The product would be OK if it wasn't for the business people.
Here's one example: the Plex media server. It used to be that Plex let you connect to your local media server to view your own local media.
Today Plex spams you with as many ads for 'free' media that it can, and even if you remove the crap from the user interface it comes back with the next update.
This doesn't seem like an engineering kind of idea, but rather a business idea that they get a penny for each time they spam you.
You're not a stupid person so you being not stupid knows that I and pretty much everyone on the face of this earth knows that we all are aware that no one understands ALL of learning. So if you're not stupid, and you already know this, why did you take the time to point out some pointless flaw in my wording?
I'll tell you why. Because you liked this analogy. You thought it was profound to compare learning to DFS and BFS and fractals and you were sort of offended when someone like me didn't find it profound. Not only do I not find it profound, I find it obvious and trivial. Comparing learning to fractals is like some offhand thought I can have for like 5 seconds than forget about because it's so trivial.
Too each his own man. If this article blew your mind great. It didn't do anything for me.
Here's another analogy for you.
Learning is like traveling down a path and encountering a several forks in the road. You can BFS the paths or you can DFS the paths
Replace Learning with "Life" and remove BFS. In life you can only choose one path every time you encounter a fork and the decision is permanent. No popping the stack like in BFS to try the other paths. It's just DFS all the way to the last final leaf node. You have one life so live it right.
Did that analogy blow your mind? Because I made it up 3 seconds ago. That's how trivial these analogies are.
I was impressed by the article and when I read your comments, I felt like this random person is right, it does sound profound but doesn't add anything substantial to the topic of learning.
It's nice to have another aspect or perspective on learning but it is certainly not a "new learning strategy". I agree.
And yet there is a merit in analogies, they can help you understand the underlying principles of something, in this case learning. I'm not sure people (including me) always get the full picture of something and an article can help with that showing learning from another angle.
In general I agree with you and yet the article adds something for some to their understanding of what learning is.
Careful. Analogies are a common form of deception. Used often in religious speeches, political speeches, blog posts and more.
The speaker offers zero substantial information yet manipulates the audience into feeling the speech was "good" through the use of analogies. There is sort of a catharsis when the person listening to the speech connects the dots between two unrelated concepts, and this subtle emotion is used as a form of manipulation often deliberately when the speaker is incredibly intelligent and often accidentally as is what I believe is the case here.
It's easiest to see the deliberate case in religious speeches or sermons if you're not religious yourself. Often you will find that religious principles or sayings have no proof and you will often find that the analogy is deceptively used in place of evidence or proof where no proof exists.
I sometimes find tremendous insight in a piece of literature that is analogous to real life difficulties. Provided that, that piece of writing, also offers some sort of a solution to the "problem".
Those problems I'm referring to are for example confidence, psyche (esp. C.G.Jung), getting over traumas etc.
Obviously, my formentioned cases are not extensive and everyone finds something else that they struggle with where a piece of literature might help.
2. Thank you for your insights. If your answer to question 1. is no, I'd like to know what kind of analogies you think are valuable and why?
1. No, I don't disregard analogies, I'm just able to recognize and isolate analogies from a topic or a point. For learning, I agree an analogy is very useful.
Analogies are tools for illustration, not for proving a point. To use a tool to illustrate a concept that is already well known (learning for example) is often pointless.
In terms of utility, much of the utility of analogies is similar to the utility of art, music or humor. You can enjoy humor, but humor itself doesn't offer any greater insight or a topic.
2. Analogies are useful for illustrating things that cannot be imagined by the human mind. The extrusion of a 3 dimensional cube into a 4 dimensional cube cannot be pictured by your minds eye. You can only visualize the analogy: The extrusion of a 2 dimensional square plane to a 3 dimensional cube. The entire field and existence of higher dimensional geometry is inferred from analogies.
Note that these are only good for things that are not known by you. Much of literature and speeches use analogies for things that are well known. For a list of examples where analogies are mostly useless see here:
Thank you for answering my questions and expanding more on the topic. You actually didn't have much convincing to do because it seemed so fundamentally true that it was hard to come up with an argument against it. I still believe analogies have more value than being mere approximations to an unimaginable world (numbers, states, etc). But like with all beliefs, I don't have any evidence to support my beliefs and rely on my intuition and experience.
> I still believe analogies have more value than being mere approximations to an unimaginable world
I didn't say this. Although my example is actually impossible to understand without an analogy, I am saying an analogy can help you understand something you currently don't understand.... it does not need to be impossible to understand without an analogy.
The quotes in my link are actually mostly things and concepts you completely understand. Nothing new is learned... the analogy is deception.
In fact, I've thought a lot about how to generalize these techniques to a data structure (i.e. knowledge graph) so that anyone can zoom in or out to whatever level of abstraction they please:
It's remarkable the difference it makes for me. I have gotten more work done when needed to, have improved in my hobbies, conversations are much better, I stay focused on tasks...it's incredible the difference.
Thanks for the support! Yes, that is one of the goals, to make it really easy to find what is known in mathematics and contribute to that knowledge base. I have https://mathlore.org which is a demonstration of how such as system could work.
> There is the old scientific method which was falsifiable, repeatable, frequentist, and it involved directly observable quantities.
> ...
> There is now the new scientific method which involves models, paradigm shifts, bayesianism, and it may not require a control variable when measurements are constructed from multiple, indirect observations.
This doesn't make much sense to me. How can there be a new scientific method?
Shouldn't these somehow boil down to the same thing: hypothesis, experiment, evidence against the null?
I feel like my company is a little too liberal with it. I suspect it might be a sign of some sort of fragmentation, but I'm not sure what kind (e.g. org chart, proj mgmt, no established point of contact for certain things).
Millions of institutions exist. Even if you take 1% of them and tell them to create a freely available course, it's good enough. Beside, I don't understand how many public funded universities don't release everything they do or teach. It's just weird imo.
Why does education need to be expensive? Why should you have to pay for it?
It's one of those things that I don't understand the reason for being behind paywall.
+1 to the idea of having a few good math courses created by institutions. I think if I can save all that time on repetitive lecturing, it would make more time for discussion/experimentation based learning.
I’ve also wondered about why publicly funded institutions don’t publicly release their courses and other resources. When the COVID lockdown started, I naively hoped that we would get some more pure math courses since now universities are teaching remotely but haven’t really found any universities doing that. I’m tempted to reach out to my alma mater and ask if I can audit their pure math courses that they’re teaching remotely in the fall.
It definitely seems easier to find CS courses online than for pure math. Maybe because there’s a wider audience for that, I don’t quite know.
