Some reasons I believe transfer learning can happen:
When I did martial arts as an adult, the instructors could spot people with previous experience with martial arts, dance, yoga, or gymnastics. I remember at least three true positive predictions, and no false positives or negatives, although I could have missed them.
This wasn’t true for other physical activities, like football or track, so it wasn’t raw athleticism.
As a child my karate teacher advised us to try gymnastics, to improve karate.
I hear about football players being sent to do dance to aid football, but not the reverse.
Inside view, I know I learned skills like and “balance” from yoga and then applied it in dance and martial arts.
Dancers report their skills transfer between dances, but not symmetrically, some dances are much better foundations than others.
Everytime I hear a polyglot talk, they say languages start to get easier around the fourth one, and by 10 they’re collecting them like pokemon.
Some things I think are broadly useful, although you can argue about if they are literally transfer learning or merely very widely applicable skills:
thinking through problems step by step
chunking problems to reduce RAM demands
noticing when I actually understand something, versus merely think I do or could pass a test
knowing how to space repetition
somatic skills:
balance
Is this good, muscle-building pain, or bad, tendon-tearing pain?
Is this gentle stretching or am I gonna tear a tendon again?
watch a novel movement you haven’t seen before and turn it into muscle commands
copy a novel movement maintaining L-R instead of mirroring
translate verbal instructions into novel muscle movements
Update: I tested snakebird on three people: one hardcore math person who delights in solving math puzzles in his head (but hadn’t done many puzzle games), one unusually mathy social science type, one generalist (who had played snakebird before). Of these, the hardcore math guy blew the others away. He picked up rules faster, had more endurance, and was much more likely to actually one shot, including after skipping 20 levels ahead.
But, also maybe more interestingly/importantly: I’m interested in having the Real Smart People walk through what their process is actually like, and see if they’re doing things differently that other people can learn. (Presumably this is also something there’s some literature on?)
Came here to comment that. It seems much more efficient to learn the cognitive strategies smart people use than to try to figure them out from scratch. Ideally, you would have people of different skill levels solve problems (and maybe even do research) while thinking out loud and describing or drawing the images they are manipulating. I know this has been done at least for chess, and it would be nice to have it for domains with more structure. Then you could catalog these strategies and measure the effectiveness of teaching the system 2 process (the whole process they use, not only the winning path) and explicitly train in isolation the individual system 1 steps that make it up.
Yeah, although notably: the goal here is to become confidently good at solving domains where there are no established experts (with the motivating case being AI alignment, though I think lots of high-impact-but-vague fields are relevant). I think this does require developing the ability to invent new ways of thinking, and check for yourself which ways of thinking apply to a situation.
I think the optimal curriculum will include some amount of learning-for-yourself and some amount of learning from others.
This might be confusing the cart with the horse though, since this doesn’t control for IQ. A person with a high IQ might be more attracted to math because of it’s relative ease and also be able to pick up specific cognitive skills faster (i.e. being able to play snakebird well). In other words, correlation doesn’t imply causation.
Transfer learning isn’t what is controversial, it is far and/or general transfer to many different domains which is controversial. There is no verified method of raising general intelligence, for example.
Do you have any pointers to what you mean? (i.e. sources that demonstrate “not particularly general transfer?” or “explicitly not working in the general case”)
Part of why I feel optimistic is I’m specifically trying to learn/teach/enable skills in a set-of-domains that seem at least fairly related, i.e. research taste in novel, technical domains, and I’d expect “weak transfer learning” to be good enough to matter without making any claims about “general transfer learning.”
(I separately guess it should be possible to train at general transfer learning but it should require training at a pretty wide variety of skills, at which point it’s actually kinda unclear whether mechanistically what’s happening is “lots of transfer between related skills” vs “raising general intelligence factor”)
Some reasons I believe transfer learning can happen:
When I did martial arts as an adult, the instructors could spot people with previous experience with martial arts, dance, yoga, or gymnastics. I remember at least three true positive predictions, and no false positives or negatives, although I could have missed them.
This wasn’t true for other physical activities, like football or track, so it wasn’t raw athleticism.
As a child my karate teacher advised us to try gymnastics, to improve karate.
I hear about football players being sent to do dance to aid football, but not the reverse.
Inside view, I know I learned skills like and “balance” from yoga and then applied it in dance and martial arts.
Dancers report their skills transfer between dances, but not symmetrically, some dances are much better foundations than others.
Everytime I hear a polyglot talk, they say languages start to get easier around the fourth one, and by 10 they’re collecting them like pokemon.
Some things I think are broadly useful, although you can argue about if they are literally transfer learning or merely very widely applicable skills:
thinking through problems step by step
chunking problems to reduce RAM demands
noticing when I actually understand something, versus merely think I do or could pass a test
knowing how to space repetition
somatic skills:
balance
Is this good, muscle-building pain, or bad, tendon-tearing pain?
Is this gentle stretching or am I gonna tear a tendon again?
watch a novel movement you haven’t seen before and turn it into muscle commands
copy a novel movement maintaining L-R instead of mirroring
translate verbal instructions into novel muscle movements
read quickly without losing comprehension
experimental design + analysis
Update: I tested snakebird on three people: one hardcore math person who delights in solving math puzzles in his head (but hadn’t done many puzzle games), one unusually mathy social science type, one generalist (who had played snakebird before). Of these, the hardcore math guy blew the others away. He picked up rules faster, had more endurance, and was much more likely to actually one shot, including after skipping 20 levels ahead.
Reminds me of video games > IQ tests
But, also maybe more interestingly/importantly: I’m interested in having the Real Smart People walk through what their process is actually like, and see if they’re doing things differently that other people can learn. (Presumably this is also something there’s some literature on?)
Came here to comment that. It seems much more efficient to learn the cognitive strategies smart people use than to try to figure them out from scratch. Ideally, you would have people of different skill levels solve problems (and maybe even do research) while thinking out loud and describing or drawing the images they are manipulating. I know this has been done at least for chess, and it would be nice to have it for domains with more structure. Then you could catalog these strategies and measure the effectiveness of teaching the system 2 process (the whole process they use, not only the winning path) and explicitly train in isolation the individual system 1 steps that make it up.
Yeah, although notably: the goal here is to become confidently good at solving domains where there are no established experts (with the motivating case being AI alignment, though I think lots of high-impact-but-vague fields are relevant). I think this does require developing the ability to invent new ways of thinking, and check for yourself which ways of thinking apply to a situation.
I think the optimal curriculum will include some amount of learning-for-yourself and some amount of learning from others.
This might be confusing the cart with the horse though, since this doesn’t control for IQ. A person with a high IQ might be more attracted to math because of it’s relative ease and also be able to pick up specific cognitive skills faster (i.e. being able to play snakebird well). In other words, correlation doesn’t imply causation.
Transfer learning isn’t what is controversial, it is far and/or general transfer to many different domains which is controversial. There is no verified method of raising general intelligence, for example.
Do you have any pointers to what you mean? (i.e. sources that demonstrate “not particularly general transfer?” or “explicitly not working in the general case”)
Part of why I feel optimistic is I’m specifically trying to learn/teach/enable skills in a set-of-domains that seem at least fairly related, i.e. research taste in novel, technical domains, and I’d expect “weak transfer learning” to be good enough to matter without making any claims about “general transfer learning.”
(I separately guess it should be possible to train at general transfer learning but it should require training at a pretty wide variety of skills, at which point it’s actually kinda unclear whether mechanistically what’s happening is “lots of transfer between related skills” vs “raising general intelligence factor”)