10 ms·

Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

375 points by bvsrinivasan 3y ago

Dalewyn 3y ago
>effortful He clearly wasn't effective in his English classes. >edutainment is not learning I learned more things from entertainment than any textbook or classroom ever taught me. Also, his choice of font is a blight upon typography.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > in his English classes How's your italian? (「ペンネ」wa, oishii desu ne?) Edit: for that matter, effortful has become more cromulent than I would've guessed: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=effortful&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=effortful&year...
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  effortful adjective showing or requiring effort https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effortful https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effortful
- vkou 3y ago
  > I learned more things from entertainment than any textbook or classroom ever taught me. It sounds like you should have probably paid more attention to your books, and in the classroom. If you can't get much value out of subject matter experts condensing the salient points of a topic into a book, with accompanying exercises that require you to master those points to solve... It probably means you didn't do the exercises. Do the exercises.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    No, I'm serious when I say that formal education taught me nowhere near what the rest of life did. Oregon Trail taught me more about American history than textbooks ever did, likewise Age of Empires II than textbooks ever did concerning medieval history. One of those Carmen Sandiego games did a better job teaching me English than any textbooks or classes ever did. And god damn RPG Maker (read: computer programming) taught me more about math than any textbooks or classes ever did. To say nothing of all the games that demanded I learn how to do complex arithmetic in my head on the spot. Looking back, the core lesson I took away is that you need to find the subject matter fun or meaningful to be able to learn it. No amount of "effort" is going to help if you simply don't, or worse can't, give a damn about the subject matter or the way it's presented.
    - mathgeek 3y ago
      > Looking back, the core lesson I took away is that you need to find the subject matter fun or meaningful to be able to learn it. No amount of "effort" is going to help if you simply don't, or worse can't, give a damn about the subject matter or the way it's presented. While there are plenty of folks for whom this is true (myself included at times), it’s not a universal experience. I am good friends with folks who find joy in learning no matter how it is presented.
    - markus_zhang 3y ago
      Just curious, but once those games trigger curiosities you could still fall back into books and papers which are more in depth. I feel there are two kinds of academic(or anything technical) knowledge in the world: One is of sugar, tastes sweet but does not provide much depth -- most youtube videos, blog posts and HN belong to this catalog. The other is of full course which provides in depth knowledge, and one needs not only to read but to try and practice based on them -- books, papers and some videos/blogs belong to this catalog.
- gandalfgreybeer 3y ago
  Isn’t effortful an actual word? Also let’s try not to pick on things that are beside the point. Especially if you look at the author’s site and he’s a non-native speaker. We’d probably make similar mistakes if we were to try Italian. On a tangential note, what does it mean to be “effective” in a class?
- mfcl 3y ago
  > I learned more things from entertainment than any textbook or classroom ever taught me. This statement is abstract enough that it can be both true and false depending on what one means when saying that. Can you be more specific? Have you watched movies and listening to music that gave you the skills to have the job or career you have? Did YouTube videos give you the knowledge to work in a scientific lab or start your own company? Do you have any example? There's a lot of educational content out there that's probably better to consume than dumb silly content, but skills and deep knowledge can only be acquired with practice, distraction-free studying, and similar activities.
mighmi 3y ago
As a child, I was able to simply read through things (history books, forum discussions about motors and cars, wiki.c2.com...) barely understanding them - but half way words would begin making sense. I could then reread the same things with understanding and keep reading through until bored - which seemingly implied understanding. Nowadays, I need comprehensible input the whole time, hooks to actually understand what's going on. I'm not sure if it's an issue with brain plasticity or growing impatience, perhaps a learned discomfort of not understanding things. Perhaps the internet has since trained me to google things instead of stopping to think or just soldier through, learned helplessness resorting to the hivemind's omniscience if you will. I suspect this refusal to engage with the material and just flee to the search is this very lack of effort, which has caused me to stagnate. Alas...
- mathgeek 3y ago
  It’s almost certainly dependent on age. I see the same youthful development in my own children that I no longer have.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    I believe it's just learned impatience/discomfort. I have over half a century, and yet can still approach things with the attitude of "it's all greek to me" — meaning that a bunch of funny characters may initially make me feel like I'm back in kindergarten, but I can remain confident that it will all become comprehensible after I have learned* what each splodge signifies and in what ways they are combined together. > μὴ εἶναι βασιλικὴν ἀτραπὸν ἐπί γεωμετρίαν — E * of course, a major part of this learning process involves doing the exercises, and if no one has been nice enough to set any exercises, then one simply has to provide one's own by playing around with other combinations of splodges to see if anything interesting results. cf http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I think there's a lot of possible explanations which may be true to different degrees and for different people. One possibility is that it becomes more challenging to integrate information the more you know, and the more that you are aware of your limitations. The child might read something and pick up the general idea of what things are from the context. An adult might realize that the context definition is incomplete. A child might read an instruction that says to use a box wrench to tighten the bolt and pick up from contacts that that's just the tool that you use. An adult night Wonder what kind of box wrench, metric or imperial ratcheting or not. What about other times where I use the socket for this type of work, is that better
markus_zhang 3y ago
This was exactly what I realized lately. I was like the author (and still am to some extent) that I'd scratch an itch but only in a superficial way and then drop it when my energy could not hold. These superficial learnings essentially become my escape from real world: family responsibility, work and others. I guess I need to grow up and somehow indulge myself with real life but heck I refuse to do that even at 40+.
- inciampati 3y ago
  As someone with what seems like unbounded, overwhelming energy, I use learning as a way to tire myself out. The alternative is overwhelming everyone around me. Or spending many hours a day exercising, which I can't organize due to my life situation. But until reading your comment I had never thought about how most people might just not have the energy to dig endlessly after every new idea. It didn't click.
angarg12 3y ago
Deliberate practice is a well studied phenomenon. My favourite talk in the subject is this one from Veritasium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA
frozenport 3y ago
Business knowledge is hard to apply in the field as they require authority, buy in, and can be very consequential. And the other items outlined in the article (like lecturing on something you haven’t tried) appear to be just vehicles to spread misinformation. Much like the actual blog post.
zoogeny 3y ago
His explanation of how one can feel like they have knowledge on a subject after engaging in some edutainment but you realize how shallow your knowledge is once you try to discuss it with others is something I find for myself a lot. It is one thing I hope AIs can really help with. It is a common belief that you don't understand something until you can explain it to someone else in simple terms. I've tried this method with AI chat bots with some success. They have two immense advantages over other humans: infinite patience and bias towards understanding over agreement. For complex and abstract concepts, most people just don't want to sit and listen to a 40+ year old dude mansplain them. AIs - no problem. They'll listen forever and never get tired, bored, frustrated, etc. The second advantage is even more important. Most people listen only to wait for their turn to speak. Or they will get caught up on a minor point because they don't agree. That proclivity to disagree can often turn into blindness, erasing any further information past wherever they got hung up. Even if they do ask you questions, often it is some attempt to highlight their disagreements, in a pseudo-socratic method kind of lawyering. AIs have no ego, they don't have stake in the game. They aren't trying to convince you to agree with them. They can just listen and understand, rephrasing and repeating back.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Have you tried this with AI with a topic you are well versed in? I am very optimistic AIs will help people feel they have some sort of understanding but far less optimistic they’ll actually help build it. They’ll try to coerce any of your (or the model’s) mistakes into the correct answer out of politeness, and when you make a mistake it has zero model of the model you used to produce such a mistake, so it has no idea where to intervene in your knowledge except at which words hit the keyboard. Idk, I am extremely extremely unimpressed any time I try to quiz it on topics I know. Except for coding, which makes sense since that’s the exercise of pushing as much semantic information into syntactic information as possible.
