Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail

1. 0:00 – 0:52

   Introduction

   1. AMAndy Matuschak0:00

      We under-appreciate the role that memory has on our lives. If what you're trying to do is to understand something pretty difficult, your ability to understand that thing is still absolutely going to be bound on your, your memory of the constituent material. For the median student, the education system mostly wants to make the student do things they don't want to do. It's not about helping them achieve their goals more easily or more effectively for the most part. It's about, like, achieving goals that aren't theirs. The histories in educational psychology that I'm most aligned with are, like, the most robotic, authoritarian kind of histories, and also the ones that are most, like, unschooling and, and Montessori-esque.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel0:39

      Do LLMs make memorization more or less valuable?

   3. AMAndy Matuschak0:43

      LLMs depend on our ability to externalize things and to make them legible. Basically everyone in the educational space are focused on really, like, the bottom quartile. Like, not even median.

2. 0:52 – 2:30

   Skillful reading

   1. AMAndy Matuschak0:52

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel0:52

      Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Andy Matuschak, who is a researcher, engineer, and designer working on Tools for Thought. In addition to this podcast on Andy's YouTube channel, we did an interesting collaboration, which I encourage you all to check out, where I just watched Andy try to learn some new material. So it was just an intro chapter of, uh, quantum mechanics. And I honestly, I was expecting to see some cool techniques or be impressed, but I was way more surprised than I expected to be by the deliberateness, the effortfulness of the practice, how, w- what was really, I mean, it was, like, 15 minutes a page in this textbook, and any small thing that Andy thought, like, "I don't fully understand this. The author's trying to say something here. He's trying to draw an analogy or relationship. I'm not s- sure I totally comprehend the relationship between this, you know, classical mechanics equation and the quantum mechanics equation the author thinks is analogous." Just really delving deep into that. So that was super... I thought that was, I thought that was really interesting, that this is a way to, um, approach the new material. Yeah, so in this conversation, I would lo- I'm looking forward to talking with Andy about, um, not only that experience, but a whole bunch of his other research and the other tools he's built. Let me ask you this. So that, that experience made me think, listen, this is somebody who actually cares about understanding the material. Like, they're going through it this deliberately. Do you think people in general care about actually integrating and understanding the material they're consuming in books and textbooks? Don't you think they'd make more an effort to actually assimilate that information if they cared

3. 2:30 – 6:52

   Do people care about understanding?

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel2:30

      to get it?

   2. AMAndy Matuschak2:30

      Yeah. I, I mean, I think the statement is just a little too, uh, general, probably, to comment on. I mean, so I think it's certainly the case that most students don't actually want to do this, because they're, they're learning stuff that they don't actually care about learning, or, um, even if they do care about learning it, often, like, there isn't a clear connection between whatever reading or activity they're doing in the moment and, like, the thing that originally inspired them for the subject, like, what they w- actually want to do. And so th- there's always something tenuous going on. I think on the other hand, like, it's amazing to look at, say, subreddits and to look at the level of nerdery and fascination that will be brought to bear on, you know, gardening equipment or, (laughs) like, knots, for instance. You know? P- people are competing to tie some very obscure, uh, you know, 18th century knot or whatever, and they're flipping through almanacs from the period. So, like, when people are interested and it connects to something that's truly meaningful for them, I think they really do want to absorb. And we see that in their behavior. There is a second thing, uh, that I think it is relevant. Well, to explain this, I will reference Mortimer Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book, which is a great guide on, on serious reading. And they consider the case of people who often have books on their bedside table, and sometimes they're, like, very difficult or demanding books. These are kind of aspirational, like, "Oh, I wish I could ring, read King Lear. I want to be the kind of person who reads King Lear." So you put it on your bedside table, and people will, like, read it before bed, and they'll find that they, like, fall asleep while they're reading it. They're not really absorbing or understanding this book. I mean, it's not just an issue of memory. It's like they, they, they simply are not apprehending the words on the page. Um, and, and the authors of How to Read a Book make the case that, like, the, the issue here with these people who are falling asleep reading King Lear, uh, is in many cases, it's not that they don't want to stay awake and to really deal with that text. In many cases, it's that they actually don't know how. They butt their heads up against this very difficult wall of material. It's- it's almost like maybe a rock climber, uh, who, who's not very experienced going up against a wall that all it has is these, like, really subtle notches. And to an experienced rock climber, those subtle notches are like a ladder, right? Like, they can get right in there and start, like, making some progress and seeing what's up with this wall. Uh, but if you're an inexperienced rock climber, it just looks like a solid wall. Um, so the claim, maybe, maybe this is an optimistic claim, y- you can take me to task, is that there is such a thing as being a more skillful reader, and being a more skillful reader will actually, in practice, in many cases, when the reading is aligned with your actual interests, uh, produce a more serious, more understanding, forward kind of reading.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel5:17

