7 ms·

How Might We Learn?

225 points by ColinWright 2y ago

k__ 2y ago
Learning well requires two circumstances for me. 1. I need a goal. 2. The time I need to practice to reach that goal needs to be reasonable. This makes endeavours like learning to speak a language, to play an instrument, or getting buff unsustainable for me.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  What do you consider a "reasonable" amount of time? (I probably come from the opposite viewpoint: I consider the few axes along which I've devoted over a decade to learning as being the particular high-dimensional corners making me me, rather than any of my 8 billion other conspecifics)
- input_sh 2y ago
  > This makes endeavours like learning to speak a language, to play an instrument, or getting buff unsustainable for me. I think your goals are just far too abstract, you're thinking years into the future instead of something more immediate. Here's how I'd "atomize" them: - Learning to speak a language → Being able to answer some basic everyday questions: What time is it? What's the weather like outside? How am I feeling? When's my birthday? - Playing an instrument → Being able to play one popular song of my choice to a reasonable degree. - Getting buff → Being able to look myself in the mirror and see progress. Suddenly all of them are very achieveable within a month or two. I then either lose interest or set myself some "higher" goal. Can I up that to three songs? Can I describe my work or hobbies in $targetLanguage? Is there a body part I'm especially interested in improving? Then that becomes my new "project" for the next couple of months. Rinse and repeat, all the way until I can speak German (not quite, but I can point to my A2 certificate and call myself an advanced beginner), or play a piano (not quite, but enough to easily impress anyone that never tried), or until I feel good about the way I look (not quite, but it is an indisputable fact that I look better than ever before).
yawpitch 2y ago
> what were the most rewarding high-growth periods of your life? Every single one was an extremely life-threatening moment in which I very likely would (and should) have died, but for my very rapid learning. The growth came in not being a corpse. I realize I am not the target audience of this article.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  "Target audience" or not, there's a ton of truth in what you say. Necessity and lack of control in a novel and frightening situation transforms our minds. It isn't sustainable, but it's not meant to be, because the goal is to get through it and get out, by becoming a different, better person. To pick some slightly less dramatic examples than combat or wilderness survival; A person who learned a new language in 14 days because they fell in love with someone who spoke almost no English, but simply had to be with them and make things work. Someone who became an expert bricklayer when stuck in a remote village where that was the only skill they could contribute. A fella named John Taylor Gatto [0,1] became the New York State Teacher of the Year (winning it more than once IIRC) before being fired for reckless unconventionality. He once drove a bus of school kids upstate into the wild, gave each $10 and a bottle of water, told them their assignment was to "find your way home", and drove off. Of course all the kids made it and recounted the "best ever learning experience of their lives". Today they'd sue for trauma... if they survived. The article I just read sadly describes more scaffolding, more mollycoddling, more "learning on rails", but "Now with added AI!" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto [1] https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/186/a-few-lessons-they-wont-forget https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/186/a-few-lessons-they-won...
  - SirensOfTitan 2y ago
    I really enjoyed Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education," it's a refreshing and entertaining rebuke of the authoritarian/scientific management consensus on schooling, which has not changed much over the past century and is not equipped to educate children for the modern era.
  - 2y ago
amadeuspagel 2y ago
> This AI system isn’t trapped in its own chatbox, or in the sidebar of one application. It can see what’s going on across multiple applications, and it can propose actions across multiple applications. Sam can click that button to view a changeset with the potential implementation. Then they can continue the conversation, smoothly switching into the context of the code editor. That would be an incredibly valuable tool beyond learning, a killer feature for an operating system.
- throwaway4aday 2y ago
  That's the ChatGPT desktop app
- breadsniffer 2y ago
  New windows PCs will come equipped with a co-pilot that can see everything on the screen. I wonder if this vision Andy laid out is more like a ChatGPT co-pilot that has all context of your screen/life, rather than a "learning tool". With this in mind, is it even worth building assistants that will behave similarly to ChatGPT?
runiq 2y ago
The intro veers dangerously close to this, which I've read with abject horror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306
- throwaway4aday 2y ago