  - zoogeny 3y ago
    It sounds like you are doing something different than what I am suggesting. I am not quizzing the AI looking to determine how well the AI knows the subject. I am using the AI as if it doesn't know the subject at all. I try to explain a subject to the AI as if I am trying to teach a friend who has no knowledge on the subject. Then I am judging how well I can communicate the idea. In many cases as soon as I try to explain the idea I realize that my own knowledge isn't deep. So I am judging myself, not the quality of the AI. An analogy is the Rubber Duck method of program debugging. Most programers have been in the situation where when they try to explain an answer to another programmer the answer will suddenly pop into their head. The value isn't the knowledge in the other programmers head, it is in the act of trying to explain. LLMs are patient and unopinionated and make for a good recipient.
mbrameld 3y ago
From the surprisingly good Aviation Instructor's Handbook [0]: Learning Is an Active Process Learners do not soak up knowledge like a sponge absorbs water. The instructor cannot assume that learners remember something just because they were in the classroom, shop, or aircraft when the instructor presented the material. Neither can the instructor assume the learners can apply what they know because they can quote the correct answer verbatim. For effective knowledge transfer, learners need to react and respond, perhaps outwardly, perhaps only inwardly, emotionally, or intellectually. [0] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/aviation_instructors_handbook https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...
- barbarbar 3y ago
  Such a good comment. Thank you for providing that.
- Llamamoe 3y ago
  This comes up often, and every time I have to disagree- there are things you can only learn actively, sure, but past that your brain is constantly analyzing and extracting the relevant features from all information you process. Personal anecdote: I've learned a good chunk of a language just by consuming a lot of subtitled media in it.
hamasho 3y ago
I realized how long I watched YouTube videos, I don't learn any new knowledge. I can learn a little about things I already know enough, or I can grasp overview of new topics, but it's never enough to use in actual conversations. The worst part is the false sense of improvement. IMO, Learning nothing, yet feeling a sense of improvement is worse than learning nothing at all.
ex3xu 3y ago
> The core idea is trying my best to not kid myself: when my engagement with a piece of content is active and effortful then it’s learning, when it’s passive it’s entertainment. When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax. This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but I disagree the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.) I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with the risk for distraction, which is a real mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions. The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with. The possibility that the author may be missing a working understanding of this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34710830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34710830
richforrester 3y ago
Worked in eye-tracking research for a bit. Things you learn; - Small text is hard to read - Making things hard to read means they get missed sometimes - Making it the only thing on the screen makes people try to read it really hard - Which makes them more likely to remember it later I work in UI/UX design and this f*cked with my brain for a while. It's counter to everything we're being taught. Human brains are fun.
hiisukun 3y ago
There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education". This post is interesting, but it reads like a layperson (from a teaching point of view) coming up with some fairly good theories of learning (of which there are quite a few) and discussing how applying them makes concrete differences in knowledge acquisition. If I was to make a guess, I'd say that the 'effortful' component the author discusses is most aligned with something commonly called the "transformation" stage of learning -- where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them. A silly but apt example would be watching a youtube video on solving a rubik's cube, then having to transform the state of a real rubik's cube using your new knowledge. This idea, and related ones, continue to be discussed at length by those who develop curriculum for educational institutions, and at a more meta-level, those who develop lessons for students who will later write a curriculum! I see a few links in sibling comments to Aviation learning, Youtube, PBS, but not to documents produced by any university on theory of learning. Perhaps they need to better link their work for smart hn readers to find.
- whartung 3y ago
  Well, regarding this, I can’t speak to the theory behind it. But as a general rule, specifically when it comes to programming, I’ve always advocated that when presented with an example, someone should type the code in and not copy paste it. That the act of typing gives you time to briefly consider each element of the text and their relationships to each other, rather than as an opaque blob pasted all at once. Sure, folks could just read the code, but inevitably people scan rather than read in detail. We all do that, and the cryptic nature of programming languages can just exacerbate it. Typing naturally slows people down. It also provides a natural opportunity to make simple changes if they so desire.
  - ReactiveJelly 3y ago
    Agreed. And it builds muscle memory. It's the difference between saying "Of course I can walk a mile" and actually walking a mile.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gabrielsroka 3y ago
Title: "How to Learn Better in the Digital Age" (2020)
magnifyhim 3y ago
Yes, learning requires effort. Does it need to be _effortful_? After a bookish childhood, I spent years as an adult trying to "learn more." Mnenomic tricks, Anki, active note-taking, exercises, trying a different book if the first one doesn't stick. It didn't work very well and I probably wasted a lot of time. Two things became clear: 1) I was focusing on the process as a way to procrastinate on the real effort involved, 2) I was compensating for a lack of real curiosity about the subject matter. Yes, learning is hard work, but does it need to _feel hard_? When I've felt truly engrossed in something, I don't need to remind myself to exert effort, and I'm not really thinking about whatever X% of learning gain I can get from doing it better. Deep down, I think like seeing myself as the kind of person who is "really into learning" -- math, theology, classics of literature, CS, art history, whatever. Keeping up the identity I developed as a nerdy kid. Of course, it's important to be gritty about learning because... why? Hustle culture? Now, I'm trying the opposite approach: enjoy as much entertainment as I want, avoid exerting any effort or discipline in learning, and stop immediately if I'm not feeling it. Part of this is not beating myself up when I naturally lose interest in something (95% of things). Yes, it's easy to get distracted by low-effort scrolling and such. Ultimately, though, avoiding exertion makes it easier to focus on those rare things that truly spark wonder.
mandmandam 3y ago
I think you can be highly engaged, and learning strongly and rapidly, without experiencing 'effort' whatsoever. The flow state I'm describing can be playful, productive, or both - and I don't know if it's ever really pointless. ... I also think that this is usually a difficult experience to guide people into, especially in a classroom. In many ways, the classroom seems almost designed to prevent this state: * You're surrounded by people, often noisy * You do not often get to choose your subject matter * If you zone out (ie, zone in), and do something weird (sit funny, pick your nose, rock back and forth, doodle, whatever) then students and even the teacher will break your flow. This means you need to be watching yourself, which is antithetical to flow. * Regular interruptions, lack of physical activity, disconnection from nature, etc, etc. * As the author very rightly points out, the lack of movement in most 'learning' situations is more harmful than most realize. This leads to people associating learning with work, with effort, with strife. People decide they don't like math, or music, or art, or reading, because their school experiences are so, so bad. It's kind of grotesque.
nomilk 3y ago
> I was spending tens of hours listening to politics on the radio. But when I tried to use any of those points in a conversation, I found that I didn't actually know enough to make a coherent argument. Interesting to hear this. For me it's the opposite; while listening I conduct mini arguments with the presenters in my head, and come up with counter arguments, and counter-counter arguments, and counter-counter-counter arguments. But a better habit is first check if it matters. Most of the time standing back and asking "why are we even talking about this?" - is the correct question, because usually there's no good reason; it's 'news' aka noise (definitely not education).
YZF 3y ago
Just want to chime in with a recommendation for the "Learning How to Learn" Coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
