Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education".

This post is interesting, but it reads like a layperson (from a teaching point of view) coming up with some fairly good theories of learning (of which there are quite a few) and discussing how applying them makes concrete differences in knowledge acquisition.

If I was to make a guess, I'd say that the 'effortful' component the author discusses is most aligned with something commonly called the "transformation" stage of learning -- where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them. A silly but apt example would be watching a youtube video on solving a rubik's cube, then having to transform the state of a real rubik's cube using your new knowledge.

This idea, and related ones, continue to be discussed at length by those who develop curriculum for educational institutions, and at a more meta-level, those who develop lessons for students who will later write a curriculum! I see a few links in sibling comments to Aviation learning, Youtube, PBS, but not to documents produced by any university on theory of learning. Perhaps they need to better link their work for smart hn readers to find.

From the surprisingly good Aviation Instructor's Handbook [0]:

Learning Is an Active Process Learners do not soak up knowledge like a sponge absorbs water. The instructor cannot assume that learners remember something just because they were in the classroom, shop, or aircraft when the instructor presented the material. Neither can the instructor assume the learners can apply what they know because they can quote the correct answer verbatim. For effective knowledge transfer, learners need to react and respond, perhaps outwardly, perhaps only inwardly, emotionally, or intellectually.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...

As a child, I was able to simply read through things (history books, forum discussions about motors and cars, wiki.c2.com...) barely understanding them - but half way words would begin making sense. I could then reread the same things with understanding and keep reading through until bored - which seemingly implied understanding.

Nowadays, I need comprehensible input the whole time, hooks to actually understand what's going on. I'm not sure if it's an issue with brain plasticity or growing impatience, perhaps a learned discomfort of not understanding things. Perhaps the internet has since trained me to google things instead of stopping to think or just soldier through, learned helplessness resorting to the hivemind's omniscience if you will.

I suspect this refusal to engage with the material and just flee to the search is this very lack of effort, which has caused me to stagnate. Alas...

Yes, learning requires effort. Does it need to be _effortful_?

After a bookish childhood, I spent years as an adult trying to "learn more." Mnenomic tricks, Anki, active note-taking, exercises, trying a different book if the first one doesn't stick. It didn't work very well and I probably wasted a lot of time. Two things became clear: 1) I was focusing on the process as a way to procrastinate on the real effort involved, 2) I was compensating for a lack of real curiosity about the subject matter. Yes, learning is hard work, but does it need to _feel hard_? When I've felt truly engrossed in something, I don't need to remind myself to exert effort, and I'm not really thinking about whatever X% of learning gain I can get from doing it better.

Deep down, I think like seeing myself as the kind of person who is "really into learning" -- math, theology, classics of literature, CS, art history, whatever. Keeping up the identity I developed as a nerdy kid. Of course, it's important to be gritty about learning because... why? Hustle culture?

Now, I'm trying the opposite approach: enjoy as much entertainment as I want, avoid exerting any effort or discipline in learning, and stop immediately if I'm not feeling it. Part of this is not beating myself up when I naturally lose interest in something (95% of things). Yes, it's easy to get distracted by low-effort scrolling and such. Ultimately, though, avoiding exertion makes it easier to focus on those rare things that truly spark wonder.

I'm convinced that there are two kinds of learning - conscious and subconscious. Most people think of learning as a purely conscious effort but I would point out that becoming fluent in a new language is almost entirely a subconscious effort.

Conscious effortful study can help you pick up new vocabulary and grammar, but our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up. It has to be learned subconsciously. Most of us don't even notice the effort needed to read this paragraph of text because it's all subconsciously processed before out conscious minds get to it. While conscious learning requires short bursts of focused attention, subconscious learning is done almost 24/7 in the background in a relaxed state (no effort is needed, and I'm not even sure if it makes a difference).

[1] None of this is backed up, I essentially pulled it out my ass. It's my theory on why language classes don't work, but children pick up languages so effortlessly.

His explanation of how one can feel like they have knowledge on a subject after engaging in some edutainment but you realize how shallow your knowledge is once you try to discuss it with others is something I find for myself a lot.

It is one thing I hope AIs can really help with. It is a common belief that you don't understand something until you can explain it to someone else in simple terms. I've tried this method with AI chat bots with some success. They have two immense advantages over other humans: infinite patience and bias towards understanding over agreement.

