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by buzzy_hacker·3y ago·view on hn ↗
You can remember something without fully understanding it. There is more to learning than just remembering.
2 comments
I agree with the core idea of your comment, but I think the author is as far as I understood it think of learning as "fully understanding", so if you didn't fully understand it then you didn't learn it yet.
If you don't understand it then you don't remember the information that compromises an "understanding" of the thing
The words used make the whole thing very confusing. Understanding and remembering are two very different thing in cognitive literature. Understanding is deeper about connections, and remembering is more recollection of facts or knowledge. It is fair to say that you cannot understand something without having some knowledge, but you can certainly know a lot of facts without having the slightest understanding.

It also poses wildly different challenges, where the metrics by which one is to judge the "degree of having attained knowledge" in the broader sense of the word, depends entirely on which of those aspects one value.

Some literature refers to this dichotomy as "instrumental" or "relational" understanding. You see this very clearly in math, where students can recall the facts of equations, but they don't understand it.

It can very well be that the author of this article is aware and appreciates this distinction. But, the phrase and title of "learning is remembering" will certainly evoke suspicion. Just because it is much easier to remember something one understand, does not mean that by remembering, one understands.

In math people apply formulas they don't understand to numbers that they don't understand to get answers they don't understand.

For some reason we then give them degrees and call them educated if they remember all those things they don't understand in an exam.