- scns 3y ago
  Seconded. Whas scrolling through to see if someone posted it.
keiferski 3y ago
The spacing effect (and spaced repetition tools) are a "hack" to this: by being prompted to review an item just as you're about to forget it, you use more mental effort – and then remember it better. This allows you to minimize effort while maximizing retention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect
wudangmonk 3y ago
First chapter of PAIP has this gem that always stuck with me.. You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program. -Alan Perlis Whenever I want to learn something, after reading the textbooks and doing the problems I always try to implement something that uses that knowledge. For Math/Physics I can vouch for its effectiveness.
chrismartin 3y ago
I recently picked up a delightfully pre-digital habit: read books with a red pen in your hand (or any color different from the print). In the margins of the pages, ask questions, note points of confusion, or challenge the author. Mark sections to revisit (or skip entirely) later. Fidget with the pen to engage your motor neurons. At the end of each chapter, there's usually a mostly-blank page. That's your spot to summarize or react to what you just absorbed. The only downside is it requires your own dead tree copy, and anyone who borrows it later will inherit your goofy notes. I've even tried printing out blog articles that I want to read more actively (2 pages per sheet, double sided).
- noisy_boy 3y ago
  I am doing something similar with online courses but digitally (so maybe it is not as effective as what you described). As each section of the video finishes, I write a summary in an Obsidian notebook. So everytime I resume the course, I use those notes as recap before I continue (also an opportunity to add additional thoughts or insights to the notes). Do it often times and you basically have ingested the summary of the course. If you have forgotten the details after an year, you just need to re-read the notes. The biggest advantage I see in this approach is that it works with multiple mediums and provides sufficient space, flexibility of formatting and ability to search. Of course, feeling of a real book in hand is something else.
- talonx 3y ago
  I take similar notes in post-its on the relevant pages. They don't damage the book and can be easily removed later. The other advantage is that I can easily read the notes later as a way to revisit key ideas. Writing in a book is abhorrent to me, but it's a personal preference.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  I was doing this but missed the travel convenience/searchability/instant purchase from Kindle. I ended up buying a Supernote A5X and it has proven to be one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. The Digest feature is fantastic for the workflow you’re describing. Ripping the DRM from Kindle books is trivial and you can export them with Calibre to include oversized margins if you’d like more space.
mochaki 3y ago
[dead]
dzink 3y ago
Is effort or is repetition making the difference? Consuming massive amounts of digital content guarantees a shallow exposure to a lot of topics, but “effort” could just mean repeating and manipulating the same topic long enough to make it stick longer than others. For me, decades ago I learned how to mechanically learn hundreds of english words per day by simply writing each word repeatedly on 4 lines of a large notebook. With each writing my mind would mechanically repeat the word, the translation, the spelling. In an hour I could be done and move on to more fun stuff, knowing my mind has effectively retained a bunch of new language. Mental effort = none. Repetition and manipulation of the knowledge counts more than passive consumption, but it doesn’t need to be a lot of effort.
wesapien 3y ago
The other day I heard someone describe learning should be about getting 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. What do we say about that?
fastball 3y ago
This is one reason we haven't yet added "AI Features" to our note-taking app. Our app was originally built with students in mind, and when building it I wanted as much as possible to build a tool that helped students learn. Not just make them feel like it was helping, but actually helping. Although we are no longer specifically targeting students, that goal is still in my mind. So we have been slow to integrate "AI" into our app because I worry about the effects of having an LLM do an appreciable amount of your writing for you. To me, an important aspect of using a tool for knowledge management is to actually do much of that management yourself, otherwise it won't stick. There are certainly a number of ways that I think LLMs can be quite useful without hindering that goal, but I need to spend a bit more time working that out for myself rather than just jumping on the "let GPT-4 finish the note for you" bandwagon.
ghufran_syed 3y ago
Or as mathematician Paul Halmos said: "Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?" https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos/quotations/#:~:text=of%20released%20tension.-,I%20want%20to%20be%20a%20Mathematician%2C%20(Washington%201985).,examples%2C%20discover%20your%20own%20proofs https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos/quo....
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Or as the modern school system would say: "Shut up and stop asking things, look at the examples in your textbook and memorize this proof I've written onto the blackboard. The test will only verify if you can apply the process like a robot, so understand it if you want but I couldn't care less if you actually do."
hkab 3y ago
Learning needs effort, and that's pretty clear, but not many folks truly understand this. Particularly when it comes to reading, some individuals only focus on the quantity of books they consume rather than the insights they can gain from them. Personally, I prefer using my Kindle to read, where I highlight noteworthy points and then transcribe those highlights into Notion. I'm not sure if writting down the highlights is better than speaking them out, but I find it to be quite effective. The concept of a "learning box" sounds interesting, and it would be great if there were an extension for it.
SPBS 3y ago
I'm convinced that there are two kinds of learning - conscious and subconscious. Most people think of learning as a purely conscious effort but I would point out that becoming fluent in a new language is almost entirely a subconscious effort. Conscious effortful study can help you pick up new vocabulary and grammar, but our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up. It has to be learned subconsciously. Most of us don't even notice the effort needed to read this paragraph of text because it's all subconsciously processed before out conscious minds get to it. While conscious learning requires short bursts of focused attention, subconscious learning is done almost 24/7 in the background in a relaxed state (no effort is needed, and I'm not even sure if it makes a difference). [1] None of this is backed up, I essentially pulled it out my ass. It's my theory on why language classes don't work, but children pick up languages so effortlessly.
- vjerancrnjak 3y ago
  More things that can be pushed to subconsciousness the better you get. You cannot constantly map your native tongue to a target language consciously and improve. Look at any activity, chess, music, physical sports, at top levels most of it is subconscious effort. Imagine having to constantly look at your keyboard, consciously searching for the letters to communicate your thoughts. How would you expect to communicate well if your conscious process includes the menial search for the individual letters? How would you be a good chess player if you didn't have an intuitive feeling for most board positions but had to evaluate every move for a long time? The things you learned well, were things that you successfully committed to your subconsciousness. Sometimes you plateau and think there's no room to improve, but by inspecting the conscious effort, you can find things that need to be practiced to make them subconscious.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Language classes do work, as long as you participate. Children may appear to be picking up languages effortlessly, but consider how much time they spend to do so: take 2 years of a language, and you will be in advance of a 2 year-old native speaker. > our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up good point for oral communication, but literacy doesn't have to be done in real time
akomtu 3y ago
I'll make a guess it's because of the think-act-observe(read) loop.
brumar 3y ago
A related theory (and book with the same name) is 'Learning as a generative activity', which states that learning occurs when one uses informations / half-backed k owledge to produce new content. It becomes more relevant these days since we tend more and more to outsource content creation to the machines. This theory would predict that we would learn less doing so.
novaRom 3y ago
TL;DR When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax.
Archer6621 3y ago
Wondering whether it subconsciously helps to have some sort of (automatic) expiration timer associated with things that end up in your "learning inbox". I know from myself that I tend to bookmark and save many interesting talks/videos and articles for later, but often I never end up revisiting them; information hoarding in some sense.
vjerancrnjak 3y ago
Learning for me is an anxious nail biting activity. I do not know why because I never felt the rush to learn something. I get anxious even when I start learning something I want to learn. The smaller the anxiety, the less I learn. It works, it becomes a cycle of anxiety and blissful revelation, an obsession.
- justinsaything 3y ago