For complex and abstract concepts, most people just don't want to sit and listen to a 40+ year old dude mansplain them. AIs - no problem. They'll listen forever and never get tired, bored, frustrated, etc.

The second advantage is even more important. Most people listen only to wait for their turn to speak. Or they will get caught up on a minor point because they don't agree. That proclivity to disagree can often turn into blindness, erasing any further information past wherever they got hung up. Even if they do ask you questions, often it is some attempt to highlight their disagreements, in a pseudo-socratic method kind of lawyering. AIs have no ego, they don't have stake in the game. They aren't trying to convince you to agree with them. They can just listen and understand, rephrasing and repeating back.

Or as mathematician Paul Halmos said: "Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?"

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos/quo....

> The core idea is trying my best to not kid myself: when my engagement with a piece of content is active and effortful then it’s learning, when it’s passive it’s entertainment. When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax.

This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but I disagree the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.)

I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with the risk for distraction, which is a real mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions.

The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with.

The possibility that the author may be missing a working understanding of this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34710830

Just want to chime in with a recommendation for the "Learning How to Learn" Coursera course:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

I think people vary in this. Just because some people find they learn poorly from pure reading does not make that experience universal. Some can just learn (and retain knowledge) via (uneffortful) absorption, others are better served via a mixture of absorption and putting things into practice. It is just important to recognise what best serves you and others, that people differ, and to develop a vauge sense of the average learning preferences of those you might want to teach.

E.g. at high school I learnt mathematics purely from reading textbooks, and found the requirement of needing to do homework and practice exercises in class hugely frustrating. For context, I did well and went on to do mathematics at university level, where my learning style more or less stayed the same.

While a great friend (who is quite possibly smarter than me) is the opposite, and they were greatly frustrated by the lack of putting things into practice, and felt it hindered their learning.

The spacing effect (and spaced repetition tools) are a "hack" to this: by being prompted to review an item just as you're about to forget it, you use more mental effort – and then remember it better. This allows you to minimize effort while maximizing retention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect

I recently picked up a delightfully pre-digital habit: read books with a red pen in your hand (or any color different from the print). In the margins of the pages, ask questions, note points of confusion, or challenge the author. Mark sections to revisit (or skip entirely) later. Fidget with the pen to engage your motor neurons.

At the end of each chapter, there's usually a mostly-blank page. That's your spot to summarize or react to what you just absorbed.

The only downside is it requires your own dead tree copy, and anyone who borrows it later will inherit your goofy notes.

I've even tried printing out blog articles that I want to read more actively (2 pages per sheet, double sided).

I think you can be highly engaged, and learning strongly and rapidly, without experiencing 'effort' whatsoever. The flow state I'm describing can be playful, productive, or both - and I don't know if it's ever really pointless.

... I also think that this is usually a difficult experience to guide people into, especially in a classroom. In many ways, the classroom seems almost designed to prevent this state:

* You're surrounded by people, often noisy

* You do not often get to choose your subject matter

* If you zone out (ie, zone in), and do something weird (sit funny, pick your nose, rock back and forth, doodle, whatever) then students and even the teacher will break your flow. This means you need to be watching yourself, which is antithetical to flow.

* Regular interruptions, lack of physical activity, disconnection from nature, etc, etc.

* As the author very rightly points out, the lack of movement in most 'learning' situations is more harmful than most realize.

This leads to people associating learning with work, with effort, with strife. People decide they don't like math, or music, or art, or reading, because their school experiences are so, so bad.

It's kind of grotesque.

This is one reason we haven't yet added "AI Features" to our note-taking app.

Our app was originally built with students in mind, and when building it I wanted as much as possible to build a tool that helped students learn. Not just make them feel like it was helping, but actually helping. Although we are no longer specifically targeting students, that goal is still in my mind.

So we have been slow to integrate "AI" into our app because I worry about the effects of having an LLM do an appreciable amount of your writing for you. To me, an important aspect of using a tool for knowledge management is to actually do much of that management yourself, otherwise it won't stick.

There are certainly a number of ways that I think LLMs can be quite useful without hindering that goal, but I need to spend a bit more time working that out for myself rather than just jumping on the "let GPT-4 finish the note for you" bandwagon.

When I was young I would devour anything I could find mainly science magazines since books were so expensive. Any educational TV too but we never had cable TV until I was about 12 years old. School was still not all that interesting it was fundamentals it wasn't until high school where it got harder and more interesting.