  It could be misused and leak vital data but so can your browser history and the data that ISPs and social media and search companies have on you. They say all processing will be done locally but you'd have to be a fool to trust that. I'd prefer to see this as a product that you could connect to your computer which would take care of all the processing and storage and have reasonable guarantees on privacy and encryption. I'm sure we'll see something like that, unsure of how successful it would be in the long run. It is a useful feature, being able to "recall" everything you've seen on your computer. I get the naming but it's bad branding since recall has negative connotations and is such a common word with many uses. Time Machine was already taken ;P They should have gone with something more generic like Windows History or Microsoft Memory. If they wanted to be cheeky then Tip of the Tongue or Snappy the helpful screenshot as an animated camera would have been better.
criddell 2y ago
For me, school was mostly frustrating. I loved kindergarten and first and second grades which mostly seemed to be play. I think it was effective for me as far as creativity and socialization goes. From third grade through high school I was bored with most of the material. A lot of it was not interesting and sometimes the pace was too slow. At university, the work load was too high. I think if I had taken six years to complete the 4 year program, I would have been a lot better off. Too often I didn’t have the time to really dig into the material and explore related ideas (side quests). Instead I settled for memorization which was enough to do well on exams. My GPA at graduation did not reflect my command of the material. Like Andy, I think an AI-powered course of learning could be great. The strength, I think, would be its adaptability. If while learning topic A I stumble across an interesting idea, it would have no problem with changing course and running down topic B.
- Xeyz0r 2y ago
  My school experience was awful
- apwell23 2y ago
  > At university, the work load was too high. I think if I had taken six years to complete the 4 year program, I would have been a lot better off. Too often I didn’t have the time to really dig into the material and explore related ideas (side quests). Instead I settled for memorization which was enough to do well on exams. My GPA at graduation did not reflect my command of the material. This perfectly describes my experience too. My learning style is to 'ride the wave' of curiosity where i am obsessed with something and keep digging into it. Uni learning was antithetical to this learning style with strict schedules and tests. I got mostly As and some Bs by doing what you did but i didn't learn much of anything. My son is somewhat like me and feel kind of sad to see him at a university to earn a living. I feel disappointed that i didn't provide him enough financial freedom to really gain enjoyment from learning istread of grinding at a uni.
- ginbazinga 2y ago
  I resonated with this urge to dig into the material a lot. For me, two use cases of "digging" come up a lot: 1. I want to know how the concept I'm learning can connect with other concepts that I'm interested in (i.e., related concepts); 2. I want to know what other materials are available out there that can provide different perspectives (i.e., related resources). So I ended up building a map visualizing concepts (https://afaik.io/ https://afaik.io/) where the proximity indicates relatedness and under each concept there are various resources attached. In addition to those more "objective" connections, I think what AI could really help is to find a more "subjective" connection that's very user-specific and utilize those connections to build a personalized tutoring experience, hence the adaptability. For now, I think the barrier to realizing that level of adaptiveness is the high hallucination rate.
SirensOfTitan 2y ago
I really enjoy reading Andy's ideas on education--alongside Peter Gray (a psychologist who emphasizes the importance of play for education, https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Reliant/dp/0465025994 https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R...) and Piotr Wozniak (invented SuperMemo, https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Main_Page https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Main_Page), he has really shaped my perspective on learning. I actually built a last-minute YOLO application to YC on an extremely similar idea--I figure that modern LLMs are capable enough to offload most of the metacognitive aspects of learning onto. Learn drive (a Wozniak term: your natural curiosity) can take you pretty far in a subject, but it's often frustrating to find the right order to learn concepts based on your current understanding and the subject matter. I've previously scoured syllabi on the internet for this, but often what I want to learn isn't really codified in a single course. I started building a prototype of this idea that I've been very slowly working on in my free time that indexes and uses my notes in emacs for RAG against a locally running LLM. I do think these kinds of learning LLMs have to be run locally, though I've recently gotten a little frustrated because I cannot run a capable open model without my machine's fans turning on.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- NeutralForest 2y ago
  If you ever plan on writing on what you're working I'd be interested. I have notes in Markdown or Org forms as well as PDF's I can convert to text easily. I'd like to be able to run a small model locally and tune it with the content i have in the future.
brainzap 2y ago
> If you wanna remember anything create a picture, a pattern, a story, or rhyme. To learn a skill break it down and then rehearse the sub skills. from some podcast I forgot