  This is not normal. Consider facing the underlying issue.
nologic01 3y ago
The connection of improved learning to physical movement and tactile feedback is intriguing. Pen and paper may not have been just simple recording devices (when we didn't know about electricity and the information retaining properties of semiconductors). I wonder if that's why some people prefer mechanical keyboards with their more tactile feeling.
sauercrowd 3y ago
This a great summary - also a really good argument I observer when using GitHub's Copilot. Using copilot makes it much harder to pick up new programming languages cause you'll end up working on much higher abstractions, since copilot is generating a good chunk of the code. Not to mention that your own code is much more sprinkled in, making it harder to build up a coherent, end-to-end understanding of the underlying syntax and semantics.
culebron21 3y ago
You don't need to go down to cellular or sub-cellular level to see what works and what doesn't. This essay might get this right, but conjectures at higher level may be misleading. At the same time, there has been a good deal of research on how learning works at the level that we can look at and understand: real people learning in different ways, then tested. There's been a research, that I fail to recall where, that when people liked learning, they learned little, while if they did hard tasks and disliked it, in fact they learned the matter far better, than the first group.
hirako2000 3y ago
Repeating a statement doesn't make it more true. On learning, what I have learnt without effort, but with the lesson of time and painless observation: it is harder to unlearn. And since content is virtually infinite - far more content was produced today than anyone could consume in 20 lives - it is crutial to currate. Given the amount of noise out there? Sharpen great and fast information filters. If an article makes a statement with little to no clear argument to back it up, I continue to read but faster, parsing only one every two or three words until the end of a section. If the same statement is made again without any backing, that's potential fallacies to brainwashing. An author dragging its feet for ads revenue or filling its prints doesn't fall into the conscious brainwasher category but still represent the risk to spoil my time at best. If no decent argument is laid out by the end of the section, to back the initial claim, a beginning of one at least, then I stop reading the piece. There statistically isn't enough value in there to burn time reading. Or worse, fallacies may start to do their magic. I did take the time to skim through the entirely of this article, just to confirm the conclusion made after reaching the first part, to write this comment
dghughes 3y ago
When I was young I would devour anything I could find mainly science magazines since books were so expensive. Any educational TV too but we never had cable TV until I was about 12 years old. School was still not all that interesting it was fundamentals it wasn't until high school where it got harder and more interesting. I think boredom played a huge part in my learning. 1970s and 1980s at home there wasn't much to do. Any new material or idea was like water in a desert. We didn't know it at the time it was just normal. Even early days of home computers it was all you on your own learning how to fix anything. Even early days of Internet it was just on for a bit and log off even shut down the computer and cover it with a cover. Now it's 24/7/365 stimulation home or outside walking from a fire hose of knowledge.
iandanforth 3y ago
The neurobiology section is so far removed from the basic understanding of memory formation I honestly wonder how the author came up with it. It's not like myelin plays no role in learning, but the primary mechanism is synaptic formation. The author has ignored the stadium to focus on a seat. If you're interested in this I highly recommend "In Search of Memory" which is Eric Kandel's autobiography. He won the Nobel prize for his work describing how memories form and is a primary author of one of the most popular and widely used textbooks "Principles of Neural Science". His bio is highly entertaining, accessible, and informative.
ouraf 3y ago
An old professor that specialized in helping students prepare to university or civil servant tests used to say that if you want to understand a subject, you need to do two things about it: - Make some kind of logical scheme to help with disambiguation (things like which legal process comes first, of the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle order of philosophers and ideas) - Write the long form of the subject everything by hand. Pen on paper. If it's a law or bill, write it fully, if it's a scientific concept, write every part of it that is related to the subjects that can appear on the test. It's slow, tiresome and a complete nightmare for students with anxiety problems (trust me, i know), but as you write, you very slowly burns the knowledge that fills your logical scheme into your brain. That's what the people that succeed in hard tests do to dominate nebulous topics. I don't know if it translates to actual mastery in different areas, but it's a very strong studying technique
- sowbug 3y ago
  I have lots of smart friends, but one in particular is leaps and bounds smarter than all of us. I've spent years observing why that is. Your first point resonates with my observation. My friend seems to operate with a strong mental scaffolding that allows him to quickly absorb new information -- you can almost see his brain saying "this goes here, that goes there" as you speak to him. This scaffolding also plainly exposes holes in knowledge, which makes him an incredible conversation partner when you're talking about a technical topic -- "you mentioned A, B, and D. Seems like there should also be a C. What happened to that?" I've known this guy for a long time, and you can imagine that his scaffolding only grows stronger over time, so that it's very rare to discuss a topic with him where he's completely adrift. It helps that he doesn't have the personality of a know-it-all; even if he is a master of a topic, he has an uncanny ability to uncover the thing you know that he doesn't, which makes conversation with him enjoyable rather than intimidating. Two final points. One, his memory is not notably better than anyone else's. He forgets conversations and situations as much as anyone else, but he definitely remembers when he's filled a hole in his scaffolding. Two, his mental scaffolding is very conventional. By that, I mean he rarely has a weird way of thinking about things that makes sense to him but to nobody else. So when he asks a question, it's almost always the same deep question that other experts in a field have been working on, rather than a strange take. While this seems like a liability, it means that his conversations with experts tend to get to the important parts very quickly, rather than wasting half an hour establishing a common lexicon. Maybe I'm confusing cause and effect, and the conventionality of his scaffolding is a consequence of the vast amount of knowledge he's learned and needed to reconcile, rather than the reverse.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Said thousands of years ago: I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.
m3kw9 3y ago
Is it safe to just read the title and be done with this?
prattatx 3y ago
I too found this effect in my dissertation research on same-different judgments of figures on a screen. Hard training achieved better and faster judgments than easy. The add from my work is the interaction effect of the cognitive style (holistic vs analytic) of the participant in comparison to the characteristics the task demands. If someone’s style was different than what the task required, hard training worked even better. I left a $20 bill in my dissertation at the library if you can find it. I did that to see if anyone would read it.
LeroyRaz 3y ago
I think people vary in this. Just because some people find they learn poorly from pure reading does not make that experience universal. Some can just learn (and retain knowledge) via (uneffortful) absorption, others are better served via a mixture of absorption and putting things into practice. It is just important to recognise what best serves you and others, that people differ, and to develop a vauge sense of the average learning preferences of those you might want to teach. E.g. at high school I learnt mathematics purely from reading textbooks, and found the requirement of needing to do homework and practice exercises in class hugely frustrating. For context, I did well and went on to do mathematics at university level, where my learning style more or less stayed the same. While a great friend (who is quite possibly smarter than me) is the opposite, and they were greatly frustrated by the lack of putting things into practice, and felt it hindered their learning.
renewiltord 3y ago
I don't know about that. I am objectively very capable and much of that wasn't hard or anything. I just poured a lot of knowledge in when I was young. I think I'll take the same approach with my kids: just pour a lot into their heads and they can form the models from the facts. In fact, the only things that I have poor retention of is Algebraic Geometry because despite the amount of time and effort I spent on it I made no progress in intuition. Partly because I was attempting the "take notes" strategy for that class instead of my usual "high attention / no notes" strategy.
nanna 3y ago
Sorry but effortful is not a word. Learning needs to 'take effort' to be effective!
lenkite 3y ago
"Keyboarding does not provide tactile feedback to the brain that the contact between pencil and paper does" I dunno - I find it easier to remember when I type something out a couple of times. When using pencil and paper, I tend to forget since I am more focused on the writing bit than the remembering it.

