I read Jaynes’ Probability book from cover to cover last year, and most of my understanding of it came visually. This was a big breakthrough for me, because I’d never tried to understand math visually before—I think I thought the graphs in my calculus education were there to explain the equations, and that the equations held the real core meaning. I finally gave up on trying to gain any intuition through equations alone and went visual first when reading Jaynes and this approach gave me 5 or 10 times the value I would have gotten if I tried to understand it algebra-first.
That is a bold statement! Sincerely taking you at your word, I can’t think of another intervention for reading comprehension that offers anything like that kind of value.
By contrast, I’ve spent the last few months trying to develop a systematic method of translating my biochemistry textbook into a rigorous form of shorthand that can capture causal and structural relationships. It’s been extremely laborious, and while I feel I’ve made a lot of progress on seeing how far you can push note-taking, coming back to visualization feels like it makes everything move much faster.
Very interesting shorthand project! It reminds me of my other big learning realization, about 8 years ago, of “don’t take notes during a lecture, just sit and try and understand in the moment”. So maybe my high-level studying strategy is something like “go all in just trying to grok the thing as best you can, even if you forget a lot of the details at first”. Visualization fits nice into that strategy. Though I think I’m basically just more visual—I’m obsessed with data graphics in a way my coworkers just clearly are not at all.
I read Jaynes’ Probability book from cover to cover last year, and most of my understanding of it came visually. This was a big breakthrough for me, because I’d never tried to understand math visually before—I think I thought the graphs in my calculus education were there to explain the equations, and that the equations held the real core meaning. I finally gave up on trying to gain any intuition through equations alone and went visual first when reading Jaynes and this approach gave me 5 or 10 times the value I would have gotten if I tried to understand it algebra-first.
That is a bold statement! Sincerely taking you at your word, I can’t think of another intervention for reading comprehension that offers anything like that kind of value.
By contrast, I’ve spent the last few months trying to develop a systematic method of translating my biochemistry textbook into a rigorous form of shorthand that can capture causal and structural relationships. It’s been extremely laborious, and while I feel I’ve made a lot of progress on seeing how far you can push note-taking, coming back to visualization feels like it makes everything move much faster.
Very interesting shorthand project! It reminds me of my other big learning realization, about 8 years ago, of “don’t take notes during a lecture, just sit and try and understand in the moment”. So maybe my high-level studying strategy is something like “go all in just trying to grok the thing as best you can, even if you forget a lot of the details at first”. Visualization fits nice into that strategy. Though I think I’m basically just more visual—I’m obsessed with data graphics in a way my coworkers just clearly are not at all.