= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on Improving Enjoyment and Retention Reading Technical Literature - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (39)
I have a basic question -- why do you want to stuff all that technical minutae into your memory?
We now live in the age of the great amount of information available at our fingertips. If I don't know something specific, but know the context and how to ask for what I want, in a few seconds Google will tell me. Lookup is fast and cheap, knowing how and where to find the information is almost as good as knowing the information itself.
Given this, I think the focus should be on understanding how the specific systems that you're interested in work in general, not on the particular details. Details you can always look up when you need them as long as you understand the broad outlines and the context. If you know, say, that insulin causes the uptake of glucose from the bloodstream into the cells, you don't need to keep in your memory the fact that this happens through GLUT-4 transporters -- when you need to drill down into particulars, such information is easy to find.
In a way that's a variation of old advice: focus on understanding, not on memorization.
Essentially, this is an issue of managing complexity. That's a huge topic and I don't want to delve into it here, but brute force (as in, whacking the bits with a spaced repetition hammer until they fit into your brain) is rarely a good approach.
To prevent context switching. Context switching in humans is bad.
(This is also why we teach people how to add, subtract, and multiply small numbers together.)
Context switching is, of course bad. But the size of human working memory is quite limited so for fields where you have to operate on lots of data some context switching is inevitable.
Also consider the cost, from two perspectives.
First, it used to be that if some piece of needed data wasn't in your memory, you had to (in the best case) get up, walk to the bookshelf, take the book, page through it to find the data, and then resume. In the worst case you had to go to the library or even send for the book or the paper you needed. That's a pretty major context switch. Nowadays, you bring up another window on the same screen you're sitting before, type a few words, and get your answer in a couple of seconds. That's a considerably less disruptive context switch.
Second, memory is adaptive and works like a cache. If you find yourself constantly looking up the same things, they will stick in your memory and you won't have to look them up any more. The context-switching issues will become less prevalent as you go along. When you try to pre-memorize everything you might need, you spend a great deal of resources (time, attention, will, etc.) to populate your memory-cache beforehand. Is this a good idea? I think it depends -- sometimes yes, sometimes no. You will forget what you're not using anyway.
One reason is because of overlearning.
Overlearning is about practicing skills, not memorizing facts.
Memorizing facts, specifically, using domain knowledge to compress the facts, thus making them easier to memorize, is a way to practice skills.
Um, no. We may be using words differently, but for me memorizing facts and practicing skills are not the same thing at all.