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Comment by mighmi | Hacker News Reader

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...

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I feel the same. I think it's mostly "impatience" or the fear of losing time. We get older and busier and the "price" we pay to spend hours on a book gets more and more expensive.

Learning is an investment, and as my salary increases and life gets more comfortable, my brain doesn't feel the urge to learn and prefers leisure.

I'm looking for ways to "hack" my brain and get back into the habit of learning in my free time and wanting to figure things out. When I have kids I hope they will be curious and I'll learn with them.

That's super annoying, because while I procrastinate on reading papers or even articles on the things I want to learn (as in, I feel - at least occasionally - motivated and positive about learning), works of fiction, like novels or short stories, can instantly suck me in for days. Somehow, when it comes to fiction, the beancounter in my head just packs up and goes on a leave.

Perhaps you’re still learning to enjoy life.

> I'm looking for ways to "hack" my brain and get back into the habit of learning in my free time and wanting to figure things out

Please share anything you've found. For me:

- discovering Obsidian a year ago was a great boon. It led me to comb through millions of words of old person notes, remembering many different me's interest in different topics etc. When approaching a new topic, I now compulsively take detailed notes and then reform them into "evergreen notes" (google this term) although it's not the same effortless joy of my childhood.

- recently refinding old sites like wiki.c2.com has rekindled a great passion. The style of discussions, without marketing, status seeking, linking to blogs, medium articles etc. is also extremely pleasant and lets the content float up much better. Even modern communities which don't suffer from these problems still seem to have jaded userbases, who are just... Tired and not willing to really revel in their knowledge, but protectedly proactively avoid things.

- really calming myself down before engaging, e.g. closing my eyes for 10 mins in quiet, or just doodling on a paper, maybe stacking some 9 volt batteries into a tower and calmly approaching the topic, reading or such. In this way, reading can almost be like a reverse stream of consciousness. However life quickly knocks, taking me out of this (flow?) state. I recall some researchers discussing how children effortlessly play (so the opposite of the original topic about effortful learning...) experimenting, collecting data etc. to learn and develop their worldviews, but if you impose requirements or expectations on them, they learn slower and don't blossom.

I keep curiosity but lowering the bar and raising the reward. I think that's going to be different for everyone, but for me the lowered bar is by making sure I have concrete "wander" time in my day, and the reward is having someome I'm excited to talk to about the topic. The latter gives me the drive to actually use my wander time on stuff that's interesting, not just faff it away on YouTube.

I also make "grab bags" for everything, I am a perpetually disorganized person but this lets me be prepared. I have a drone bag, an electronics box, a bike toolbox, any significant project gets a bag/box I grab on a whim. That way I lower the preparedness bar and boring organization tasks.

I'm definitely in this camp except for one area - PBS Space Time[0].

I have _NO CLUE_ about 80% of the topics on the more complex subjects. Especially when he's explaining the equations. I rewatch the videos sometimes 4-5 times and still learn things that my mind glossed over. Lots of "ah ha!" moments. Love this channel.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime

Maybe read “Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata”. Forces you into that mode you were in earlier in your life.

I found the experience enlightening.

According to Krashen, effort is not needed for comprehensible input to be effective. Rather, it is more likely that you are simply not consuming enough comprehensible input

> not consuming enough comprehensible input

I wonder if the nature of internet discourse has also changed, reducing how much there is. Comparing wiki.c2.com style pages/discussions with reddit now, things evolve in a much less coherent manner, there is less of a conversational back and forth truly developing ideas and more of a show-offy approach. Perhaps topics are also more difficult - e.g. learning CSS today with 30+ units of measurement must be hell compared to back in the day.

Krashen is speaking with regards to languages. He doesn't expand on this to other fields.

It may well be the case that 'comprehensible input' is enough for languages because we already _understand_ at least one language to a functional degree, and there's no real 'learning' a foreign language, moreso _remembering_ words and structures. Much like most people don't 'understand' the mechanics of their native language, they merely use them.

I don't think that we can readily assume that comprehensible input is thus generalisable across other things we would wish to learn.

Krashen is brought up a lot as a "magic bullet". But I think there are 3 big caveats to his work that often don't get brought up.

- The amount of comprehensible input needed is really huge. So much so that someone who has 10-20 hours a week to learn a language might be better using an active approach.

- I used to think that if you understood a language certainly you would also be able to speak it. But this just isn't true. Passive vocabulary and active vocabulary (not to mention sentence construction) are separate and need to be practiced individually.

- In my own experience I have been very successfull with comprehensible input when paired with being in the country or studying the language during the day. This allows me to solidify links from what I've heard and read with the real world. AFAIK, his studies had a similar setup, always including students who were studying the language and then did extra reading/watching on top of that.

There is a bit of a pipe dream, that you will just watch mangas all day at your level and suddenly come out fluent.

> I need comprehensible input

The safer bet. Children and adult cognitive loads are assigned different in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

It’s almost certainly dependent on age. I see the same youthful development in my own children that I no longer have.

I believe it's just learned impatience/discomfort. I have over half a century, and yet can still approach things with the attitude of "it's all greek to me" — meaning that a bunch of funny characters may initially make me feel like I'm back in kindergarten, but I can remain confident that it will all become comprehensible after I have learned* what each splodge signifies and in what ways they are combined together.

> μὴ εἶναι βασιλικὴν ἀτραπὸν ἐπί γεωμετρίαν — E

* of course, a major part of this learning process involves doing the exercises, and if no one has been nice enough to set any exercises, then one simply has to provide one's own by playing around with other combinations of splodges to see if anything interesting results. cf http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

I think there's a lot of possible explanations which may be true to different degrees and for different people.

One possibility is that it becomes more challenging to integrate information the more you know, and the more that you are aware of your limitations.

The child might read something and pick up the general idea of what things are from the context. An adult might realize that the context definition is incomplete.

A child might read an instruction that says to use a box wrench to tighten the bolt and pick up from contacts that that's just the tool that you use.

An adult night Wonder what kind of box wrench, metric or imperial ratcheting or not. What about other times where I use the socket for this type of work, is that better

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