YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Matuschak

lines on the record: 158
first: 2023-07-12
most recent: 2023-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“As the material gets harder, and as it gets less familiar. So, one common thread, at least in kind of learning science stuff, has been outsourced metacognition. So some of the ways we outsource that are actually very familiar. They're things like somebody gives you a syllabus and tells you what to read when. You reference that. So that is a user interface. That is a design practice. If you're a self-motivated student, one thing you can do that I've done is just go appropriate a syllabus from some graduate level course that corresponds to the text that you're reading and say like, well, that might be a good guide as to what's most important, how to approach this. There are also lots of things that one can build directly into the interfaces. Just as one example, in quantum country, which was a textbook that Michael Nielsen and I developed to explore some ideas around augmented breeding experiences, we embedded a bunch of review questions.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So one enduring result in education psychology is that when you're doing a lot of cognition, metacognition is difficult. So what I mean by that is like when you're thinking really hard about the stuff on the page, it's very difficult for you to plan, regulate yourself, figure out what the best next action to do is reflect and evaluate whether you're understanding things. All the stuff that we're talking about, about asking questions, all that gets”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is again a habit, it's a skill that can be built. Adler and Vandoran suggest that the first and most important rule of skillful reading, active reading, is asking questions and trying to answer them. And that really, if you just dwell on that and dwell on, well, what kinds of questions should I be asking and how should I go about asking them? How should I go about answering them when the author isn't present and so on and so forth, they don't get very far. We also say conversely, and like this isn't meant as a criticism, an undemanding reader asks no questions and gets no answers. And I certainly have read many, many books that way, particularly before I develop this habit. And I often found myself falling into that second category of the issue was not that I failed to remember things, but rather that my eyes just kind of skidded across paragraphs without even realizing.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cases, it's not that they don't want to stay awake and to really deal with that text. In many cases, it's that they actually don't know how. They butt their heads up against this very difficult wall of material. It's almost like maybe a rock climber who's not very experienced going up against a wall that all it has is these really subtle notches. To an experienced rock climber, those subtle notches are like a ladder, right? Like they can get right in there and start making some progress and seeing what's up with this wall. But if you're an inexperienced rock climber, it just looks like a solid wall. So the claim maybe, maybe this is an optimistic claim. You can take me to task, is that there is such a thing as being a more skillful reader. And being a more skillful reader will actually, in practice, in many cases, when the reading is aligned with your actual interests, produce a more serious, more”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For them, I think they really do want to absorb, and we see that in their behavior. There's a second thing that I think is relevant. Well, to explain this, I will reference Mortimer Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book, which is a great guide on serious reading. And they consider the case of people who often have books on their bedside table, and sometimes they're very difficult or demanding books. These are kind of aspirational, like, oh, I wish I could read King Lear. I want to be the kind of person who reads King Lear. You put it on your bedside table and people were like, read it before bed. And they'll find that they fall asleep while they're reading it. They're not really absorbing or understanding this book. I mean, it's not just an issue of memory. It's like they simply are not apprehending the words on the page. And the authors of how to read a book make the case that the issue here with these people who are falling asleep reading King Lear is in many cases.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think the statement is just a little too general probably to comment on. I mean, so I think it's certainly the case that most students don't actually want to do this because they're learning stuff that don't actually care about learning, or even if they do care about learning it, often there isn't a clear connection between whatever reading or activity they're doing in the moment and the thing that originally inspired them for the subject, like what they actually want to do. And so there's always something tenuous going on. I think, on the other hand, it's amazing to look at, say, subreddits and to look at the level of nurtury and fascination that will be brought to bear on gardening equipment or knots, for instance. People are competing to tie some very obscure 18th century knot or whatever, and they're flipping through almanacs from the period. So when people are interested in it connects to something that's truly meaningful,”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“LLMs depend on our ability to externalize things and to make them legible. Basically, everyone in the educational space are focused on really like the bottom quartile, like not even medium.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underappreciate the role that memory has in our lives. If what you're trying to do is to understand something pretty difficult, your ability to understand that thing is still absolutely going to be bound on your memory of the constituent material. For the median student, the education system mostly wants to make the student do things they don't want to do. It's not about helping them achieve their goals more easily or more effectively for the most part. It's about achieving goals that aren't theirs. The histories in educational psychology that I'm most aligned with are the most robotic, authoritarian kind of histories, and also the ones that are most like kind of unschooling and monasteries.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source