You Don’t Learn to Ride a Bike by Reading a Textbook | Hacker News Reader

You Don’t Learn to Ride a Bike by Reading a Textbook

blog.studentrnd.org

22 pointstylermenezes9 comments

I think that there are different types of learning, which I think are correlated with different brain areas.

For example, learning to ride a bike likely involves the cerebellum (the chunk way in the back, bottom). The cerebellum is involved in balance and coordination. (People who have damage to their cerebellum still have normal consciousness, but they become very un-coordinated and clumsy.) It's likely that you cannot just read a book and "download" that knowledge into the cerebellum. So skills requiring balance and coordination (riding a bicycle, swimming, sky-diving) must be learned by doing.

Compare that to knowledge that exists in our conscious minds. This knowledge likely exists in the neocortex. If we are conscious of the knowledge, then we likely can read a book and incorporate that knowledge into our own thoughts.

I suppose there are some professions that require a mix of skills. maeon3 brought up brain surgery. Surgeons read a lot of books, but they also practice their cutting skills on cadavers.

But overall, I agree with the concept behind studentrnd.org. "Doing things for yourself" is often a better way to learn. Plus, one of the points they make in this article: the first person to do something (invent the lightbulb, etc) didn't have anyone to learn from; they had to figure things out for themselves.

(Plus, I have my own personal biases: I'm sick of all the hand-holding that goes on in the modern world. Everyone has to take a class for anything, and time is always scheduled... whatever happened to just living your own life and trying things out for yourself? Build your own desk even though you could just buy one from the store... simply because it's fun to just do things for yourself... many people enjoy cooking their own food, etc...)

This article disregards everything we know about how people learn for the sake of a cute analogy.

What do we know about how people learn which this is disregarding? Working in the CS education field for several years, this is very in line with my observations.

I'm also curious. I think there's a lot that I wouldn't intuitively think about now with CS courses but other than advanced algorithms and time complexity analysis, I've been entirely self taught and anytime I learn a new language or concept I struggle with it by trial-and-error.

I could read a whole book about C and not be able to regurgitate any of it, or struggle with a sample application in C and learn the mechanics as I go, so that I get an actual working knowledge of it rather than something intangible.

For example, I'm in a class that is covering concurrency primitives. People understand them, kind of. They can trace a program, but they can't use them or explain where they'd use them. On the other hand I have a project making extensive use of them so I have an idea of how they're used and why they're useful and what they do... AND I also understand HOW they work.

Now which is more pracitcal? Exclusively self-taught? Exclusively book-taught? A mixture? The problem has probably more to do with CS curriculums in my opinion.

We don't need to read a textbook to use a spoon. But, then we need to read the manufacturer's manual to write effective assembly code. Is this a conundrum, or is it just that life is a little bit too complex to fit in naive generalizations?

Also, when I go in for brain surgury, I want a neurosurgeon who has learned to operate on brains by "just trying it out" and Learning from experience, rather than one who has spent long hours painstakingly going over the routines and outcomes of past procedures, past brain surgeons, theory of brain surgury and other text books related to brain surgery.

Programmers should do the same, whatever you do, keep doing trial and error, don't look at code written by the coding legends, don't know their names, don't go over their code, don't learn from them. Just fiddle about with your own programs, if it's good enough to know, you'll find out yourself.

Actually, I think I would much prefer a brain surgeon who has spend decades learning all the intricacies of the brain operation through hands on experience starting when they are in elementary school. I'm just not sure who would provide access to brains in the interim leading up to my surgery, in order to have the experience, due to the nature of the work.

The computer, however, doesn't care how inexperienced you are. You can screw up hundreds or thousands of times and it really doesn't matter. By the time you are old enough to enter the workforce where your work does start to matter, you will have the solid grasp necessary to do the work professionally.

Poe's law almost caught me out here.

actually there was a brain surgeon who was doing exactly that. he was asking questions and depending on the answers different sections of the brain would activate. to make sure he wouldn't cut out the wrong part.

that said edison was a douche and doesn't really fit into the comparison.

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