375 points by bvsrinivasan 3y ago

>effortful He clearly wasn't effective in his English classes. >edutainment is not learning I learned more things from entertainment than any textbook or classroom ever taught me. Also, his choice of font is a blight upon typography.

082349872349872 3y ago
> in his English classes How's your italian? (「ペンネ」wa, oishii desu ne?) Edit: for that matter, effortful has become more cromulent than I would've guessed: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=effortful&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=effortful&year...
wlesieutre 3y ago
effortful adjective showing or requiring effort https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effortful https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effortful
vkou 3y ago
> I learned more things from entertainment than any textbook or classroom ever taught me. It sounds like you should have probably paid more attention to your books, and in the classroom. If you can't get much value out of subject matter experts condensing the salient points of a topic into a book, with accompanying exercises that require you to master those points to solve... It probably means you didn't do the exercises. Do the exercises.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  No, I'm serious when I say that formal education taught me nowhere near what the rest of life did. Oregon Trail taught me more about American history than textbooks ever did, likewise Age of Empires II than textbooks ever did concerning medieval history. One of those Carmen Sandiego games did a better job teaching me English than any textbooks or classes ever did. And god damn RPG Maker (read: computer programming) taught me more about math than any textbooks or classes ever did. To say nothing of all the games that demanded I learn how to do complex arithmetic in my head on the spot. Looking back, the core lesson I took away is that you need to find the subject matter fun or meaningful to be able to learn it. No amount of "effort" is going to help if you simply don't, or worse can't, give a damn about the subject matter or the way it's presented.
  - mathgeek 3y ago
    > Looking back, the core lesson I took away is that you need to find the subject matter fun or meaningful to be able to learn it. No amount of "effort" is going to help if you simply don't, or worse can't, give a damn about the subject matter or the way it's presented. While there are plenty of folks for whom this is true (myself included at times), it’s not a universal experience. I am good friends with folks who find joy in learning no matter how it is presented.
  - markus_zhang 3y ago
    Just curious, but once those games trigger curiosities you could still fall back into books and papers which are more in depth. I feel there are two kinds of academic(or anything technical) knowledge in the world: One is of sugar, tastes sweet but does not provide much depth -- most youtube videos, blog posts and HN belong to this catalog. The other is of full course which provides in depth knowledge, and one needs not only to read but to try and practice based on them -- books, papers and some videos/blogs belong to this catalog.
gandalfgreybeer 3y ago
Isn’t effortful an actual word? Also let’s try not to pick on things that are beside the point. Especially if you look at the author’s site and he’s a non-native speaker. We’d probably make similar mistakes if we were to try Italian. On a tangential note, what does it mean to be “effective” in a class?
mfcl 3y ago
> I learned more things from entertainment than any textbook or classroom ever taught me. This statement is abstract enough that it can be both true and false depending on what one means when saying that. Can you be more specific? Have you watched movies and listening to music that gave you the skills to have the job or career you have? Did YouTube videos give you the knowledge to work in a scientific lab or start your own company? Do you have any example? There's a lot of educational content out there that's probably better to consume than dumb silly content, but skills and deep knowledge can only be acquired with practice, distraction-free studying, and similar activities.

mighmi 3y ago

As a child, I was able to simply read through things (history books, forum discussions about motors and cars, wiki.c2.com...) barely understanding them - but half way words would begin making sense. I could then reread the same things with understanding and keep reading through until bored - which seemingly implied understanding. Nowadays, I need comprehensible input the whole time, hooks to actually understand what's going on. I'm not sure if it's an issue with brain plasticity or growing impatience, perhaps a learned discomfort of not understanding things. Perhaps the internet has since trained me to google things instead of stopping to think or just soldier through, learned helplessness resorting to the hivemind's omniscience if you will. I suspect this refusal to engage with the material and just flee to the search is this very lack of effort, which has caused me to stagnate. Alas...

mathgeek 3y ago
It’s almost certainly dependent on age. I see the same youthful development in my own children that I no longer have.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  I believe it's just learned impatience/discomfort. I have over half a century, and yet can still approach things with the attitude of "it's all greek to me" — meaning that a bunch of funny characters may initially make me feel like I'm back in kindergarten, but I can remain confident that it will all become comprehensible after I have learned* what each splodge signifies and in what ways they are combined together. > μὴ εἶναι βασιλικὴν ἀτραπὸν ἐπί γεωμετρίαν — E * of course, a major part of this learning process involves doing the exercises, and if no one has been nice enough to set any exercises, then one simply has to provide one's own by playing around with other combinations of splodges to see if anything interesting results. cf http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  I think there's a lot of possible explanations which may be true to different degrees and for different people. One possibility is that it becomes more challenging to integrate information the more you know, and the more that you are aware of your limitations. The child might read something and pick up the general idea of what things are from the context. An adult might realize that the context definition is incomplete. A child might read an instruction that says to use a box wrench to tighten the bolt and pick up from contacts that that's just the tool that you use. An adult night Wonder what kind of box wrench, metric or imperial ratcheting or not. What about other times where I use the socket for this type of work, is that better

markus_zhang 3y ago

This was exactly what I realized lately. I was like the author (and still am to some extent) that I'd scratch an itch but only in a superficial way and then drop it when my energy could not hold. These superficial learnings essentially become my escape from real world: family responsibility, work and others. I guess I need to grow up and somehow indulge myself with real life but heck I refuse to do that even at 40+.

inciampati 3y ago
As someone with what seems like unbounded, overwhelming energy, I use learning as a way to tire myself out. The alternative is overwhelming everyone around me. Or spending many hours a day exercising, which I can't organize due to my life situation. But until reading your comment I had never thought about how most people might just not have the energy to dig endlessly after every new idea. It didn't click.

angarg12 3y ago

Deliberate practice is a well studied phenomenon. My favourite talk in the subject is this one from Veritasium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA

frozenport 3y ago

Business knowledge is hard to apply in the field as they require authority, buy in, and can be very consequential. And the other items outlined in the article (like lecturing on something you haven’t tried) appear to be just vehicles to spread misinformation. Much like the actual blog post.

zoogeny 3y ago

His explanation of how one can feel like they have knowledge on a subject after engaging in some edutainment but you realize how shallow your knowledge is once you try to discuss it with others is something I find for myself a lot. It is one thing I hope AIs can really help with. It is a common belief that you don't understand something until you can explain it to someone else in simple terms. I've tried this method with AI chat bots with some success. They have two immense advantages over other humans: infinite patience and bias towards understanding over agreement. For complex and abstract concepts, most people just don't want to sit and listen to a 40+ year old dude mansplain them. AIs - no problem. They'll listen forever and never get tired, bored, frustrated, etc. The second advantage is even more important. Most people listen only to wait for their turn to speak. Or they will get caught up on a minor point because they don't agree. That proclivity to disagree can often turn into blindness, erasing any further information past wherever they got hung up. Even if they do ask you questions, often it is some attempt to highlight their disagreements, in a pseudo-socratic method kind of lawyering. AIs have no ego, they don't have stake in the game. They aren't trying to convince you to agree with them. They can just listen and understand, rephrasing and repeating back.

