It’s interesting how learning to code is so challenging. Especially because it’s something humans make. Over the past few years, coders have been abstracting the complexity away, but man there’s a lot of it.
On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd.
Like nobody has quite cracked the nut for how to do it. Not with programming, not with language, not with cooking. It’s always so much effort. As if the lessons people have learned are forgotten as soon as a few years pass.
We know a little bit. Spaced repetition helps. Not doing anything after studying intensely helps (as in literally just doing nothing after studying improves retention).
Going for long walks helps. So does transforming concepts into something you can see (I suspect because we have a lot of “machinery” for visual computations).
Engaging more of your muscles during an activity (writing as opposed to typing) helps too.
Engaging extra senses (like smell) seems to help.
But that’s about it. There’s no common modality, no library of how humans learn, retain, and transfer knowledge.
It’s been like what? 200,000 years since we’ve been on this planet.
We’ve barely touched the surface of what we’re capable of doing because we keep forgetting.
> On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd.
It's very well studied. I'd start by reading a cognitive science textbook and go from there. I have Cognition by Reisberg[0], it was well-written and well-structured.
Alternatively, an entertaining and informative popular account is Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel[1].
I do agree that the research findings are greatly underapplied, though.
There are two ways to learn. Copy knowledge from someone else or trial and error. Copying has the advantage that it's much faster but it doesn't necessarily result in comprehension.
When someone shows how to install i.e. kubernetes they show you the happy path. Once something goes wrong you can't debug the problem. The alternative is to simply try installing kubernetes yourself. You will probably make some major mistakes but you will also gain enough experience to deal with all the edge cases when they do occur.
In my 30+ year carreer in IT the most beneficial insights came from brilliant people I had the pleasure to work with and who were willing to share.
In a way that's self-evident. Really smart people with a true clue about what they are doing are not wallowing in angst that their trainees (for lack of a better word) would ever endanger their position and they're often happy to share.
That does not discount the trial and error approach, which could work quite brilliantly when the documentation was good. (being something of a dinosaur I'd happily refer to anything DEC in its heyday).
But there is that list of people, which I can't really thank enough for instilling some of the invaluable knowledge, which defined my career.
> On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best.
I think it’s naive to think there one way that will work for everyone. Attempts to find such a solution inevitably fail because it’s not something that can be generalized and then scaled. The more mechanized and focused the process, the more outliers get left behind.
On a more meta level, it feels like we’ve barely touched the margins of how humans learn best. That’s always struck me as odd.
Like nobody has quite cracked the nut for how to do it. Not with programming, not with language, not with cooking. It’s always so much effort. As if the lessons people have learned are forgotten as soon as a few years pass.
We know a little bit. Spaced repetition helps. Not doing anything after studying intensely helps (as in literally just doing nothing after studying improves retention).
Going for long walks helps. So does transforming concepts into something you can see (I suspect because we have a lot of “machinery” for visual computations).
Engaging more of your muscles during an activity (writing as opposed to typing) helps too.
Engaging extra senses (like smell) seems to help.
But that’s about it. There’s no common modality, no library of how humans learn, retain, and transfer knowledge.
It’s been like what? 200,000 years since we’ve been on this planet.
We’ve barely touched the surface of what we’re capable of doing because we keep forgetting.