throwaway4aday 2y ago
I like a lot of these ideas. Some of this is built in to the ChatGPT desktop app. Other parts of it could be glued together from existing tools. Others are still beyond the capability of LLMs. Lots of people thinking along the same lines and there will be a lot of products taking a shot at this or similar uses. When one sticks it's going to be a big, if somewhat niche, hit. I know I'd use it.
cloogshicer 2y ago
I really like Andy Matuschak's ideas. What I don't understand though is his obsession with spaced repetition. While I see the value in it, the cost for me personally is also very high. I was surprised to hear that with just 10 minutes of practice he can sustain up to 40 new cards added every day. I did quantum country a while back and I sometimes needed more than an hour to get through all the questions in a single practice session. Maybe my brain is just slower at recalling things.
- luqtas 2y ago
  "retrieval practice" is a really efficient evidence based method [0]... maybe that's why they talk about spaced repetition [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654316689306?journalCode=rera https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/003465431668930...
- keiferski 2y ago
  In my experience, the amount of time needed to remember things in Anki will slowly improve. The key word being slowly. A lot of people get frustrated when they have been learning an item for weeks, answered the card over a dozen times, and yet still struggle to remember it. That’s because you need months for the SR algorithm to work properly. You really need to commit to it for the long haul for it to be effective. Personally I can remember random words in obscure languages off the top of my head (instantaneously), purely because I added a card for them years ago and still keep current.
  - kiba 2y ago
    I stopped using anki because the stuff I chosen to remember and study are often of no applicable value or they are of use but does very little toward developing the skills I want. I have no doubt that spaced repetition is a biological reality in how our memories work but I haven't found a way to make it resonate for me.
    - keiferski 2y ago
      It depends on what you're trying to learn. There are certainly some things which don't benefit much from the flash card format, but I do think even then, these kinds of complaints are largely a failing of the user, not the app. If you get a little creative and experiment with the format of your cards, you can learn pretty much anything via Anki. Or at least enhance your knowledge of the skill you're ostensibly also practicing in real life. The mistake most people make is simply adopting the "boring" flash card format of FRONT-BACK, and not incorporating other more creative types of cards. For example, question-answer, visualization, triggers, or unique images. ChatGPT is pretty useful for this, as you can get it to present the same information in a variety of different formats and contexts.
thefaux 2y ago
In my experience, some key aspects of learning are honest self-assessment (avoiding unnecessary comparisons to others) and learning to appreciate whatever you have wherever you are. Learning music is one of the best areas to learn how to learn. When you start a new instrument or technique, you will not be good relative to experts. That's ok. You just need to focus on what you can do and build from a solid foundation. Listen closely and your weaknesses will become apparent. You can even learn to appreciate your weaknesses as they provide the opportunities for growth and development. Unfortunately, I worry that ai tools will ultimately hinder learning as much as help (at least in the aggregate). My fear is that it will prevent people from exploring and finding their own path, passively following the track laid out by the ai. Inevitably many will compare themselves to ai and find themselves wanting instead of asking what they can do that an ai can't. Teachers can be helpful, but you ultimately are responsible for your own education. It is one thing to follow an individual who has a proven track record, but at least at this stage, I feel like ai tools may be more pied piper than wise sage.
- simonw 2y ago
  "My fear is that it will prevent people from exploring and finding their own path, passively following the track laid out by the ai" My experience learning with LLM-based tools over the past ~18 months has been the opposite. The ability for me to redirect the learning path in a direction that best matches my own interests and curiosity is unparalleled. It's that ability to directly influence the learning path that makes me do optimistic about LLMs as a tool for learning.
  - englishspot 2y ago
    that's been my experience, as well. yes, AI will give me the knowledge, but I still drive the conversation. if I want to dive deeper into a certain topic, or even change tracks completely, I can.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Killer framing. This is the point, this is the thing. Extremely well set up, beautifully crafted words, on the utmost of topics. Would that we be getting anywhere here! > Subordinated to an authentic pursuit . . . Diving into a brick wall. Alas software usually is the wall, keeps us from grasping true understanding & development. Interface most often is a wrapper high above the core of software. We trap users, keeping them away from authentic & self directed experience. There was a great submission hours before on Enlightenmentware, on softwares that have enlightened us. Letting users into the natural philosophies underlying software, bringing software from "wizards" and "just works" to an age of reason for users. I think this underlies everything setup here; it's the tales of systems that fomemted implicit learning well! