Notice when you stop reading right before you understand
Here is a bad habit I noticed in myself.
I encounter something I want to learn about. For example, let’s pick transformers.
I scroll through the tweet/paper/article and get some sort of general gist. “Okay, there’s positional encoding, and an encoder-decoder setup, and something called self-attention which people seem to think is important, and people claim this somehow makes it so that the model understands how words in a sentence relate to each other.”
Then, I think to myself: “Understanding this topic seems relevant to my goals! But, I don’t feel like putting in the mental energy to fully understand it. Maybe later.”
And then I abandon the topic. If transformers come up later, my knowledge is limited to a couple of related keywords (“self-attention”, “encoder”/”decoder”) with no real gears-level understanding of anything.
It’s like intellectual edging. I read just enough so that I almost understand the topic, but then I quit and never reach full understanding.
I believe the source of this habit is 1) social media and 2) school. On social media, it’s easy to get in the habit of scrolling past dense intellectual content, because the fluff goes down so much easier. With school, often the way to get adequate grades with minimal time spent is to learn just enough so that you can do shallow keyword matching—full understanding is not needed.
I think this habit is bad because I end up spending too much time skimming content I don’t need and won’t remember, and not enough time trying to deeply understand content I do need and want to remember.
I have noticed this habit in myself, and I intend to unlearn it. Here is the process I intend to follow instead:
My goal is to follow the “YES” branch at least once per day.
I consider this to be attainable because the topics I am envisioning are quite small (“understand how a basic transformer works”, not “understand all variants of transformers ever used”) and my bar for understanding is not too high (“be able to explain how transformers work to a technical friend”, not “be able to implement a transformer from scratch with no references”).
This is something I’ve recognized in myself many times and try to override it. It’s sometimes difficult disambiguating between being too tired to expend energy, intuitively feeling like it’s going to take too long to grok the concept so I should go back to working on other things, and just trying to avoid the mental effort required to grok the concept. Generally, I just try to default to push through every time.
At worst, I’ll add it to my “questions to answer / concepts to grok” page in my notetaking app. Eventually I am getting to them. However, I’ve noticed that pushing through and taking time to understand the concepts/jargon in the moment is usually the right decision. When I do put it aside, I regret having not taken the time to learn sooner.
You might find value in exploring my idea of “boxed topics” and “jenga tower topics.” We can only learn so many new higher-level concepts when we’ve only just learned the fundamentals they depend on. I wonder if you are getting overwhelmed by trying to swallow a large amount of new, interconnected material all at once, bouncing off, getting frustrated. Maybe your solution is to come back to it repeatedly, rather than trying to learn it all in one day. Embrace the power of spaced repetition and spreading out your efforts over time! Your brain needs time to incorporate new ideas.
The example in the beginning is a perfect retelling of my interaction with transformers too :D
However, a word of caution: sometimes the efficient thing is actually to skim and move on. If you spend the effort to actually understand a topic which is difficult but limited in scope, but then you don’t interact with it for a year or two, what you remember is just the high-level verbal summary (the same as if you stopped at the first step). For example, I have understood and forgotten MOSFET transistors at least three times in my life, and each time it was more or less the same effort. If I had to explain them now, I would retreat to a single shallow-level sentence.
“With school, often the way to get adequate grades with minimal time spent is to learn just enough so that you can do shallow keyword matching—full understanding is not needed.”
I once made $1000 from a desperate housemate during Undergrad, who had not written papers for his Epistemology course along with some other philosophy course. He met me at 10pm, the night before everything was due. Now, I did not understand Hume or half of what I wrote, but I literally bunched words according to meaning blocks and slapped them together with a consistent meaning ruleset with some reasonable logical jumps on that same ruleset. I was in the zone enough for him to get a low A and a high B.
Since then, I have been an educator myself and I try very hard to make that sort of keyword matching totally not possible as a final stopping place in my classes. However, it can be used along the way (see below).
And a note on the rest of your paper: Lately one thing I have been doing is “just finish the book.” Like, I was reading Quantum computing books and kept getting hung up on some points. So I went through A Student’s Guide to Vectors and Tensors to refresh my vector analysis. That was nice, however, it just didn’t get me all I needed to comprehend the Quantum stuff. What finally worked a lot better was just setting aside (in fact, shallow keyword matching) understanding of the points of quantum computing and just doing an entire book all the way to the last page. Now I am working another one (which is more programmer oriented) and kind of getting it. Again, I’m just chugging through the book, and mentally holding spaces for the things I still haven’t grokked.
Learning is weird. I kind of need to juggle ambiguity in a creative tension to construct the knowledge for myself Maybe this is a-la Vygotsky? I cannot say for sure because I didn’t finish the Vygotsky parts of the learning theory book. I got stuck re-reading and trying to really understand one or two concepts and never picked it up again after awhile. At the same time, I had enough to finish my paper and get an A. In fact, for my Instructional Design degree, I got nearly a 4.3 GPA in +/- grading. Yes, all of this really happened, including WRT Vygotsky, but as a result I don’t have enough knowledge base about Vygotsky’s theories to be certain one way or another if it’s ironic. I have a little suspicion it is based on my surface-level reading, and so I’m laughing nervously.
Anyway, everything you said was useful and cool. I am going to be thinking about this.
Understanding things in depth is a significant part of the process. You would also like to retain things in your memory. For this, you may like to use Anki (spaced iteration, interleaving, etc.)
My personnal solution to this is to mostly use Anki for everything and anything.
It helps not loose my momentum: if I see my cards about the beginning of the articles about transformers it increases my chance of finishing the article
It garuantees that I never get the dreaded
my knowledge is limited to a couple of related keywords ("self-attention", "encoder"/"decoder") with no real gears-level understanding of anything.feeling. Making it all the more easier to get back to reading.In fact I hate the number 2 feeling so much that it was a huge motivation to really master Anki. (1300 day streak or so with no sign of regret whatsoever)