ethanbond 3y ago
Have you tried this with AI with a topic you are well versed in? I am very optimistic AIs will help people feel they have some sort of understanding but far less optimistic they’ll actually help build it. They’ll try to coerce any of your (or the model’s) mistakes into the correct answer out of politeness, and when you make a mistake it has zero model of the model you used to produce such a mistake, so it has no idea where to intervene in your knowledge except at which words hit the keyboard. Idk, I am extremely extremely unimpressed any time I try to quiz it on topics I know. Except for coding, which makes sense since that’s the exercise of pushing as much semantic information into syntactic information as possible.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  It sounds like you are doing something different than what I am suggesting. I am not quizzing the AI looking to determine how well the AI knows the subject. I am using the AI as if it doesn't know the subject at all. I try to explain a subject to the AI as if I am trying to teach a friend who has no knowledge on the subject. Then I am judging how well I can communicate the idea. In many cases as soon as I try to explain the idea I realize that my own knowledge isn't deep. So I am judging myself, not the quality of the AI. An analogy is the Rubber Duck method of program debugging. Most programers have been in the situation where when they try to explain an answer to another programmer the answer will suddenly pop into their head. The value isn't the knowledge in the other programmers head, it is in the act of trying to explain. LLMs are patient and unopinionated and make for a good recipient.

mbrameld 3y ago

From the surprisingly good Aviation Instructor's Handbook [0]: Learning Is an Active Process Learners do not soak up knowledge like a sponge absorbs water. The instructor cannot assume that learners remember something just because they were in the classroom, shop, or aircraft when the instructor presented the material. Neither can the instructor assume the learners can apply what they know because they can quote the correct answer verbatim. For effective knowledge transfer, learners need to react and respond, perhaps outwardly, perhaps only inwardly, emotionally, or intellectually. [0] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/aviation_instructors_handbook https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...

barbarbar 3y ago
Such a good comment. Thank you for providing that.
Llamamoe 3y ago
This comes up often, and every time I have to disagree- there are things you can only learn actively, sure, but past that your brain is constantly analyzing and extracting the relevant features from all information you process. Personal anecdote: I've learned a good chunk of a language just by consuming a lot of subtitled media in it.

hamasho 3y ago

I realized how long I watched YouTube videos, I don't learn any new knowledge. I can learn a little about things I already know enough, or I can grasp overview of new topics, but it's never enough to use in actual conversations. The worst part is the false sense of improvement. IMO, Learning nothing, yet feeling a sense of improvement is worse than learning nothing at all.

ex3xu 3y ago

> The core idea is trying my best to not kid myself: when my engagement with a piece of content is active and effortful then it’s learning, when it’s passive it’s entertainment. When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax. This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but I disagree the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.) I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with the risk for distraction, which is a real mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions. The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with. The possibility that the author may be missing a working understanding of this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34710830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34710830

richforrester 3y ago

Worked in eye-tracking research for a bit. Things you learn; - Small text is hard to read - Making things hard to read means they get missed sometimes - Making it the only thing on the screen makes people try to read it really hard - Which makes them more likely to remember it later I work in UI/UX design and this f*cked with my brain for a while. It's counter to everything we're being taught. Human brains are fun.

hiisukun 3y ago

There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education". This post is interesting, but it reads like a layperson (from a teaching point of view) coming up with some fairly good theories of learning (of which there are quite a few) and discussing how applying them makes concrete differences in knowledge acquisition. If I was to make a guess, I'd say that the 'effortful' component the author discusses is most aligned with something commonly called the "transformation" stage of learning -- where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them. A silly but apt example would be watching a youtube video on solving a rubik's cube, then having to transform the state of a real rubik's cube using your new knowledge. This idea, and related ones, continue to be discussed at length by those who develop curriculum for educational institutions, and at a more meta-level, those who develop lessons for students who will later write a curriculum! I see a few links in sibling comments to Aviation learning, Youtube, PBS, but not to documents produced by any university on theory of learning. Perhaps they need to better link their work for smart hn readers to find.

whartung 3y ago
Well, regarding this, I can’t speak to the theory behind it. But as a general rule, specifically when it comes to programming, I’ve always advocated that when presented with an example, someone should type the code in and not copy paste it. That the act of typing gives you time to briefly consider each element of the text and their relationships to each other, rather than as an opaque blob pasted all at once. Sure, folks could just read the code, but inevitably people scan rather than read in detail. We all do that, and the cryptic nature of programming languages can just exacerbate it. Typing naturally slows people down. It also provides a natural opportunity to make simple changes if they so desire.
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  Agreed. And it builds muscle memory. It's the difference between saying "Of course I can walk a mile" and actually walking a mile.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gabrielsroka 3y ago

Title: "How to Learn Better in the Digital Age" (2020)

magnifyhim 3y ago

Yes, learning requires effort. Does it need to be _effortful_? After a bookish childhood, I spent years as an adult trying to "learn more." Mnenomic tricks, Anki, active note-taking, exercises, trying a different book if the first one doesn't stick. It didn't work very well and I probably wasted a lot of time. Two things became clear: 1) I was focusing on the process as a way to procrastinate on the real effort involved, 2) I was compensating for a lack of real curiosity about the subject matter. Yes, learning is hard work, but does it need to _feel hard_? When I've felt truly engrossed in something, I don't need to remind myself to exert effort, and I'm not really thinking about whatever X% of learning gain I can get from doing it better. Deep down, I think like seeing myself as the kind of person who is "really into learning" -- math, theology, classics of literature, CS, art history, whatever. Keeping up the identity I developed as a nerdy kid. Of course, it's important to be gritty about learning because... why? Hustle culture? Now, I'm trying the opposite approach: enjoy as much entertainment as I want, avoid exerting any effort or discipline in learning, and stop immediately if I'm not feeling it. Part of this is not beating myself up when I naturally lose interest in something (95% of things). Yes, it's easy to get distracted by low-effort scrolling and such. Ultimately, though, avoiding exertion makes it easier to focus on those rare things that truly spark wonder.

mandmandam 3y ago

I think you can be highly engaged, and learning strongly and rapidly, without experiencing 'effort' whatsoever. The flow state I'm describing can be playful, productive, or both - and I don't know if it's ever really pointless. ... I also think that this is usually a difficult experience to guide people into, especially in a classroom. In many ways, the classroom seems almost designed to prevent this state: * You're surrounded by people, often noisy * You do not often get to choose your subject matter * If you zone out (ie, zone in), and do something weird (sit funny, pick your nose, rock back and forth, doodle, whatever) then students and even the teacher will break your flow. This means you need to be watching yourself, which is antithetical to flow. * Regular interruptions, lack of physical activity, disconnection from nature, etc, etc. * As the author very rightly points out, the lack of movement in most 'learning' situations is more harmful than most realize. This leads to people associating learning with work, with effort, with strife. People decide they don't like math, or music, or art, or reading, because their school experiences are so, so bad. It's kind of grotesque.

nomilk 3y ago

> I was spending tens of hours listening to politics on the radio. But when I tried to use any of those points in a conversation, I found that I didn't actually know enough to make a coherent argument. Interesting to hear this. For me it's the opposite; while listening I conduct mini arguments with the presenters in my head, and come up with counter arguments, and counter-counter arguments, and counter-counter-counter arguments. But a better habit is first check if it matters. Most of the time standing back and asking "why are we even talking about this?" - is the correct question, because usually there's no good reason; it's 'news' aka noise (definitely not education).

