The structure of knowledge is an undirected cyclic graph between concepts. To make it easier to present to the novice, experts convert that graph into a tree structure by removing some edges. Then they convert that tree into natural language. This is called a textbook.
Scholarship is the act of converting the textbook language back into nodes and edges of a tree, and then filling in the missing edges to convert it into the original graph.
The mind cannot hold the entire graph in working memory at once. It’s as important to practice navigating between concepts as learning the concepts themselves. The edges are as important to the structure as the nodes. If you have them all down pat, then you can easily get from one concept to another.
It’s not always necessary to memorize every bit of knowledge. Part of the graph is knowing which things to memorize, which to look up, and where to refer to if you need to look something up.
Feeling as though you’ve forgotten is not easily distinguishable from never having learned something. When people consult their notes and realize that they can’t easily call to mind the concepts they’re referencing, this is partly because they’ve never practiced connecting the notes to the concepts. There are missing edges on the graph.
The structure of knowledge is an undirected cyclic graph between concepts. To make it easier to present to the novice, experts convert that graph into a tree structure by removing some edges. Then they convert that tree into natural language. This is called a textbook.
Scholarship is the act of converting the textbook language back into nodes and edges of a tree, and then filling in the missing edges to convert it into the original graph.
The mind cannot hold the entire graph in working memory at once. It’s as important to practice navigating between concepts as learning the concepts themselves. The edges are as important to the structure as the nodes. If you have them all down pat, then you can easily get from one concept to another.
It’s not always necessary to memorize every bit of knowledge. Part of the graph is knowing which things to memorize, which to look up, and where to refer to if you need to look something up.
Feeling as though you’ve forgotten is not easily distinguishable from never having learned something. When people consult their notes and realize that they can’t easily call to mind the concepts they’re referencing, this is partly because they’ve never practiced connecting the notes to the concepts. There are missing edges on the graph.