It really wouldn’t be possible to take 4-6 hours to talk to other people, that would completely take you out of it, it would kill a lot of momentum. After 3 days of really spending every waking hour thinking of a subject, it sort of temporarily becomes the new baseline, and the difficulty of thinking about it drops really dramatically, but it is a fragile effect, any context switching at all comes at the cost of a blunting of momentum, and this is especially true of talking to other people. If you’ve spent a lot of time just thinking in silence, 4 hours of talking with others will literally cause a pounding headache. I took about 3 to 4 hours per day of break-time to eat and go walk without feeling the need to think of the material, but in the later part of the 10-day period I usually think about the textbook even during breaks. I’m not sure how you’d manage this with a job and daily commitments, what I do is do one of these 10-day periods every 2 months, but I run a small business that allows me to do that, and I don’t have a romantic relationship.
Very interesting. It seems important to understand the relationship between the “initial contact” with knowledge and maintenance activities later on.
For example, 12 hours/day for 10 days is 120 hours. By contrast, a conventional class demands about 300 hours of work over the course of a semester. If we consider both of these to constitute an “initial contact” with knowledge, the 10 day retreat is much more efficient.
Then we have to ask whether one or the other leads to more efficient maintenance over the long run. Plus, on an instrumental level, we absorb knowledge not only to accumulate it, but also to determine what sort of projects to pursue and how to specialize ourselves.
Figuring out how a 10-day single-subject retreat vs. a half-year spread-out interleaving of learning impact later maintenance and ability to choose and execute projects would be an important aspect of deciding which approach to “initial contact” is optimal.
Since a graduate program basically consists of classes + research, and the classes are pretty much all “initial contact,” it would seem that if the 10-day retreat was more efficient, that you could replace a 2-year grad program with maybe 9 months of retreats. But I’m not sure if that sort of lifestyle seems optimal somehow… (low confidence on all of this!)
As a followup, it does seem like you could test this to some extent. Find out what textbook an upcoming year-long class uses. Take 10 days prior to the class for a retreat, during which you read the entire textbook. Then try to do the homework and exams with minimal review of the textbook, treating the class as a review of material you’re already familiar with rather than a first brush with the content. Since textbook reading comprises the bulk of my studies, it seems possible that this would feel like a net time saving/deeper learning, but I’m not sure. Would be interesting to try it and see!
It really wouldn’t be possible to take 4-6 hours to talk to other people, that would completely take you out of it, it would kill a lot of momentum. After 3 days of really spending every waking hour thinking of a subject, it sort of temporarily becomes the new baseline, and the difficulty of thinking about it drops really dramatically, but it is a fragile effect, any context switching at all comes at the cost of a blunting of momentum, and this is especially true of talking to other people. If you’ve spent a lot of time just thinking in silence, 4 hours of talking with others will literally cause a pounding headache. I took about 3 to 4 hours per day of break-time to eat and go walk without feeling the need to think of the material, but in the later part of the 10-day period I usually think about the textbook even during breaks. I’m not sure how you’d manage this with a job and daily commitments, what I do is do one of these 10-day periods every 2 months, but I run a small business that allows me to do that, and I don’t have a romantic relationship.
Very interesting. It seems important to understand the relationship between the “initial contact” with knowledge and maintenance activities later on.
For example, 12 hours/day for 10 days is 120 hours. By contrast, a conventional class demands about 300 hours of work over the course of a semester. If we consider both of these to constitute an “initial contact” with knowledge, the 10 day retreat is much more efficient.
Then we have to ask whether one or the other leads to more efficient maintenance over the long run. Plus, on an instrumental level, we absorb knowledge not only to accumulate it, but also to determine what sort of projects to pursue and how to specialize ourselves.
Figuring out how a 10-day single-subject retreat vs. a half-year spread-out interleaving of learning impact later maintenance and ability to choose and execute projects would be an important aspect of deciding which approach to “initial contact” is optimal.
Since a graduate program basically consists of classes + research, and the classes are pretty much all “initial contact,” it would seem that if the 10-day retreat was more efficient, that you could replace a 2-year grad program with maybe 9 months of retreats. But I’m not sure if that sort of lifestyle seems optimal somehow… (low confidence on all of this!)
As a followup, it does seem like you could test this to some extent. Find out what textbook an upcoming year-long class uses. Take 10 days prior to the class for a retreat, during which you read the entire textbook. Then try to do the homework and exams with minimal review of the textbook, treating the class as a review of material you’re already familiar with rather than a first brush with the content. Since textbook reading comprises the bulk of my studies, it seems possible that this would feel like a net time saving/deeper learning, but I’m not sure. Would be interesting to try it and see!