough down the wikipedia hole until you got lost? The working memory limit explained in the article must apply to you unless you have some sort of a very special form of photographic memory
- aappleby 4y ago
  That's the thing though, I never get "lost". I've never studied quantum mechanics aside from snippets I picked up through pop science articles or such, so it's not like I started with a big body of knowledge already in place. It's hard for me to imagine what feeling "lost" in Wikipedia would be like. Maybe reading some article about a complex historical battle would do it - lists of people with important names would probably become a jumble without really clear identifiers of who did what and why.
  - p-christ 4y ago
    Ok how about this more difficult experiment to prove the hypothesis: I'm going to send you a wikipedia page written in chinese. You're going to read it once. For every chinese word you're allowed to look up the meaning on google translate once as you read. You're not allowed to do any other form of learning besides reading. Do you think in this case you'd also not get "lost"?
    - aappleby 4y ago
      I think I would get lost, but only due to the vocabulary and translation load and the "once" restrictions - not due to the content of the article itself. In practice I end up reading the same wiki articles dozens of times as I go up and down the link trees, with each pass connecting various ambiguous ideas together. If I could annotate the pages with arbitrary amounts of translation notes as I read them, I could probably get through the article though it would take a very long time.
      - p-christ 4y ago

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.

p-christ 4y ago

Maybe you already know quite a lot about physics? Or maybe you have an unusually large working memory and didn't go far enough down the wikipedia hole until you got lost? The working memory limit explained in the article must apply to you unless you have some sort of a very special form of photographic memory

aappleby 4y ago
That's the thing though, I never get "lost". I've never studied quantum mechanics aside from snippets I picked up through pop science articles or such, so it's not like I started with a big body of knowledge already in place. It's hard for me to imagine what feeling "lost" in Wikipedia would be like. Maybe reading some article about a complex historical battle would do it - lists of people with important names would probably become a jumble without really clear identifiers of who did what and why.
- p-christ 4y ago
  Ok how about this more difficult experiment to prove the hypothesis: I'm going to send you a wikipedia page written in chinese. You're going to read it once. For every chinese word you're allowed to look up the meaning on google translate once as you read. You're not allowed to do any other form of learning besides reading. Do you think in this case you'd also not get "lost"?
  - aappleby 4y ago
    I think I would get lost, but only due to the vocabulary and translation load and the "once" restrictions - not due to the content of the article itself. In practice I end up reading the same wiki articles dozens of times as I go up and down the link trees, with each pass connecting various ambiguous ideas together. If I could annotate the pages with arbitrary amounts of translation notes as I read them, I could probably get through the article though it would take a very long time.
    - p-christ 4y ago