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419856 > Learning by emersion works nautralistocally when the material has low enough complexity relative to your prior knowledge that you can process it on the fly . And natural participation reinforces everything important giving you fluency when those conditions arent satisfied - which is most of the time - you will need some support. You want to just drive in and you want learning to just work. This is such a beautiful capstone for the bridge IT ought be building. It speaks to the need for general systems research, new (or improved I guess) systems for operating many processes (and their sprawling subprocesses/subroutines/promises) and seeing them run. It necessitates being free to take that live world and tinker and run and rerun experiments. With safety (and the already spoken of visibility). Opening the option to become acquainted with capability and intent. I'm less clear on the guided parts. But my thesis is that software fails to have sufficient starting conditions for most of these good implicit / guided learning loops to begin. We are trapped in a place where everything is arbitrary interface & none of it is learnable at all (to any honest depth). So we have no mental leverage to begin building mental muscles with. This speaks deeply to me, as the shame of our industry & the shining endless journey we should be so excited to be exploring. That we haven't been trying for broader software ecosystems, for more visible and malleable software is a resounding quaking mystery. This is the great open ended quest, is the real journey of what we are doing, and we are not only flat failing to heed the call of this grand adventure, we are worse, to its detriment, building infernal machines that trap us. Even before machine learning, we were already far down the winnowing closing path spoken of in Dune, and some day I hope the sleeping computing world might awaken from this slumber, > Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. This talk sets up the greatest call for computing humanism that I have ever read. Throwing off the spheres of control & helping each other reach to the poles is the point of these days is the point, and computing's chance to be the vanguard pushing that forward is colossal, and keeps rising & getting yet more possible.
nicklecompte 2y ago
It is frustrating to read through demos which feature a hypothetical AI that greatly exceeds the capacities of any actual LLM, and which does not consider the serious risks of learners getting misled by confabulations. It is especially frustrating when I recently tested GPT-4o on a factual question and got 1000 words which were all completely wrong, including fake citations. It is especially frustrating to read this sci-fi daydreaming after talking to a high school science teacher who was forced to use generative AI tutors in their classes this year, even though these tutors are poorly tested and seem to have a ~20% confabulation rate. This particular teacher is technically sophisticated but even they sometimes get confused and misled by the chatbot. Students don't have a chance. I think Matuschak has valuable insights on learning in general. But it seems incomplete to go through this AI thought experiment without discussing how inadequate current AI is to the task. "Technology will get better" but what if it takes 50 years?
- mathnmusic 2y ago
  You have only tested the current "FREE" AIs, right? How do GPT-4 or Perplexity Pro work on the very same tests?
  - jeffreyrogers 2y ago
    I have tried some chemistry problems on the latest models and they still get simple math wrong (mess up conversion between micro and milligrams for example) unless you tell them to think carefully.
  - nicklecompte 2y ago
    No, I tested the paid GPT-4 last year on similar questions (animal cognition) and it was so bad I decided it was a waste of money. I actually don't care if it's maybe gotten better in the past year, and I'm certainly not spending money to find out. Last I checked the best LLMs still have a 5-15% confabulation rate on simple document summarization. In 2023 GPT-4 had a ~75% confabulation rate on animal cognition questions, but even 5% is not reliable enough for me to want to use it. The high school AI tutor probably wasn't using GPT-4, but the district definitely paid a lot of money for the software. I also hate this entire argument, that AI confabulations don't matter for free products. Unreliable software like GPT-4o shouldn't be widely released to the public as a cool new tech product, and certainly not handed out for free.
leke 2y ago
An AI feedback loop would be great, but AI is really bad at being correct through my experience.
pizzafeelsright 2y ago
The method for Meno's slave was really the way to learn - at least for me. Example: How do you land on the moon? Build a rocket and land it. Divide the problem into 99 steps involving Gravity (math), rockets (mechanical, combustion, chemical), trajectories (advanced math), and then life support (biology, math) Learn each of those steps and with enough money you can get to the moon.
maddynator 2y ago
Does anyone know what tech stack is used to align the audio with the text? How does specific section gets highlighted when the video reaches that mark and vice versa on how the video jumps to location where the text is clicked?