I think boredom played a huge part in my learning. 1970s and 1980s at home there wasn't much to do. Any new material or idea was like water in a desert. We didn't know it at the time it was just normal.

Even early days of home computers it was all you on your own learning how to fix anything. Even early days of Internet it was just on for a bit and log off even shut down the computer and cover it with a cover. Now it's 24/7/365 stimulation home or outside walking from a fire hose of knowledge.

Worked in eye-tracking research for a bit.

Things you learn;

- Small text is hard to read

- Making things hard to read means they get missed sometimes

- Making it the only thing on the screen makes people try to read it really hard

- Which makes them more likely to remember it later

I work in UI/UX design and this f*cked with my brain for a while. It's counter to everything we're being taught.

Human brains are fun.

Is effort or is repetition making the difference? Consuming massive amounts of digital content guarantees a shallow exposure to a lot of topics, but “effort” could just mean repeating and manipulating the same topic long enough to make it stick longer than others. For me, decades ago I learned how to mechanically learn hundreds of english words per day by simply writing each word repeatedly on 4 lines of a large notebook. With each writing my mind would mechanically repeat the word, the translation, the spelling. In an hour I could be done and move on to more fun stuff, knowing my mind has effectively retained a bunch of new language. Mental effort = none. Repetition and manipulation of the knowledge counts more than passive consumption, but it doesn’t need to be a lot of effort.

> I was spending tens of hours listening to politics on the radio. But when I tried to use any of those points in a conversation, I found that I didn't actually know enough to make a coherent argument.

Interesting to hear this. For me it's the opposite; while listening I conduct mini arguments with the presenters in my head, and come up with counter arguments, and counter-counter arguments, and counter-counter-counter arguments.

But a better habit is first check if it matters. Most of the time standing back and asking "why are we even talking about this?" - is the correct question, because usually there's no good reason; it's 'news' aka noise (definitely not education).

Learning needs effort, and that's pretty clear, but not many folks truly understand this. Particularly when it comes to reading, some individuals only focus on the quantity of books they consume rather than the insights they can gain from them. Personally, I prefer using my Kindle to read, where I highlight noteworthy points and then transcribe those highlights into Notion. I'm not sure if writting down the highlights is better than speaking them out, but I find it to be quite effective.

The concept of a "learning box" sounds interesting, and it would be great if there were an extension for it.

Said thousands of years ago: I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.

Repeating a statement doesn't make it more true.

On learning, what I have learnt without effort, but with the lesson of time and painless observation: it is harder to unlearn.

And since content is virtually infinite - far more content was produced today than anyone could consume in 20 lives - it is crutial to currate. Given the amount of noise out there? Sharpen great and fast information filters.

If an article makes a statement with little to no clear argument to back it up, I continue to read but faster, parsing only one every two or three words until the end of a section.

If the same statement is made again without any backing, that's potential fallacies to brainwashing. An author dragging its feet for ads revenue or filling its prints doesn't fall into the conscious brainwasher category but still represent the risk to spoil my time at best.

If no decent argument is laid out by the end of the section, to back the initial claim, a beginning of one at least, then I stop reading the piece. There statistically isn't enough value in there to burn time reading. Or worse, fallacies may start to do their magic.

I did take the time to skim through the entirely of this article, just to confirm the conclusion made after reaching the first part, to write this comment

An old professor that specialized in helping students prepare to university or civil servant tests used to say that if you want to understand a subject, you need to do two things about it:

- Make some kind of logical scheme to help with disambiguation (things like which legal process comes first, of the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle order of philosophers and ideas)

- Write the long form of the subject everything by hand. Pen on paper. If it's a law or bill, write it fully, if it's a scientific concept, write every part of it that is related to the subjects that can appear on the test.

It's slow, tiresome and a complete nightmare for students with anxiety problems (trust me, i know), but as you write, you very slowly burns the knowledge that fills your logical scheme into your brain.

That's what the people that succeed in hard tests do to dominate nebulous topics. I don't know if it translates to actual mastery in different areas, but it's a very strong studying technique

Business knowledge is hard to apply in the field as they require authority, buy in, and can be very consequential. And the other items outlined in the article (like lecturing on something you haven’t tried) appear to be just vehicles to spread misinformation.

Much like the actual blog post.

