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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 - Less Wrong Discussion
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For education purposes, Pensieves seem entirely analogous to video recording. Is there a relevant distinction?
Pensieves appear to function equivalently to a video lifelog - they give you an accurate view of things that have happened to you, and allow you to share it with others. As a teaching tool, it is a VCR. It would be very useful for DADA, if you can talk some aurors into sharing memories of real fights, but I'd not expect exposure to that prior to NEWT level classes, and having that record be restricted to auror trainees would be easily justifiable.
As an investigative and intellectual tool, it is highly valuable, of course. But for basic education? Nah.
How do you know that when they're never used for education, and are only ever shown for personal experience? Perhaps they burn in memories effectively, in which case they're a clear win: take the smartest and most skilled student, have them learn something, extract the memory, and mass produce that. Amortize it over thousands of students for indefinite decades... Sounds much better than video.
As far as I recall, we are given no indication that such an advantage over video is present.
The argument from silence works both ways.
Except, we know that they aren't in fact used for education.
In fiction, if something is not foreshadowed, it can be true, but it shouldn't play any role in what follows, and in this sense it could be said to not belong to the fictional setting.
We have no evidence that it's possible to reproduce memories extracted from a pensieve. It may be that the only way to do so is manually, i.e. casting memory charms that exactly replicate the content of the memory from the pensieve. That would mean a whole lot of man-hours to mass produce a memory.
It's a whole lot of man-hours to produce education the old-fashioned way too - think of how much of the economy education makes up.
That's true, but when you put in all that time to produce a memory, you're making something that can only be used by one person at a time, albeit an indefinite number of times. A video takes less time and money to reproduce, and can be watched by many people simultaneously.
I don't think viewing a pensieve memory guarantees understanding of the contents. In canon, when Harry first viewed one, his reaction was essentially "what the hell is this?" A star pupil who puts their memories of their classes into a pensieve may not produce something that confers any more comprehension than a video of the lecture. You can't ask a pensieve memory or a video questions when you're confused.
So you have multiple Pensieves and each student does a different memory at a time, and when they get confused they ask another student No different than books or 'flipped' classrooms.
If the pensieve memories don't confer greater understanding though, why not just use books instead? They're cheaper.
Faster (at least in the movies, wasn't a time-speedup implied?), 3D sound & audio, literally immersive, forced attention...
I don't know, I've only watched a couple of them, but I'm pretty sure that it wasn't in the books.
I think wizards can probably produce 3d sound and audio via illusions without needing pensieves anyway.
A pensieve puts you in the memory, so you can't focus on something outside it, but I don't think there's anything that prevents you from zoning out or dozing off in someone else's memory. Of course, in the books, everyone perusing a pensieve memory had enough reason to pay rapt attention that it wasn't an issue.
To reuse the argument from silence which everyone is using on the pensieves: we don't see the wizards produce 3D sound and audio via illusions for educational purposes despite the obvious utility in such classes as History of Magic, therefore they cannot.