YZF 3y ago

Just want to chime in with a recommendation for the "Learning How to Learn" Coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

scns 3y ago
Seconded. Whas scrolling through to see if someone posted it.

keiferski 3y ago

The spacing effect (and spaced repetition tools) are a "hack" to this: by being prompted to review an item just as you're about to forget it, you use more mental effort – and then remember it better. This allows you to minimize effort while maximizing retention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect

wudangmonk 3y ago

First chapter of PAIP has this gem that always stuck with me.. You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program. -Alan Perlis Whenever I want to learn something, after reading the textbooks and doing the problems I always try to implement something that uses that knowledge. For Math/Physics I can vouch for its effectiveness.

chrismartin 3y ago

I recently picked up a delightfully pre-digital habit: read books with a red pen in your hand (or any color different from the print). In the margins of the pages, ask questions, note points of confusion, or challenge the author. Mark sections to revisit (or skip entirely) later. Fidget with the pen to engage your motor neurons. At the end of each chapter, there's usually a mostly-blank page. That's your spot to summarize or react to what you just absorbed. The only downside is it requires your own dead tree copy, and anyone who borrows it later will inherit your goofy notes. I've even tried printing out blog articles that I want to read more actively (2 pages per sheet, double sided).

noisy_boy 3y ago
I am doing something similar with online courses but digitally (so maybe it is not as effective as what you described). As each section of the video finishes, I write a summary in an Obsidian notebook. So everytime I resume the course, I use those notes as recap before I continue (also an opportunity to add additional thoughts or insights to the notes). Do it often times and you basically have ingested the summary of the course. If you have forgotten the details after an year, you just need to re-read the notes. The biggest advantage I see in this approach is that it works with multiple mediums and provides sufficient space, flexibility of formatting and ability to search. Of course, feeling of a real book in hand is something else.
talonx 3y ago
I take similar notes in post-its on the relevant pages. They don't damage the book and can be easily removed later. The other advantage is that I can easily read the notes later as a way to revisit key ideas. Writing in a book is abhorrent to me, but it's a personal preference.
ethanbond 3y ago
I was doing this but missed the travel convenience/searchability/instant purchase from Kindle. I ended up buying a Supernote A5X and it has proven to be one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. The Digest feature is fantastic for the workflow you’re describing. Ripping the DRM from Kindle books is trivial and you can export them with Calibre to include oversized margins if you’d like more space.

mochaki 3y ago

[dead]

dzink 3y ago

Is effort or is repetition making the difference? Consuming massive amounts of digital content guarantees a shallow exposure to a lot of topics, but “effort” could just mean repeating and manipulating the same topic long enough to make it stick longer than others. For me, decades ago I learned how to mechanically learn hundreds of english words per day by simply writing each word repeatedly on 4 lines of a large notebook. With each writing my mind would mechanically repeat the word, the translation, the spelling. In an hour I could be done and move on to more fun stuff, knowing my mind has effectively retained a bunch of new language. Mental effort = none. Repetition and manipulation of the knowledge counts more than passive consumption, but it doesn’t need to be a lot of effort.

wesapien 3y ago

The other day I heard someone describe learning should be about getting 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. What do we say about that?

fastball 3y ago

This is one reason we haven't yet added "AI Features" to our note-taking app. Our app was originally built with students in mind, and when building it I wanted as much as possible to build a tool that helped students learn. Not just make them feel like it was helping, but actually helping. Although we are no longer specifically targeting students, that goal is still in my mind. So we have been slow to integrate "AI" into our app because I worry about the effects of having an LLM do an appreciable amount of your writing for you. To me, an important aspect of using a tool for knowledge management is to actually do much of that management yourself, otherwise it won't stick. There are certainly a number of ways that I think LLMs can be quite useful without hindering that goal, but I need to spend a bit more time working that out for myself rather than just jumping on the "let GPT-4 finish the note for you" bandwagon.

ghufran_syed 3y ago

Or as mathematician Paul Halmos said: "Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?" https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos/quotations/#:~:text=of%20released%20tension.-,I%20want%20to%20be%20a%20Mathematician%2C%20(Washington%201985).,examples%2C%20discover%20your%20own%20proofs https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos/quo....

moffkalast 3y ago
Or as the modern school system would say: "Shut up and stop asking things, look at the examples in your textbook and memorize this proof I've written onto the blackboard. The test will only verify if you can apply the process like a robot, so understand it if you want but I couldn't care less if you actually do."

hkab 3y ago

Learning needs effort, and that's pretty clear, but not many folks truly understand this. Particularly when it comes to reading, some individuals only focus on the quantity of books they consume rather than the insights they can gain from them. Personally, I prefer using my Kindle to read, where I highlight noteworthy points and then transcribe those highlights into Notion. I'm not sure if writting down the highlights is better than speaking them out, but I find it to be quite effective. The concept of a "learning box" sounds interesting, and it would be great if there were an extension for it.

SPBS 3y ago

I'm convinced that there are two kinds of learning - conscious and subconscious. Most people think of learning as a purely conscious effort but I would point out that becoming fluent in a new language is almost entirely a subconscious effort. Conscious effortful study can help you pick up new vocabulary and grammar, but our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up. It has to be learned subconsciously. Most of us don't even notice the effort needed to read this paragraph of text because it's all subconsciously processed before out conscious minds get to it. While conscious learning requires short bursts of focused attention, subconscious learning is done almost 24/7 in the background in a relaxed state (no effort is needed, and I'm not even sure if it makes a difference). [1] None of this is backed up, I essentially pulled it out my ass. It's my theory on why language classes don't work, but children pick up languages so effortlessly.

vjerancrnjak 3y ago
More things that can be pushed to subconsciousness the better you get. You cannot constantly map your native tongue to a target language consciously and improve. Look at any activity, chess, music, physical sports, at top levels most of it is subconscious effort. Imagine having to constantly look at your keyboard, consciously searching for the letters to communicate your thoughts. How would you expect to communicate well if your conscious process includes the menial search for the individual letters? How would you be a good chess player if you didn't have an intuitive feeling for most board positions but had to evaluate every move for a long time? The things you learned well, were things that you successfully committed to your subconsciousness. Sometimes you plateau and think there's no room to improve, but by inspecting the conscious effort, you can find things that need to be practiced to make them subconscious.
082349872349872 3y ago
Language classes do work, as long as you participate. Children may appear to be picking up languages effortlessly, but consider how much time they spend to do so: take 2 years of a language, and you will be in advance of a 2 year-old native speaker. > our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up good point for oral communication, but literacy doesn't have to be done in real time

akomtu 3y ago

I'll make a guess it's because of the think-act-observe(read) loop.

brumar 3y ago

A related theory (and book with the same name) is 'Learning as a generative activity', which states that learning occurs when one uses informations / half-backed k owledge to produce new content. It becomes more relevant these days since we tend more and more to outsource content creation to the machines. This theory would predict that we would learn less doing so.

novaRom 3y ago

TL;DR When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax.