The neurobiology section is so far removed from the basic understanding of memory formation I honestly wonder how the author came up with it. It's not like myelin plays no role in learning, but the primary mechanism is synaptic formation. The author has ignored the stadium to focus on a seat. If you're interested in this I highly recommend "In Search of Memory" which is Eric Kandel's autobiography. He won the Nobel prize for his work describing how memories form and is a primary author of one of the most popular and widely used textbooks "Principles of Neural Science". His bio is highly entertaining, accessible, and informative.

I don't know about that. I am objectively very capable and much of that wasn't hard or anything. I just poured a lot of knowledge in when I was young. I think I'll take the same approach with my kids: just pour a lot into their heads and they can form the models from the facts.

In fact, the only things that I have poor retention of is Algebraic Geometry because despite the amount of time and effort I spent on it I made no progress in intuition. Partly because I was attempting the "take notes" strategy for that class instead of my usual "high attention / no notes" strategy.

You don't need to go down to cellular or sub-cellular level to see what works and what doesn't. This essay might get this right, but conjectures at higher level may be misleading. At the same time, there has been a good deal of research on how learning works at the level that we can look at and understand: real people learning in different ways, then tested. There's been a research, that I fail to recall where, that when people liked learning, they learned little, while if they did hard tasks and disliked it, in fact they learned the matter far better, than the first group.

Deliberate practice is a well studied phenomenon. My favourite talk in the subject is this one from Veritasium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA

I too found this effect in my dissertation research on same-different judgments of figures on a screen. Hard training achieved better and faster judgments than easy. The add from my work is the interaction effect of the cognitive style (holistic vs analytic) of the participant in comparison to the characteristics the task demands. If someone’s style was different than what the task required, hard training worked even better.

I left a $20 bill in my dissertation at the library if you can find it. I did that to see if anyone would read it.

"Keyboarding does not provide tactile feedback to the brain that the contact between pencil and paper does"

I dunno - I find it easier to remember when I type something out a couple of times. When using pencil and paper, I tend to forget since I am more focused on the writing bit than the remembering it.

This a great summary - also a really good argument I observer when using GitHub's Copilot.

Using copilot makes it much harder to pick up new programming languages cause you'll end up working on much higher abstractions, since copilot is generating a good chunk of the code.

Not to mention that your own code is much more sprinkled in, making it harder to build up a coherent, end-to-end understanding of the underlying syntax and semantics.

This was exactly what I realized lately. I was like the author (and still am to some extent) that I'd scratch an itch but only in a superficial way and then drop it when my energy could not hold.

These superficial learnings essentially become my escape from real world: family responsibility, work and others. I guess I need to grow up and somehow indulge myself with real life but heck I refuse to do that even at 40+.

First chapter of PAIP has this gem that always stuck with me..

You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program. -Alan Perlis

Whenever I want to learn something, after reading the textbooks and doing the problems I always try to implement something that uses that knowledge. For Math/Physics I can vouch for its effectiveness.

A related theory (and book with the same name) is 'Learning as a generative activity', which states that learning occurs when one uses informations / half-backed k owledge to produce new content.

It becomes more relevant these days since we tend more and more to outsource content creation to the machines. This theory would predict that we would learn less doing so.

The connection of improved learning to physical movement and tactile feedback is intriguing. Pen and paper may not have been just simple recording devices (when we didn't know about electricity and the information retaining properties of semiconductors). I wonder if that's why some people prefer mechanical keyboards with their more tactile feeling.

I realized how long I watched YouTube videos, I don't learn any new knowledge. I can learn a little about things I already know enough, or I can grasp overview of new topics, but it's never enough to use in actual conversations.

The worst part is the false sense of improvement. IMO, Learning nothing, yet feeling a sense of improvement is worse than learning nothing at all.

Wondering whether it subconsciously helps to have some sort of (automatic) expiration timer associated with things that end up in your "learning inbox".

I know from myself that I tend to bookmark and save many interesting talks/videos and articles for later, but often I never end up revisiting them; information hoarding in some sense.

Learning for me is an anxious nail biting activity. I do not know why because I never felt the rush to learn something. I get anxious even when I start learning something I want to learn. The smaller the anxiety, the less I learn.

It works, it becomes a cycle of anxiety and blissful revelation, an obsession.

The other day I heard someone describe learning should be about getting 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. What do we say about that?

Sorry but effortful is not a word. Learning needs to 'take effort' to be effective!

I'll make a guess it's because of the think-act-observe(read) loop.