Andy Matuschak: belief

Transcript context

…Once all the tools are built, when you're at the end of your career, is the learning process supposed to feel fun? Or does it have to feel fun? Is there an element of even when all the tools are there, that there's just like a level of David Goggins, this is going to be miserable, but I've decided to learn this in this way and I just had to go through it. Where does misery come from? I'm asking this honestly, not really rhetorically. Let me try to answer my own question. Let me say first off that I am, broadly speaking, very opposed to what I understand to be David Gogginsesque attitude towards almost anything. In this particular instance, I think what I think is something like, if I ask why is it miserable to learn a particular subject? The answers that come to mind are things like, first off, I don't care about this subject. And I think that's not what we're talking about. You're asking about a world in which these great tools exist and someone's using one of these tools to try to do something they really care about. So another reason why it could be miserable that I think is pretty common is that you have some idea about, you're not going fast enough, or you're failing, or you're struggling, and the misery comes from resisting that. It comes from feeling like you're doing poorly and you shouldn't be doing poorly, it's bad that you're doing poorly. And maybe you're feeling fearful that others are going to judge you or you don't have enough time or something like that. And I think that's basically like an emotional problem that needs to get healed, rather than like a practical problem with learning. In the case of something like organic chemistry, where you truly do just need to learn 200 names or something. One answer is that it can be done very cheaply using modern memory systems. Organic chemistry students suffer through this and they don't need to. But even with modern memory systems, you're probably going to spend a total of 100 or so minutes across some weeks, studying all of these formulae. That still is unpleasant so can that be resolved? And I think the answer is yes, actually. I was thinking about this in the context of the Cell Biology By The Numbers book I was telling you about where there's all of these things like the volume of the nucleotide is a nanoliter. To study the flashcard “What's the volume of a nucleotide?” is not terribly pleasant. I'm not sure it constitutes suffering exactly. It's fine. I'll do it while waiting in line. But I think there is a better version of that, which is like solving an interesting Fermi problem which involves that term. So something like, if I have a vial of the COVID vaccine, how many copies of the COVID RNA are likely to actually be in it if the vial is a milliliter large? That's a fun little question and I can enjoy sitting and noodling on that. And in doing so, I will need to retrieve the volume of the nucleotide to help me make that approximation. So I think there's moves like that you can use to paper over any remaining stuff that feels kind of necessarily unpleasant or rote. I'm actually surprised to hear you say that because one way in which I read some of your stuff is that this is actually a way of endorsing the traditional way of thinking about education, but using new tools to get the traditional ones. To give you an example of what I'm talking about, you go back to a headmaster from the 1900s, and you say, is it important to have the taxonomy of a subject memorized? You say, of course it is, that's why you’re going to spend a year memorizing the taxonomy. And then you would say memorizing is actually important so that you have a dictionary by which to proceed on the subject. So in those ways you have new systems for doing that same kind of thing. And the reason in this particular case, I was expecting you to say, No, you have to be disciplined if you decided to learn something. I expected that in the case of the three hours of intense learning followed by an intense piano session, you were just really tired at the end and you're like, “But no, this is something I have to do this evening.” So yes, I'm actually surprised to hear you say that.…

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