I will not argue that any of what you said is wrong, because I don’t believe it is, but I’ve personally found that learning too much too fast makes me sick. “Rapid” learning may be fine, but anything faster could have serious trade-offs. Consuming and digesting food os similar enough to consuming and digesting knowledge that many intuitions carry over (like the neusea for overeating, or getting tired of eating the same thing for too long, etc).
When cramming for exams, I would sometimes go through 4000 pages in about two weeks, and it would result in a sort of confusion and nausea, and I’d have lots of loose ends and scattered thoughts floating around. Now, I didn’t always do the exercises like I should, and my learning was more theoretical than practical, so it may just be that I didn’t finish anything before moving on to the next part, leaving my knowledge unsolidified. So “sort of understanding” is definitely not a good stage to stop at, that’s my mistake, and most people here probably know better than to do that.
However, I’ve heard of people trying really hard to study or remember something for hours a day, and then forgetting other important events going back like two weeks. Like memories of last weekend just disappearing and such. I’m not sure if older knowledge is at risk (if you can accidentally erase important things if you’re too aggressive in your learning).
Maybe some people on here have stories to share? Not that it’s likely. You need to be really low in conscientiousness to be as unstructured as I am, and to have a messy desk, a messy house, messy notes, and be obsessed enough with something that you forget to eat, or forget if it’s currently morning or evening. And people like ‘us’ don’t fit in here since we avoid “tedius” things, leading to messy and informal writing, and leading us to avoid knowledge which doesn’t interests us but which is relevant if one wants to write an article on a subject. Perhaps med students have enough of a workload to understand the consequences of excessive learning, but I don’t know how many of them use this site.
Apologies if your areas of interest doesn’t extend to what I’m discussing here.
I think that’s completely valid, and I’ve often experienced that as well. I think, though, if you’re properly taking the time to apply what you’ve learned and build sensory experiences based on the things you’re learning, you’ll have an artificial cap on the pace at which you can consume knowledge and be forced to learn at a speed that allows you to digest things fully and have things properly integrate with your previous base of knowledge instead of replacing things that were in your head before.
Not to say I am or anyone is good at applying everything they learned, and not to say that everything you come across should be properly assimilated, because most of it isn’t really useful at helping you address the problems that you’re facing. But I think if you take seriously the notion that you have to apply things to truly assimilate them, I think you’ll find a healthier balance.
Most of my learning took place in my head, causing it to be isolated from other senses, so that’s likely one of the reasons. In some of the examples I know of people forgetting other things, they did things like learning 2000 digits of pi in 3 days, which is exactly something which doesn’t really connect to anything else. So you’re likely correct (at least, I don’t know enough instances of forgetting to make any counter-arguments)
most of it isn’t really useful at helping you address the problems that you’re facing
This is a rather commonly known technique, but you can work backwards from the problems, learning everything related to them. Rather than learning a lot and hoping that you can solve whatever problems might appear.
What I personally did, which might have been unhealthy, was wanting to fully understand what I was working with in general. So I’d always throw myself at material 5 years of studies above what I currently understood. When introduced to the Bayes chain rule, I started looking into the nature of chain rules, wanting to know how many existed across mathematics and if they were connected with one another. Doing things like this isn’t always a waste of time, though, sometimes you really can skip ahead. If you Google summaries of about 100 different books written by people who are experts in their fields or highly intelligent in general, you will gain a lot of insights into things.
I will not argue that any of what you said is wrong, because I don’t believe it is, but I’ve personally found that learning too much too fast makes me sick. “Rapid” learning may be fine, but anything faster could have serious trade-offs. Consuming and digesting food os similar enough to consuming and digesting knowledge that many intuitions carry over (like the neusea for overeating, or getting tired of eating the same thing for too long, etc).
When cramming for exams, I would sometimes go through 4000 pages in about two weeks, and it would result in a sort of confusion and nausea, and I’d have lots of loose ends and scattered thoughts floating around. Now, I didn’t always do the exercises like I should, and my learning was more theoretical than practical, so it may just be that I didn’t finish anything before moving on to the next part, leaving my knowledge unsolidified. So “sort of understanding” is definitely not a good stage to stop at, that’s my mistake, and most people here probably know better than to do that.
However, I’ve heard of people trying really hard to study or remember something for hours a day, and then forgetting other important events going back like two weeks. Like memories of last weekend just disappearing and such. I’m not sure if older knowledge is at risk (if you can accidentally erase important things if you’re too aggressive in your learning).
Maybe some people on here have stories to share? Not that it’s likely. You need to be really low in conscientiousness to be as unstructured as I am, and to have a messy desk, a messy house, messy notes, and be obsessed enough with something that you forget to eat, or forget if it’s currently morning or evening. And people like ‘us’ don’t fit in here since we avoid “tedius” things, leading to messy and informal writing, and leading us to avoid knowledge which doesn’t interests us but which is relevant if one wants to write an article on a subject. Perhaps med students have enough of a workload to understand the consequences of excessive learning, but I don’t know how many of them use this site.
Apologies if your areas of interest doesn’t extend to what I’m discussing here.
I think that’s completely valid, and I’ve often experienced that as well. I think, though, if you’re properly taking the time to apply what you’ve learned and build sensory experiences based on the things you’re learning, you’ll have an artificial cap on the pace at which you can consume knowledge and be forced to learn at a speed that allows you to digest things fully and have things properly integrate with your previous base of knowledge instead of replacing things that were in your head before.
Not to say I am or anyone is good at applying everything they learned, and not to say that everything you come across should be properly assimilated, because most of it isn’t really useful at helping you address the problems that you’re facing. But I think if you take seriously the notion that you have to apply things to truly assimilate them, I think you’ll find a healthier balance.
Most of my learning took place in my head, causing it to be isolated from other senses, so that’s likely one of the reasons. In some of the examples I know of people forgetting other things, they did things like learning 2000 digits of pi in 3 days, which is exactly something which doesn’t really connect to anything else. So you’re likely correct (at least, I don’t know enough instances of forgetting to make any counter-arguments)
This is a rather commonly known technique, but you can work backwards from the problems, learning everything related to them. Rather than learning a lot and hoping that you can solve whatever problems might appear.
What I personally did, which might have been unhealthy, was wanting to fully understand what I was working with in general. So I’d always throw myself at material 5 years of studies above what I currently understood. When introduced to the Bayes chain rule, I started looking into the nature of chain rules, wanting to know how many existed across mathematics and if they were connected with one another. Doing things like this isn’t always a waste of time, though, sometimes you really can skip ahead. If you Google summaries of about 100 different books written by people who are experts in their fields or highly intelligent in general, you will gain a lot of insights into things.