Oddbean new post about login | logout @134318c2 that's a thread/theme in the Dune universe I never focused on too. Interesting thought to ponder.
@134318c2 like, there was just a kinda background assumption until the mid 20th that the world would continue to get more complex, and we'd have to adapt & train human brains increasingly to manage that growing complexity but instead we just tacked silicon onto our extended phenotype
@0b086a8e As much as I am skeptical of my dad's idea of "learning calculus" Which was to keep reading that book over and over until you could answer all the questions correctly. My dad did understand calculus well enough to help me with my homework. Though I liked how my mom would explain it better, she always started with the theory. My dad was all examples. And "Don't forget this fact!" He'd start problems by thinking of the problems they were like he'd done before...
@134318c2 "thinking of the problems they were like he'd done before" Yup. As you said earlier in the thread this can also be one pathway to the deep understanding (possibly even the best pathway for a small subset of folks) but more commonly leads to purely instrumental "understanding". Interestingly that second pathway is (for me, personally) how I best understand many fiction #writing tools & techniques - "bulk familiarity" unlocks the pattern/purpose more easily than explanation, oftentimes