Comment by andymatuschak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andymatuschak | Hacker News Reader

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(Author here) You might be amused to learn that I actually have looked into prospects for technologies around learning in one's sleep. Unfortunately, things don't look great. But you might enjoy this paper, on learning smell–sound associations during sleep: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3193

To your central point: you're right that effortful engagement is a hugely important ingredient for learning, so we shouldn't aspire to simply remove effort. But do you think that there's nothing that can be done in an explanatory artifact to support the knowledge construction process you're describing? To make it any easier, at all?

Just as an intuition pump, imagine comparing 1. Euclid's Elements, with no figures; 2. Euclid's Elements with figures. Does the latter addition ease knowledge construction? If so, why wouldn't we expect it to be possible to take more steps of the same kind?

Thanks for your reply. The Euclid’s Elements example seems possibly a good anchor for discussion.

However I think the difficulty/effortfulness/dynamism of the learning process should signal that the communication/teaching side of the process is only going to be more effortful/dynamic/etc.

In other words whether or not to present Euclid with diagrams and how and when to present them seems to be such a context-sensitive concerns that any generalized approach is going to miss the mark.

As a learner/reader or teacher/writer I don’t think you can do better than to be equipped with some tools (words, drawing devices, audio, gestures, cinema) and then dynamically utilize these to reach your listener/“student”.

But any thesis that doesn’t respect that this as an extremely dynamic & context-sensitive process is going to fail I think.

I think there’s a parallel to art. And effective teaching being like art.

You can’t formalize the artists process — or dictate a medium preference — without taking away the artist’s effectiveness.

Yep, I think we're aligned on all this! One lens on my aspirations is to create a "stable" of "moves" like "including figures" which can be applied contextually to better align with the way readers think and learn.

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