Ask HN: Understanding a theory by learning it’s history vs. just how it is now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Understanding a theory by learning it’s history vs. just how it is now?

1 pointstarfleet_bop4 comments

I’ve been thinking about the various methods / philosophies of trying to understand things and theories.

I vaguely remember reading about 2 different philosophies, one where you just learn how things are understood today, e.g. to learn calculus you just learn it’s rules, vs learning the history of calculus and how it came to be in order to understand it.

Another example being learning about fire just through the theory of oxygen and combustion, vs learning about the history of fire such as the 4 elements and theory of Phlogiston.

Does anyone know the formal names for these 2 philosophies / thoughts?

I may be mistaken but I also recall the Whig Interpretation of History and Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts being related. Is the school of analytic thought more predisposed to just learning how things are now in order to understand them?

On a personal note, I always seem to learn things / theories better when I also learn about their history and how they came to be discovered and developed over time.

The historical approach is dangerous.

Lenora Fulani for instance would start a story with the Greeks and drone on and on until you were hypnotized then go off track with some obscure Russian theorist circa 1926, next thing you know you are living in a group home making and selling candles.

Whenever I invented something or figured out how to calculate something the first, second and third versions were worth forgetting about but after many iterations I really understood it and can make it look like it came easy.

Calculus is the ultimate example of something that people stumbled into and the old texts will confuse you. Sigmund Freud’s journey will drive anyone crazy.

Yet I like the early Foucault on history, like Casanova as an early literature of the sexual revolution. Once in a while you see the straight line from the past to the present, the person who was ahead of today 200 years ago. But you will suffer a lot of meandering to find those things.

You're conflating two kinds of history (though they are of course intertwined, but I think a distinction is still worth making): how one person (eg. Freud) developed their ideas over time (which, outside of literary or artistic contexts, isn't very interesting), vs. how some schools of thought (eg. Freudian psychoanalysis, Behaviorism) gave rise to others in response (eg. Humanistic psychology).

Getting back to the OP's question, while some discarded theories can justifiably be ignored when studying a field (eg. in geology, anything prior to the general acceptance of plate tectonics in the late 70s), in some fields older theories and models aren't necessarily abandoned entirely (eg. the aforementioned Freudian psychoanalysis is still somewhat relevant for individual counseling) depending on the context (eg. you probably CAN skip Freud if you're interested in Behavioral Economics or Organizational Psychology), unless what you're really interested in is arguing about definitions (eg. there is no reason to pay any attention to Lamarckism unless you just want to argue whether or not epigenetic mechanisms that provide additional wiggle room for phenotypic expression across generations should be considered Lamarckian).

So, it depends.

I enjoy reading Freud and he was "ahead of his time" in many levels but he got stuck at the "Oedipus complex" and never got a clear concept of "Narcissism" and pre-Oedipal phenomena that you might find talked about in:

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

(It's a mistake to think that "Narcissism" is a disease, rather "Narcissism" is self-love, a concept Freud articulated in at least two different confused ways. Everybody has a "Narcissism" just like everybody has a heart: pathological Narcissism is like having heart disease or heart failure, or a heart attack...)

Both paths are valid and they are often intertwined. But be clear Learning happens under 3 conditions

1. A good environment - low/no distraction

2. Mentors - people who know more AND know how to teach

3. Repetition. The brain has 200 billion neurons with a trillion connections. Nothing is static about that network. The connnections are constantly changing depending on what gets fed in. So if you want to understand something its all about Repeating the same input again and again until connections solidify

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