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 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.