
The Genius of Learning - noyesno
http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/the-genius-of-learning-rp
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danharaj
Reminds me of _wéi wú wéi_ , the mystical Daoist concept. It literally means
"action without action". My favorite story that illustrates the concept is the
anecdote about the skillful butcher in _Zhuangzi_ :

 _Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand,
every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee
— zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect
rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or
keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such
heights!”

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way,
which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see
was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now —
now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and
understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along
with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through
the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the
smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook
changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine
for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the
blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are
spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness.
If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of
room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after
nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came
from the grindstone.

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties,
tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work
very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the
whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand
there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and
reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and
learned how to care for life!”_

(translation by Burton Watson, my particular favorite)

~~~
Jugurtha
_“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook
changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine
for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the
blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are
spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness.
If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of
room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after
nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came
from the grindstone. "_

 _“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the
difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what
I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety,
until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to
the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely
satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it
away.”_

 _Exactly this_. You can skin and cut a whole sheep to pieces with a small
knife while others sweat profusely using a meat axe and a saw and you can do
it faster. If something moves, it can be cut where it moves. Spaces between
vertebrae and ribs. Articulations.

The bit about the state of the knife is also true: My father has French and
German bayonets from WWI and WWII. You have to be _very_ careful near those
things.

~~~
westoncb
This part of the passage stuck out to me also. My read on it is that what
enables the subject of the story to guide his knife so well is: human
attention is a finite resource and it's typically divided up among many
things, and, the more attention allocated to something the more rich its
representation in consciousness.

If you have some variation in success watching your breath in meditation,
you'll notice an astonishing range of detail that your breath might be
represented with. When you are distracted, it might barely register as the
symbol, "feeling of breath"; and if you have nothing else on your mind, you
can have a super rich, fully continuous experience of it moving in and out,
with all the gradations of temperature at different points etc.

Seems not very useful with breath watching, but if you carry this over to a
sport or other skill, it's amazing how much more time it seems you have to
act, and how many subtleties about the playing field that are otherwise
totally filtered out.

I can imagine the butcher feeling every little difference in density of the
meat as his knife moves along, anticipating where it will give or catch and
always remaining on a smooth track.

~~~
Jugurtha
I looked into cognitive skills on and off for some time. I started writing
something to sythesize my knowledge about it and share it but I didn't as you
can see (from the time management chapter, you see where the problem lies):

[https://github.com/jhadjar/Notes/blob/master/Cognitive%20Ski...](https://github.com/jhadjar/Notes/blob/master/Cognitive%20Skills/Enhancing%20Cognitive%20Abilities/Abilit%C3%A9s%20Cognitives.pdf)

From problem solving to deliberate practice, meta-cognition. etc. Long-term
potentiation is one of the concepts that blew my mind the most. Following the
process down to the neural and _ion_ level (as in how sodium, calcium and
magnesium ions are involved), I learned amazing things.

Here's a sweet Long-Term Potentiation video describing what happens:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vso9jgfpI_c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vso9jgfpI_c)

I recently put a few things in that repo and add to it from time to time
instead of "wanting to do one big thing".

~~~
sn9
You'd probably be interested in reading Edward Slingerland's _Trying Not to
Try_ for a take on the parallels between _wu wei_ and current research in
cognitive science.

~~~
Jugurtha
Thank you for the not asinine recommendation, sn9.

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mannykannot
"...but as people mastered the task, the systems [of the brain] stopped
communicating. It turned out that people who could disengage these systems the
fastest were also the best learners."

This may just be an artifact of the presentation, or my misreading of it, but
from then on it seems to be assumed that fast learning is a consequence of
fast disengagement, rather than the other way around, yet no evidence is
offered here that explicitly supports this interpretation over the
alternative.

~~~
plurinshael
I assumed there was quite a bit of research and Hegelian synthesis that
occurred outside of the narrative.

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irickt
direct link, on the cartoonist's site:
[http://www.laurenweinstein.com/#/genius-of-
learning/](http://www.laurenweinstein.com/#/genius-of-learning/)

~~~
AceJohnny2
Unrelated to Lauren Weinstein, the privacy activist:
[https://lauren.vortex.com/](https://lauren.vortex.com/)

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zodPod
I feel like the format makes this really hard to read through. It'd be much
easier to read as a blog post.

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jotto
reminds me of "The Inner Game" \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12520444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12520444)

