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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

You can downvote me but I think OP hasn't learned how to learn yet. If OP reads Wikipedia by understanding every sentence and clicking on every link, that's deliberately sabotaging his own learning. Attitudes like "I don't really feel like spelunking through a ton more articles" simply shows OP isn't interested in learning per se, just quick answers.

OP learns in a way that's very child-like. When you are a five-year-old it's okay to learn by asking everything. That stops being acceptable by the age of fifteen. OP hasn't learned any research skills yet, and when OP's needs inevitably exhausts the ability of LLMs, OP would be utterly unable to read an encyclopedia or a research paper or perhaps a textbook.

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OP here. I think learning exists on a broad spectrum. On one end, you're just indulging curiosity ("I wonder how...?"). On the other, you're trying to build deep understanding and expertise.

I completely agree that for the latter goal, the approaches in the blog post are insufficient, even undesirable. And I do worry that the way I engage with content on the web is weakening my ability to go deep on a subject I'm interested in.

But I do think there is value in just being able to indulge curiosity quickly and consistently. Not only is it rewarding in its own right, but it also provides the spark that leads you to eventually go deeper.

Lately, I've found myself sitting at a laptop with friends, asking GPT a question, reading and discussing the response, and then coming up with and asking followup questions as a group. I don't think we would've done that in the past, because the interface of search engines and webpages and browser tabs were too unwieldy to engage with collectively. It just feels like a completely new way to learn things, and what's what I'm most excited about.

OT but I like the fact that you used please and thank you.

I notice that this contains only criticism and comparison to children, without offering a better way to learn.

If OP reads your comment, they will be no better at learning than they were before. In that way, it's a pretty unhelpful comment.

The problem is Wikipedia. OP's approach is perfectly natural. Textbooks are designed for OP's approach because that's how people learn.

If I want to learn about topic C which requires knowledge of topics A and B, but C can also be generalized to concepts X and Y, it will be very hard to learn from Wikipedia.

If I don't know how to add numbers and look up "sum" on Wikipedia, in the second sentence I learn that summing is used for functions, vectors, matrices, and other things I don't know about. This is a cool feature and I love it for exploring but hate it for learning things that require a few layers of concepts to get.

Textbooks do the opposite and are awesome. An electronics textbook will take you step by step through all the concepts to get to LEDs, without "forward references" to the concepts you haven't learned yet.

The "problem" with textbooks is that it will take a while to get to the destination. LEDs might be in chapter 15 and you may not want to spend a few months going through chapters 1-14. You don't know what you will need to understand chapter 15.

But you can perhaps work backward - you are guaranteed that any unfamiliar concept introduced in chapter 15 will be covered in chapters 1-14, and that there is no rabbit hole.

ChatGPT or a personal tutor can shortcut this by giving you just the "narrow path" of knowledge to understand the concept that you want to learn.

I agree, especially if you consider these were the questions on OP's mind:

> just out of curiosity, I wanted to learn more. I get that LEDs consume less energy and release less heat, and that they're made using semiconductors. But what kinds of semiconductors? How do semiconductors work in general, anyway?

And they proceed to type "LED" into Google. Why not "led what kind of semiconductor" and "how do semiconductors work in leds"?

I assume, OP didn't write "LED" in the ChatGPT text box without any context either.

For what it’s worth, the transcript I posted is 100% of the conversation I had with GPT-4. “How do LEDs work?” was the only thing I wrote in the initial question.

I did try Googling “how do LEDs work” for comparison, but it yielded the same top few results. Of course, I could have iteratively tried different search queries to get to the answers I wanted, but this gets at my real point: I don’t have to formulate 5 different search queries anymore, allowing me to maintain one focused line of inquiry. I talk about this a little in the “fewer browser tabs” bit of the post.

I do think someone could create an alternative search UI that would be better for learning on the web. Something where you can run multiple searches and “collect” the useful information you find into a single page, rather than having the results split across a mess of browser tabs and note-taking windows. Maybe I just find juggling many browser tabs more annoying than other people do?

Anyway, I tried the queries you posted above, and most resources I found were still very confusing for a layman. The one exception is this page, which I think does a great job of introducing additional complexity on this topic gradually: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/led.htm

Just out of curiosity what would say is the optimal way to learn from an encyclopedia, research paper or Wikipedia?

Sticking to what you want to understand - for example, when reading a paper, you don't necessarily need to read the methodology, especially if it's out of your field. Read the abstract and the conclusion, identify any part of it that you are suprised by and would like further explanation, and go see that part of the paper.

A lot of the paper is talking to peer and people wanting to verify the validity of the paper - by it being peer reviewed, you can mostly assume that the paper is valid, and stick to what the paper is saying instead of it's methodology.

>> you can mostly assume that the paper is valid

What? Is that something you can still assume in 2023?

>> you can mostly assume that the paper is valid

you should check this

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging or P-hacking

and many more...

Yes! I'm well aware of the replication crisis.

While this is valid, this shouldn't make us paranoid of all papers. If it's a paper out of your expertise, it's unlikely that you would be able to catch problems with it that the peer review process wouldn't have caught.

So in practice, it doesn't really change the way you interact with papers - it should change the way people write them and how the peer review process works.

You would at least skim over the whole thing without being distracted by snippets or phrases you don't understand. That's the whole point: you need the ability to have temporary placeholders for concepts you don't know and continue learning. You cannot expect that everything you learn will be arranged in a fashion such that every new concept only mentions already known concepts.

Not that harsh but I do think that googling as well as ChatGPT will only yield in a superficial understanding of topics. For a deeper profound understanding, connections, complexities, etc. A different more holistic learning is required. Not sure how else to explain this.

Agreed. I look back to my high school and college education and can't help but think that for a deeper understanding, exercises must be needed. It is too easy to think you have learned something but then fail at the easiest synthetic problem that requires you to use what you have learned to solve a problem.

Yes, I did write 'exercise' in my original post but then deleted it as I felt it was too much like asking to make it like school.

Asking simple questions is a great way to start, it doesn’t matter how old you are. I think Feynman and Schrödinger would agree. Certainly de Broglie would. You can go down as deeply as you like.

Right now, if the level involves advanced math, it’s better to switch to other sources at some point, but that will change.

You can ask GPT-4 to tutor you, also.

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