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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

One key feature of learning is that it must involve some form of failure - at least in the sciences that HN is typically involved in. It is impossible to fail at watching a video, but it is possible to fail at deriving a formula yourself on a piece of paper, or at writing a program that is supposed to achieve some goal. The failure and subsequent recovery is exactly where knowledge is gained. This is perhaps why writing code is so much fun, the failure-recovery loop is very short.

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I agree with you, although I would put it differently.

Learning requires feedback, not necessarily failure. The issue with watching a video is not that you can’t fail, you can certainly fail to get the point made in a video, but as you can’t get any feedback it would be hard to figure out that you didn’t get it.

In my view the difference between watching a video, vs trying to implement an idea as code is the direct feedback you get. If you’re wrong or made a mistake, you’ll know and can adjust your mental model accordingly.

It’s also what I like about writing code, if a colleague and I disagree we can just design a test together and find out and learn together.

(citation needed)? The more general knowledge of the related area you have, the more the new information starts looking like "this other thing, but with a slight twist". But that means you don't need to fail to learn. If you tell me about some new networking/routing layer for example, I don't need to "fail" in any way to understand how it works - it's going to be like or unlike something we already have.

At some point you'll have to use your knowledge for something, and only then you'll find out whether or not your knowledge is complete, i.e. whether or not you've actually learned the topic, or is there an entire aspect you haven't thought about before.

Of course this is all a simplification, if you learn protocol X and then someone comes up with protocol Y that just adds a few fields then it may be just enough to read about these new fields. I'm talking about larger stuff, like knowing quite a bit about radio communication protocols and encountering secure wireless ranging protocols. A whole other game.

Of course we find out we don't understand something via failure. But that's a different claim than needing to fail.

I think the most correct way to phrase this would be that the more complicated something is, the more likely it is that you believe some falsehoods about it, or that there are entire areas that you didn't consider at all. And people are often very bad at recognizing complexity upfront.

One extreme example that comes to mind is people asking contractors on websites like Upwork to implement a clone of google.com, with some ridiculous offers under $1000. The rationale being that google.com only has a logo, text field, and two buttons, so it shouldn't be too hard to make.

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