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Interesting. Makes me think about science vulgarization or good online courses/explanation in general : I absolutely love the new solutions to learn quickly and

Interesting. Makes me think about science vulgarization or good online courses/explanation in general : I absolutely love the new solutions to learn quickly and efficiently new knowledge. But at the same time I remember all the good knowledge I acquired was the result of me spending hours trying to figure out and writing on a notebook tons of stuff (for example solving maths equations on my own). And not the result of me finding someone's else amazing explanation. The better / easier the explanation, the less efforts the learner has to produce to get to his / her ends. The path to his / her ends is the process of learning and is more important than the end goal, and being better at learning is more important than one little piece of knowledge you just acquired. Another learning / creating paradox famous here is The Telescope Rule : "It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror" https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule

dvrp 4y ago
Wow! Thanks for the comment. I take a main learnings from your comment: 1. Learning can be pseudo-defined as the total distance[1] traveled from A to B. A is your starting learning point, your current level. B is what you want to know how to do. If what you want to do is hard (far from you), you can find simple explanations (shorter distances) or curvy explanations (longer distances). But regardless of the explanation, depending what you want to learn and your current skill, you may need to put in the hours either way! This relates to your mirror example. Once you have attained the knowledge to create a four-inch mirror, the distance to the six one is drastically lower. So, you do not have to assume that you will have to go through all that hardship again. Disclaimer: AB + BC may be longer than AC! This begs the question, when we learn new knowledge “efficiently” and “quickly”. How much knowledge did we really acquire? [1]: I said distance, not Euclidean distance!
- ttoinou 4y ago
  Disclaimer: AB + BC may be longer than AC It's the opposite ! The triangle inequality doesn't always hold when it comes to learning (unless you meant longer = you learn more, here I meant longer = you spend more time / efforts on it) This begs the question, when we learn new knowledge “efficiently” and “quickly”. How much knowledge did we really acquire? Good question. Sometimes a real breakthrough can also happen without working really hard, it's just not very common. And some of the knowledge you got can be useful quite quickly in your daily life or profession, so there are definitely /some/ benefits in learning efficiently. Ee'll always need to simplify some past discoveries / knowledge and focus our time / energy on more complex problems. Our children will get access to much more knowledge than us anyway, it's all about explicitly deciding where our efforts should be focused on. Some people might loose, some might win. I think it's related to your last link https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ in abundance, the ultra smart will rise, the median people will fall behind. For now, I would like to produce more high quality learning material. But if I had to mentor someone to learn stuff, I wouldn't always recommend to constantly look for a ready-made answer online for example.

dvrp 4y ago

Wow! Thanks for the comment. I take a main learnings from your comment: 1. Learning can be pseudo-defined as the total distance[1] traveled from A to B. A is your starting learning point, your current level. B is what you want to know how to do. If what you want to do is hard (far from you), you can find simple explanations (shorter distances) or curvy explanations (longer distances). But regardless of the explanation, depending what you want to learn and your current skill, you may need to put in the hours either way! This relates to your mirror example. Once you have attained the knowledge to create a four-inch mirror, the distance to the six one is drastically lower. So, you do not have to assume that you will have to go through all that hardship again. Disclaimer: AB + BC may be longer than AC! This begs the question, when we learn new knowledge “efficiently” and “quickly”. How much knowledge did we really acquire? [1]: I said distance, not Euclidean distance!

ttoinou 4y ago
Disclaimer: AB + BC may be longer than AC It's the opposite ! The triangle inequality doesn't always hold when it comes to learning (unless you meant longer = you learn more, here I meant longer = you spend more time / efforts on it) This begs the question, when we learn new knowledge “efficiently” and “quickly”. How much knowledge did we really acquire? Good question. Sometimes a real breakthrough can also happen without working really hard, it's just not very common. And some of the knowledge you got can be useful quite quickly in your daily life or profession, so there are definitely /some/ benefits in learning efficiently. Ee'll always need to simplify some past discoveries / knowledge and focus our time / energy on more complex problems. Our children will get access to much more knowledge than us anyway, it's all about explicitly deciding where our efforts should be focused on. Some people might loose, some might win. I think it's related to your last link https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ in abundance, the ultra smart will rise, the median people will fall behind. For now, I would like to produce more high quality learning material. But if I had to mentor someone to learn stuff, I wouldn't always recommend to constantly look for a ready-made answer online for example.