225 points by ColinWright 2y ago

k__ 2y ago

Learning well requires two circumstances for me. 1. I need a goal. 2. The time I need to practice to reach that goal needs to be reasonable. This makes endeavours like learning to speak a language, to play an instrument, or getting buff unsustainable for me.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
082349872349872 2y ago
What do you consider a "reasonable" amount of time? (I probably come from the opposite viewpoint: I consider the few axes along which I've devoted over a decade to learning as being the particular high-dimensional corners making me me, rather than any of my 8 billion other conspecifics)
input_sh 2y ago
> This makes endeavours like learning to speak a language, to play an instrument, or getting buff unsustainable for me. I think your goals are just far too abstract, you're thinking years into the future instead of something more immediate. Here's how I'd "atomize" them: - Learning to speak a language → Being able to answer some basic everyday questions: What time is it? What's the weather like outside? How am I feeling? When's my birthday? - Playing an instrument → Being able to play one popular song of my choice to a reasonable degree. - Getting buff → Being able to look myself in the mirror and see progress. Suddenly all of them are very achieveable within a month or two. I then either lose interest or set myself some "higher" goal. Can I up that to three songs? Can I describe my work or hobbies in $targetLanguage? Is there a body part I'm especially interested in improving? Then that becomes my new "project" for the next couple of months. Rinse and repeat, all the way until I can speak German (not quite, but I can point to my A2 certificate and call myself an advanced beginner), or play a piano (not quite, but enough to easily impress anyone that never tried), or until I feel good about the way I look (not quite, but it is an indisputable fact that I look better than ever before).

yawpitch 2y ago

> what were the most rewarding high-growth periods of your life? Every single one was an extremely life-threatening moment in which I very likely would (and should) have died, but for my very rapid learning. The growth came in not being a corpse. I realize I am not the target audience of this article.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
"Target audience" or not, there's a ton of truth in what you say. Necessity and lack of control in a novel and frightening situation transforms our minds. It isn't sustainable, but it's not meant to be, because the goal is to get through it and get out, by becoming a different, better person. To pick some slightly less dramatic examples than combat or wilderness survival; A person who learned a new language in 14 days because they fell in love with someone who spoke almost no English, but simply had to be with them and make things work. Someone who became an expert bricklayer when stuck in a remote village where that was the only skill they could contribute. A fella named John Taylor Gatto [0,1] became the New York State Teacher of the Year (winning it more than once IIRC) before being fired for reckless unconventionality. He once drove a bus of school kids upstate into the wild, gave each $10 and a bottle of water, told them their assignment was to "find your way home", and drove off. Of course all the kids made it and recounted the "best ever learning experience of their lives". Today they'd sue for trauma... if they survived. The article I just read sadly describes more scaffolding, more mollycoddling, more "learning on rails", but "Now with added AI!" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto [1] https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/186/a-few-lessons-they-wont-forget https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/186/a-few-lessons-they-won...
- SirensOfTitan 2y ago
  I really enjoyed Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education," it's a refreshing and entertaining rebuke of the authoritarian/scientific management consensus on schooling, which has not changed much over the past century and is not equipped to educate children for the modern era.
- 2y ago

amadeuspagel 2y ago

> This AI system isn’t trapped in its own chatbox, or in the sidebar of one application. It can see what’s going on across multiple applications, and it can propose actions across multiple applications. Sam can click that button to view a changeset with the potential implementation. Then they can continue the conversation, smoothly switching into the context of the code editor. That would be an incredibly valuable tool beyond learning, a killer feature for an operating system.

throwaway4aday 2y ago
That's the ChatGPT desktop app
breadsniffer 2y ago
New windows PCs will come equipped with a co-pilot that can see everything on the screen. I wonder if this vision Andy laid out is more like a ChatGPT co-pilot that has all context of your screen/life, rather than a "learning tool". With this in mind, is it even worth building assistants that will behave similarly to ChatGPT?

