[tianshuo]

Calling learning remembering, is like calling a computer a hard drive. Sorry, but, remembering is just one part, although important part of learning. There is loads of difference between remembering the words of a foreign language and fluently speaking it. The process of learning is complicated, eg. good teaching is not giving the final answers to learner, which should seem faster, but letting the learner arrive at their answers, even sometimes arriving at a wrong answer at first. And the point about reducing forgetting, that's also a terrible way of learning. If you want to minimize forgetting, that means you have to learn in baby steps, repeat everything using some kind of spaced repetition algorithm, and endure the pain of doing all this for a considerate amount of time. Instead, learning the content rapidly (meanwhile forgetting a lot of the content), getting a whole picture, and gradually gain more understanding repeating the process using different textbooks/courses, is a much more faster way of learning. The brain is more used to BFS (breadth-first-search) than DFS (depth-first-search), and the whole process is much more stimulating. This is because new knowledge needs to be encoded with connections to pre-existing knowledge, and most knowledge is intertwined together, for example in calculus, limits, derivatives, integrals, infinite series, etc. Learning limits in isolation of the whole picture, optimizing for less percentage of forgetting, often leaves learners confused, why am I even learning this, and what use is this for. Even though the percentage of forgetting is much higher in the latter holistic BFS process, the overall content mastered in the same month or week duration is higher. So forgetting is actually normal and you shouldn't panic when you forget things- since you will gain more understanding each time you learn and re-learn the content. For the last ten years, I've been making products for learning, and every day now and then, I'm still learning something new about learning.

[weekendvampire]

I think the point being made is that remembering is a huge if not key aspect of learning anything, and people underestimate the importance of memorization. Maybe that title is a bit misleading, could've been "No serious learning can happen without memorization" but that doesn't flow as well.

[thevardanian]

If anything the problem used to be that we overestimated the importance of memorization. Maybe it's changed now, but trying to free cognitive load is important. It's the same reason why literary societies beat oral ones. The emphasis on memorization was reduced.

[puchatek]

I think it flows pretty well, fwiw. Strikes a better balance between readability and ambiguity.

[p-christ]

yes exactly

[swantonb]

There's an old saying in Asian cultures about learning.

- You do not truly understand until you "forget" what you've learned.

I know, it's weird and opposite of what Feynman Said. But it makes sense.

[a1369209993]

A less eloquent but probably more helpful translation/phasing might be:

You have not truely mastered something until you've forgotten the step-by-step process of it (and presumably had to reconstruct it by doing it and paying attention to how you do so).

(This is also why it can be hard to teach something you're very good at - often, you literally don't know (well, remember) "how to do it" in a form that's actually useful to them.)

[mod]

Does this mean you've internalized it?

I think that generally is a characteristic of something who's mastered something.

It does make sense, but I don't think it's strictly true. You can understand something without making it second nature.

[p-christ]

> eg. good teaching is not giving the final answers to learner, which should seem faster, but letting the learner arrive at their answers

Why is that "good" teaching? ---> Its because if they arrive at the answer themselves then both the answer & the process for figuring it out will be more ingrained in their long-term memory!

> Instead, learning the content rapidly (meanwhile forgetting a lot of the content), getting a whole picture, and gradually gain more understanding repeating the process using different textbooks/courses, is a much more faster way of learning.

I agree to an extent. It's inefficient to try and remember everything beyond a point. But spaced repetition is very efficient e.g. with Save All it might only take you 5 minutes to remember something for 10 years... so it is much more efficient than you think to try and remember more things.

[colechristensen]

Learning is a lot of things, fact collection is one small part.

Learning is mostly model building. Building a model to predict future sensory inputs from past sensory inputs. Building a model to predict future sensory inputs from past sensory inputs and control inputs.

Learning is not just recording sensory inputs for future recall, it is taking them and building useful abstractions with them.

[zackmorris]

This is why abstraction is so important (came here to say the same thing).

Wikipedia is factually correct but often lacks insight. It puts the learner at the wrong level of abstraction, limiting how much more can be learned.

For example, a sine wave looks complex, and has a great deal of inherent complexity around stuff like transcendental functions. But it's just a spiral, the side view of a radius arm turning through time along the x axis with a period of 2 pi radians and a radius of 1.

But if readers don't know that, they get stuck at the abstraction of trigonometry instead of the far deeper relations between things like complex numbers and higher dimensions.

That's why I think it's difficult to learn quantum mechanics without a teacher. It just ends of being a bunch of matrices and handwaving that makes little sense intuitively.

This is why the debate around higher education is silly IMHO. Sure, someone can avoid college and get hands-on experience in application. But they'll miss out on the theory and abstraction that allows them to transcend their area of expertise. That's good enough for most people, but most likely won't result in true mastery. No schooling is not better than schooling if one wants to do important work.

[rmah]

Your brain is neither BFS or DFS. Your brain is a biological neural network. It is associative, that is, your brain follows paths of relationships. The brain actually is "like calling a computer a hard drive" in that memory and processing is wrapped up in the same mechanism. "Thinking", "knowing" and "remembering" are not separate things for a brain, they are all flavors of the same thing.

You wrote "learning limits in isolation of the whole picture, optimizing for less percentage of forgetting, often leaves learners confused". The is true. The reason is because, if you do it in isolation, you're not forming connections to related knowledge.

The main split in brains is short-term memory vs long-term memory. And I suspect (speculating here) that forming more connections to items in long-term memory helps in moving a fact from short-term memory to long-term memory.

[BlargMcLarg]

>There is loads of difference between remembering the words of a foreign language and fluently speaking it.

And alternatively put, there's a difference between learning to read, and learning to speak. Yet both would boil down to primarily rote memorization, as languages tend to do.

Language is not a good example to prove your point on.

[connectsnk]

I 100% agree. This is true in my experience as well. Is your content available in English? If not, can you recommend some books for derivatives/ integrals or statistics please