Archer6621 3y ago

Wondering whether it subconsciously helps to have some sort of (automatic) expiration timer associated with things that end up in your "learning inbox". I know from myself that I tend to bookmark and save many interesting talks/videos and articles for later, but often I never end up revisiting them; information hoarding in some sense.

vjerancrnjak 3y ago

Learning for me is an anxious nail biting activity. I do not know why because I never felt the rush to learn something. I get anxious even when I start learning something I want to learn. The smaller the anxiety, the less I learn. It works, it becomes a cycle of anxiety and blissful revelation, an obsession.

justinsaything 3y ago
This is not normal. Consider facing the underlying issue.

nologic01 3y ago

The connection of improved learning to physical movement and tactile feedback is intriguing. Pen and paper may not have been just simple recording devices (when we didn't know about electricity and the information retaining properties of semiconductors). I wonder if that's why some people prefer mechanical keyboards with their more tactile feeling.

sauercrowd 3y ago

This a great summary - also a really good argument I observer when using GitHub's Copilot. Using copilot makes it much harder to pick up new programming languages cause you'll end up working on much higher abstractions, since copilot is generating a good chunk of the code. Not to mention that your own code is much more sprinkled in, making it harder to build up a coherent, end-to-end understanding of the underlying syntax and semantics.

culebron21 3y ago

You don't need to go down to cellular or sub-cellular level to see what works and what doesn't. This essay might get this right, but conjectures at higher level may be misleading. At the same time, there has been a good deal of research on how learning works at the level that we can look at and understand: real people learning in different ways, then tested. There's been a research, that I fail to recall where, that when people liked learning, they learned little, while if they did hard tasks and disliked it, in fact they learned the matter far better, than the first group.

hirako2000 3y ago

Repeating a statement doesn't make it more true. On learning, what I have learnt without effort, but with the lesson of time and painless observation: it is harder to unlearn. And since content is virtually infinite - far more content was produced today than anyone could consume in 20 lives - it is crutial to currate. Given the amount of noise out there? Sharpen great and fast information filters. If an article makes a statement with little to no clear argument to back it up, I continue to read but faster, parsing only one every two or three words until the end of a section. If the same statement is made again without any backing, that's potential fallacies to brainwashing. An author dragging its feet for ads revenue or filling its prints doesn't fall into the conscious brainwasher category but still represent the risk to spoil my time at best. If no decent argument is laid out by the end of the section, to back the initial claim, a beginning of one at least, then I stop reading the piece. There statistically isn't enough value in there to burn time reading. Or worse, fallacies may start to do their magic. I did take the time to skim through the entirely of this article, just to confirm the conclusion made after reaching the first part, to write this comment

dghughes 3y ago

When I was young I would devour anything I could find mainly science magazines since books were so expensive. Any educational TV too but we never had cable TV until I was about 12 years old. School was still not all that interesting it was fundamentals it wasn't until high school where it got harder and more interesting. I think boredom played a huge part in my learning. 1970s and 1980s at home there wasn't much to do. Any new material or idea was like water in a desert. We didn't know it at the time it was just normal. Even early days of home computers it was all you on your own learning how to fix anything. Even early days of Internet it was just on for a bit and log off even shut down the computer and cover it with a cover. Now it's 24/7/365 stimulation home or outside walking from a fire hose of knowledge.

iandanforth 3y ago

The neurobiology section is so far removed from the basic understanding of memory formation I honestly wonder how the author came up with it. It's not like myelin plays no role in learning, but the primary mechanism is synaptic formation. The author has ignored the stadium to focus on a seat. If you're interested in this I highly recommend "In Search of Memory" which is Eric Kandel's autobiography. He won the Nobel prize for his work describing how memories form and is a primary author of one of the most popular and widely used textbooks "Principles of Neural Science". His bio is highly entertaining, accessible, and informative.

ouraf 3y ago

An old professor that specialized in helping students prepare to university or civil servant tests used to say that if you want to understand a subject, you need to do two things about it: - Make some kind of logical scheme to help with disambiguation (things like which legal process comes first, of the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle order of philosophers and ideas) - Write the long form of the subject everything by hand. Pen on paper. If it's a law or bill, write it fully, if it's a scientific concept, write every part of it that is related to the subjects that can appear on the test. It's slow, tiresome and a complete nightmare for students with anxiety problems (trust me, i know), but as you write, you very slowly burns the knowledge that fills your logical scheme into your brain. That's what the people that succeed in hard tests do to dominate nebulous topics. I don't know if it translates to actual mastery in different areas, but it's a very strong studying technique

sowbug 3y ago
I have lots of smart friends, but one in particular is leaps and bounds smarter than all of us. I've spent years observing why that is. Your first point resonates with my observation. My friend seems to operate with a strong mental scaffolding that allows him to quickly absorb new information -- you can almost see his brain saying "this goes here, that goes there" as you speak to him. This scaffolding also plainly exposes holes in knowledge, which makes him an incredible conversation partner when you're talking about a technical topic -- "you mentioned A, B, and D. Seems like there should also be a C. What happened to that?" I've known this guy for a long time, and you can imagine that his scaffolding only grows stronger over time, so that it's very rare to discuss a topic with him where he's completely adrift. It helps that he doesn't have the personality of a know-it-all; even if he is a master of a topic, he has an uncanny ability to uncover the thing you know that he doesn't, which makes conversation with him enjoyable rather than intimidating. Two final points. One, his memory is not notably better than anyone else's. He forgets conversations and situations as much as anyone else, but he definitely remembers when he's filled a hole in his scaffolding. Two, his mental scaffolding is very conventional. By that, I mean he rarely has a weird way of thinking about things that makes sense to him but to nobody else. So when he asks a question, it's almost always the same deep question that other experts in a field have been working on, rather than a strange take. While this seems like a liability, it means that his conversations with experts tend to get to the important parts very quickly, rather than wasting half an hour establishing a common lexicon. Maybe I'm confusing cause and effect, and the conventionality of his scaffolding is a consequence of the vast amount of knowledge he's learned and needed to reconcile, rather than the reverse.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Said thousands of years ago: I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.

m3kw9 3y ago

Is it safe to just read the title and be done with this?

prattatx 3y ago

I too found this effect in my dissertation research on same-different judgments of figures on a screen. Hard training achieved better and faster judgments than easy. The add from my work is the interaction effect of the cognitive style (holistic vs analytic) of the participant in comparison to the characteristics the task demands. If someone’s style was different than what the task required, hard training worked even better. I left a $20 bill in my dissertation at the library if you can find it. I did that to see if anyone would read it.

LeroyRaz 3y ago

I think people vary in this. Just because some people find they learn poorly from pure reading does not make that experience universal. Some can just learn (and retain knowledge) via (uneffortful) absorption, others are better served via a mixture of absorption and putting things into practice. It is just important to recognise what best serves you and others, that people differ, and to develop a vauge sense of the average learning preferences of those you might want to teach. E.g. at high school I learnt mathematics purely from reading textbooks, and found the requirement of needing to do homework and practice exercises in class hugely frustrating. For context, I did well and went on to do mathematics at university level, where my learning style more or less stayed the same. While a great friend (who is quite possibly smarter than me) is the opposite, and they were greatly frustrated by the lack of putting things into practice, and felt it hindered their learning.

renewiltord 3y ago

I don't know about that. I am objectively very capable and much of that wasn't hard or anything. I just poured a lot of knowledge in when I was young. I think I'll take the same approach with my kids: just pour a lot into their heads and they can form the models from the facts. In fact, the only things that I have poor retention of is Algebraic Geometry because despite the amount of time and effort I spent on it I made no progress in intuition. Partly because I was attempting the "take notes" strategy for that class instead of my usual "high attention / no notes" strategy.

nanna 3y ago

Sorry but effortful is not a word. Learning needs to 'take effort' to be effective!

lenkite 3y ago

"Keyboarding does not provide tactile feedback to the brain that the contact between pencil and paper does" I dunno - I find it easier to remember when I type something out a couple of times. When using pencil and paper, I tend to forget since I am more focused on the writing bit than the remembering it.