runiq 2y ago

The intro veers dangerously close to this, which I've read with abject horror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306

throwaway4aday 2y ago
It could be misused and leak vital data but so can your browser history and the data that ISPs and social media and search companies have on you. They say all processing will be done locally but you'd have to be a fool to trust that. I'd prefer to see this as a product that you could connect to your computer which would take care of all the processing and storage and have reasonable guarantees on privacy and encryption. I'm sure we'll see something like that, unsure of how successful it would be in the long run. It is a useful feature, being able to "recall" everything you've seen on your computer. I get the naming but it's bad branding since recall has negative connotations and is such a common word with many uses. Time Machine was already taken ;P They should have gone with something more generic like Windows History or Microsoft Memory. If they wanted to be cheeky then Tip of the Tongue or Snappy the helpful screenshot as an animated camera would have been better.

criddell 2y ago

For me, school was mostly frustrating. I loved kindergarten and first and second grades which mostly seemed to be play. I think it was effective for me as far as creativity and socialization goes. From third grade through high school I was bored with most of the material. A lot of it was not interesting and sometimes the pace was too slow. At university, the work load was too high. I think if I had taken six years to complete the 4 year program, I would have been a lot better off. Too often I didn’t have the time to really dig into the material and explore related ideas (side quests). Instead I settled for memorization which was enough to do well on exams. My GPA at graduation did not reflect my command of the material. Like Andy, I think an AI-powered course of learning could be great. The strength, I think, would be its adaptability. If while learning topic A I stumble across an interesting idea, it would have no problem with changing course and running down topic B.

Xeyz0r 2y ago
My school experience was awful
apwell23 2y ago
> At university, the work load was too high. I think if I had taken six years to complete the 4 year program, I would have been a lot better off. Too often I didn’t have the time to really dig into the material and explore related ideas (side quests). Instead I settled for memorization which was enough to do well on exams. My GPA at graduation did not reflect my command of the material. This perfectly describes my experience too. My learning style is to 'ride the wave' of curiosity where i am obsessed with something and keep digging into it. Uni learning was antithetical to this learning style with strict schedules and tests. I got mostly As and some Bs by doing what you did but i didn't learn much of anything. My son is somewhat like me and feel kind of sad to see him at a university to earn a living. I feel disappointed that i didn't provide him enough financial freedom to really gain enjoyment from learning istread of grinding at a uni.
ginbazinga 2y ago
I resonated with this urge to dig into the material a lot. For me, two use cases of "digging" come up a lot: 1. I want to know how the concept I'm learning can connect with other concepts that I'm interested in (i.e., related concepts); 2. I want to know what other materials are available out there that can provide different perspectives (i.e., related resources). So I ended up building a map visualizing concepts (https://afaik.io/ https://afaik.io/) where the proximity indicates relatedness and under each concept there are various resources attached. In addition to those more "objective" connections, I think what AI could really help is to find a more "subjective" connection that's very user-specific and utilize those connections to build a personalized tutoring experience, hence the adaptability. For now, I think the barrier to realizing that level of adaptiveness is the high hallucination rate.

SirensOfTitan 2y ago

I really enjoy reading Andy's ideas on education--alongside Peter Gray (a psychologist who emphasizes the importance of play for education, https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Reliant/dp/0465025994 https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R...) and Piotr Wozniak (invented SuperMemo, https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Main_Page https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Main_Page), he has really shaped my perspective on learning. I actually built a last-minute YOLO application to YC on an extremely similar idea--I figure that modern LLMs are capable enough to offload most of the metacognitive aspects of learning onto. Learn drive (a Wozniak term: your natural curiosity) can take you pretty far in a subject, but it's often frustrating to find the right order to learn concepts based on your current understanding and the subject matter. I've previously scoured syllabi on the internet for this, but often what I want to learn isn't really codified in a single course. I started building a prototype of this idea that I've been very slowly working on in my free time that indexes and uses my notes in emacs for RAG against a locally running LLM. I do think these kinds of learning LLMs have to be run locally, though I've recently gotten a little frustrated because I cannot run a capable open model without my machine's fans turning on.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
NeutralForest 2y ago
If you ever plan on writing on what you're working I'd be interested. I have notes in Markdown or Org forms as well as PDF's I can convert to text easily. I'd like to be able to run a small model locally and tune it with the content i have in the future.

