@ZelalemMekonnen-y2g
This is spot on! Learning should be coherent and fun!
@SuperMemoVideo
That must be the best 8 minutes on the pleasure of learning on YouTube. The only disagreement is that it is all very intuitive. Great educators observe how little kids love to learn and how they change once you send them to school. This video might be unintuitive only to people who have been hammered by years of schooling. Those people will not come here. Their learn drive has been flattened so bad that they run away from anything that smells of education or science. Even a cat video may feel more attractive. Thank you
@SolarPunkDog
I love this!! It makes a lot of sense. Personally, I hated school so much that I just quit going to highschool. School was boring and difficult. I thought I was bad at learning things. Later I took up learning Japanese on a whim and was able to learn to read and speak it somewhat fluently and have learned the meanings of tens of thousands of vocabulary words and thousands of chinese characters. How did I do this when I couldn't even memorize ten facts for a test at school? Since then I have been learning so many amazing and interesting things. Things that can really make a difference in the world and help people. My life is so much better now. That's why this makes a lot of sense to me. Why oh why do people think that learning/life must be suffering? Life is so fun! I want to try to be more conscious of this process, perhaps I'll join your discussion chat.. oh crap it's at 1am my time. Oh well I guess I'll try your anki deck :)
@guillempalau
Outstanding video ! Great synthesis and editing. I think the format is suitable for more mainstream audience. Keep up the good work !
@jameezybreezy9030
This channel is incredible
@VarunSudarsanan
An important issue is the delay between pleasure reward of learning and the activities required to get there. For example, math can be pleasurable for most people - but understanding the language of math is important before delving into concepts. Learning the vocabulary in any field is often the biggest challenge and the barrier to entry. Internalizing the idea of delayed rewards is also probably important for learning. But I guess the first step should be to make sure everyone wants to learn and thinks positively about learning - encouraging to follow the drive is the first step for sure.
@mattneilsen2272
Looking forward to the discussion on Sunday đź‘Ť
@ExperimentalLearning
Check the description for the voice chat event details!
@gerritvb
Is there tension between the takeaways 1. "learn what is fun," 2. "globally optimized curricula are *meh*," and 3. the point you demonstrated by reading the Quantum Physics wiki article? Sometimes, to learn (even a fun) thing, you need lots of background information, experience, or even "adjacent" knowledge (math is required for many "unrelated" fun fields). Don't e.g., college course syllabi (globally optimized?) solve this background information problem elegantly, by curating (and abridging!) the best materials in a given field to provider learners with the minimum effective dose? An auto-didact might spend many hours seeking good sources for a topic, and even then might not find the best ones, or enough to achieve the goal. I think if you want the end goal badly enough (e.g., "I want to build a cool robot") then you can probably stomach some learning along the way that is not inherently fun (e.g., math needed for coding). This connects back to your other video talking about goals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FQNjDnz94o&t=2324s. If I want to make a robot, I won't learn all the math, or all the programming languages — I'd just focus on the bits I need to get the robot running.
@tanguyen7351
hi james! thank you for making this short and clear video summary of wozniak's article! :D with regards to forgoing "globally optimized curricula" and following your learn drive, is there a way to achieve real mastery of a subject without ever following the globally optimized curricula? I think it's great to follow your own curiosity but I often feel conflicted about learning something interesting vs learning something practical. Learning the practical thing is tied to that ascetic view of studying but I guess I always thought that's the way to mastery (after all, masters of the subject were the ones who developed the curriculum)...Thoughts?
@ZelalemMekonnen-y2g
That is where my pain come from!
@AvinashPujala
“Pleasure is optimization”. Is it optimization itself or the convergence to a local minimum through the process of optimization? I think the latter.
@ZelalemMekonnen-y2g
Could this also apply for work?
@alexgiorev7252
I agree with the conclusions (learning should be fun, lack of fun is a critique of one's approach, etc.) I have some comments :) Our theories are never perfect, and they can have errors we can't see. So the best we can do is find and correct errors ad infinitum. Finding errors and problems is then a step towards progress, and should be a joyous moment. Consistency is listed as a source of valuation, but finding inconsistencies can sometimes be fun too, because they reveal errors/problems in our theories. This can then be an occasion for more fun learning so that we can correct the errors and solve the problems. Also, isn't consistency in conflict with surprise? That something is surprising could be taken to mean that it violates our expectations, and therefore is inconsistent with them. Finally, a person can have two inconsistent theories at the same time and value both of them highly. Perhaps this is because they solve different problems in different situations. I don't know much about physics, so I may be wrong here, but I've heard that quantum mechanics and general relativity are theories which are logically inconsistent with each other. Yet I'm sure there are many people who understand both of those and value each of them highly.
@Killy10000
For me, I am not sure if learning is 'fun'. However, I do find unforced learning to be interesting, especially if I do exploration learning away from the textbook before I return to it. For example, I learned George Washington ordered an inoculation campaign against smallpox against the wishes of the continental congress. Anki for me is at least mildly interesting. I add whatever I was interested in and I never really get bored even if some of the topics are a bit mechanical, such as learning the birth and death of people or the flags of countries. I'll definitely follow your advice for adding more interesting content when I can.
@nathansmith8187