brainzap 2y ago

> If you wanna remember anything create a picture, a pattern, a story, or rhyme. To learn a skill break it down and then rehearse the sub skills. from some podcast I forgot

throwaway4aday 2y ago

I like a lot of these ideas. Some of this is built in to the ChatGPT desktop app. Other parts of it could be glued together from existing tools. Others are still beyond the capability of LLMs. Lots of people thinking along the same lines and there will be a lot of products taking a shot at this or similar uses. When one sticks it's going to be a big, if somewhat niche, hit. I know I'd use it.

cloogshicer 2y ago

I really like Andy Matuschak's ideas. What I don't understand though is his obsession with spaced repetition. While I see the value in it, the cost for me personally is also very high. I was surprised to hear that with just 10 minutes of practice he can sustain up to 40 new cards added every day. I did quantum country a while back and I sometimes needed more than an hour to get through all the questions in a single practice session. Maybe my brain is just slower at recalling things.

luqtas 2y ago
"retrieval practice" is a really efficient evidence based method [0]... maybe that's why they talk about spaced repetition [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654316689306?journalCode=rera https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/003465431668930...
keiferski 2y ago
In my experience, the amount of time needed to remember things in Anki will slowly improve. The key word being slowly. A lot of people get frustrated when they have been learning an item for weeks, answered the card over a dozen times, and yet still struggle to remember it. That’s because you need months for the SR algorithm to work properly. You really need to commit to it for the long haul for it to be effective. Personally I can remember random words in obscure languages off the top of my head (instantaneously), purely because I added a card for them years ago and still keep current.
- kiba 2y ago
  I stopped using anki because the stuff I chosen to remember and study are often of no applicable value or they are of use but does very little toward developing the skills I want. I have no doubt that spaced repetition is a biological reality in how our memories work but I haven't found a way to make it resonate for me.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    It depends on what you're trying to learn. There are certainly some things which don't benefit much from the flash card format, but I do think even then, these kinds of complaints are largely a failing of the user, not the app. If you get a little creative and experiment with the format of your cards, you can learn pretty much anything via Anki. Or at least enhance your knowledge of the skill you're ostensibly also practicing in real life. The mistake most people make is simply adopting the "boring" flash card format of FRONT-BACK, and not incorporating other more creative types of cards. For example, question-answer, visualization, triggers, or unique images. ChatGPT is pretty useful for this, as you can get it to present the same information in a variety of different formats and contexts.

thefaux 2y ago

In my experience, some key aspects of learning are honest self-assessment (avoiding unnecessary comparisons to others) and learning to appreciate whatever you have wherever you are. Learning music is one of the best areas to learn how to learn. When you start a new instrument or technique, you will not be good relative to experts. That's ok. You just need to focus on what you can do and build from a solid foundation. Listen closely and your weaknesses will become apparent. You can even learn to appreciate your weaknesses as they provide the opportunities for growth and development. Unfortunately, I worry that ai tools will ultimately hinder learning as much as help (at least in the aggregate). My fear is that it will prevent people from exploring and finding their own path, passively following the track laid out by the ai. Inevitably many will compare themselves to ai and find themselves wanting instead of asking what they can do that an ai can't. Teachers can be helpful, but you ultimately are responsible for your own education. It is one thing to follow an individual who has a proven track record, but at least at this stage, I feel like ai tools may be more pied piper than wise sage.

simonw 2y ago
"My fear is that it will prevent people from exploring and finding their own path, passively following the track laid out by the ai" My experience learning with LLM-based tools over the past ~18 months has been the opposite. The ability for me to redirect the learning path in a direction that best matches my own interests and curiosity is unparalleled. It's that ability to directly influence the learning path that makes me do optimistic about LLMs as a tool for learning.
- englishspot 2y ago
  that's been my experience, as well. yes, AI will give me the knowledge, but I still drive the conversation. if I want to dive deeper into a certain topic, or even change tracks completely, I can.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Killer framing. This is the point, this is the thing. Extremely well set up, beautifully crafted words, on the utmost of topics. Would that we be getting anywhere here! > Subordinated to an authentic pursuit . . . Diving into a brick wall. Alas software usually is the wall, keeps us from grasping true understanding & development. Interface most often is a wrapper high above the core of software. We trap users, keeping them away from authentic & self directed experience. There was a great submission hours before on Enlightenmentware, on softwares that have enlightened us. Letting users into the natural philosophies underlying software, bringing software from "wizards" and "just works" to an age of reason for users. I think this underlies everything setup here; it's the tales of systems that fomemted implicit learning well! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419856 > Learning by emersion works nautralistocally when the material has low enough complexity relative to your prior knowledge that you can process it on the fly . And natural participation reinforces everything important giving you fluency when those conditions arent satisfied - which is most of the time - you will need some support. You want to just drive in and you want learning to just work. This is such a beautiful capstone for the bridge IT ought be building. It speaks to the need for general systems research, new (or improved I guess) systems for operating many processes (and their sprawling subprocesses/subroutines/promises) and seeing them run. It necessitates being free to take that live world and tinker and run and rerun experiments. With safety (and the already spoken of visibility). Opening the option to become acquainted with capability and intent. I'm less clear on the guided parts. But my thesis is that software fails to have sufficient starting conditions for most of these good implicit / guided learning loops to begin. We are trapped in a place where everything is arbitrary interface & none of it is learnable at all (to any honest depth). So we have no mental leverage to begin building mental muscles with. This speaks deeply to me, as the shame of our industry & the shining endless journey we should be so excited to be exploring. That we haven't been trying for broader software ecosystems, for more visible and malleable software is a resounding quaking mystery. This is the great open ended quest, is the real journey of what we are doing, and we are not only flat failing to heed the call of this grand adventure, we are worse, to its detriment, building infernal machines that trap us. Even before machine learning, we were already far down the winnowing closing path spoken of in Dune, and some day I hope the sleeping computing world might awaken from this slumber, > Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. This talk sets up the greatest call for computing humanism that I have ever read. Throwing off the spheres of control & helping each other reach to the poles is the point of these days is the point, and computing's chance to be the vanguard pushing that forward is colossal, and keeps rising & getting yet more possible.

nicklecompte 2y ago

It is frustrating to read through demos which feature a hypothetical AI that greatly exceeds the capacities of any actual LLM, and which does not consider the serious risks of learners getting misled by confabulations. It is especially frustrating when I recently tested GPT-4o on a factual question and got 1000 words which were all completely wrong, including fake citations. It is especially frustrating to read this sci-fi daydreaming after talking to a high school science teacher who was forced to use generative AI tutors in their classes this year, even though these tutors are poorly tested and seem to have a ~20% confabulation rate. This particular teacher is technically sophisticated but even they sometimes get confused and misled by the chatbot. Students don't have a chance. I think Matuschak has valuable insights on learning in general. But it seems incomplete to go through this AI thought experiment without discussing how inadequate current AI is to the task. "Technology will get better" but what if it takes 50 years?

mathnmusic 2y ago
You have only tested the current "FREE" AIs, right? How do GPT-4 or Perplexity Pro work on the very same tests?
- jeffreyrogers 2y ago
  I have tried some chemistry problems on the latest models and they still get simple math wrong (mess up conversion between micro and milligrams for example) unless you tell them to think carefully.
- nicklecompte 2y ago
  No, I tested the paid GPT-4 last year on similar questions (animal cognition) and it was so bad I decided it was a waste of money. I actually don't care if it's maybe gotten better in the past year, and I'm certainly not spending money to find out. Last I checked the best LLMs still have a 5-15% confabulation rate on simple document summarization. In 2023 GPT-4 had a ~75% confabulation rate on animal cognition questions, but even 5% is not reliable enough for me to want to use it. The high school AI tutor probably wasn't using GPT-4, but the district definitely paid a lot of money for the software. I also hate this entire argument, that AI confabulations don't matter for free products. Unreliable software like GPT-4o shouldn't be widely released to the public as a cool new tech product, and certainly not handed out for free.

leke 2y ago

An AI feedback loop would be great, but AI is really bad at being correct through my experience.

pizzafeelsright 2y ago

The method for Meno's slave was really the way to learn - at least for me. Example: How do you land on the moon? Build a rocket and land it. Divide the problem into 99 steps involving Gravity (math), rockets (mechanical, combustion, chemical), trajectories (advanced math), and then life support (biology, math) Learn each of those steps and with enough money you can get to the moon.

maddynator 2y ago

Does anyone know what tech stack is used to align the audio with the text? How does specific section gets highlighted when the video reaches that mark and vice versa on how the video jumps to location where the text is clicked?