      Hmm. Right. I, so there's, like, two models of why people might fail to retain the material they're consuming. One is they got it at some point, but they forgot it, and the other is they- they never understood it in the first place and they just never noticed that they never understood it. And what was really, uh, what I found really interesting was you going paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, "Have I got this?" And by the way, this was material that I had tried to go through the week before, and there were things when you dwelved on something that I'm like, "Actually, I don't understand that either." (laughs) And I didn't notice I didn't understand that.

   4. AMAndy Matuschak5:50

      Right.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel5:50

      How- how do you... How are you able to notice your confusion a- uh, while you were going through?

   6. AMAndy Matuschak5:56

      This is, again, a habit. It's a skill that can be built. Adler and Van Doren suggest that the first and most important rule of skillful reading, active reading, is asking questions and trying to answer them.... and that really, if you just dwell on that and dwell on, "Well, what kinds of questions should I be asking? And how should I go about asking them? How should I go about answering them when the author isn't present?" And so on and so forth, think you'll get very far. They also say conversely, and like, this isn't meant as a criticism, an undemanding reader asks no questions and gets no answers.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel6:29

      Mm-hmm.

   8. AMAndy Matuschak6:29

      And I certainly have read many, many books that way, uh, particularly before I- I developed this habit. And I often found myself falling into that second category of, where the issue was not that I failed to remember things, but rather, that my eyes just kind of skidded across paragraphs without even realizing it.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel6:47

      You're, you know, halfway through a chapter and you're thinking, "What- what is this chapter about?" (laughs)

4. 6:52 – 16:37

   Structuring effective self-teaching

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel6:52

   2. AMAndy Matuschak6:52

      (laughs)

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel6:52

      Okay, so broader question is now that we have all these online resources, some of which, you know, you've helped develop, uh, Khan Academy and elsewhere, it seems that the value of conscientiousness as a trait has dramatically increased. If you can motivate yourself to learn these things, the world is out there for you to, uh, absorb.

   4. AMAndy Matuschak7:13

      Mm-hmm.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel7:13

      What are the sort of design or UI or even content modifications that can be made to give you a conscientiousness boost? Where in the past, you have a professor, you have peers, you have in-person deadlines that motivate you, is there something equivalent to a pen and paper how that boost your mathematical IQ, uh, for conscientiousness?

   6. AMAndy Matuschak7:33

      Right. So one enduring result in education psychology is that when you're doing a lot of cognition, metacognition is difficult. So what I mean by that is like, when you're thinking really hard about the stuff on the page, it's very difficult for you to, like, plan, uh, regulate yourself, uh, figure out what the best next action to do is, um, reflect and evaluate, uh, you know, what, whether you're understanding things, and all the stuff that we're talking about, about asking questions. That, all that gets harder as, um, as the material gets harder and as it gets less familiar. So uh, one common thread, um, at least in kind of learning science stuff has been outsource metacognition. So some of the ways we outsource that are actually very familiar. They're things like somebody gives you a syllabus and tells you what to read when. Uh, you- you reference that. So that is a user interface. Like, that- that is a- a design practice. Um, if you're a self-motivated student, uh, one thing you can do, and that I've done is just go appropriate a syllabus-

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel8:29

      Yeah.

   8. AMAndy Matuschak8:29

      ... uh, from, you know, some graduate level course that corresponds to the text that you're reading, and say like, "Well, you know, that might be a good guide, uh, as to- to, you know, what's most important, how to approach this." There are also lots of things that- that one can build directly into the interfaces. Uh, just as one example, in Quantum Country, which was a textbook that Michael Nielsen and I developed to explore some ideas around augmented reading experiences, um, we embedded a bunch of review questions every, say, 1500 words or so in this text on quantum computation. And our- our primary intention in doing this was to help people remember what they read. Uh, and we- we had this theory that part of what makes it hard to learn a complex subject is that there's all these new definitions and notation and terms and things being thrown at you at once. And you're being asked to combine these things which are still unfamiliar. And so you're constantly having to retrieve these elements and struggling to do it. Uh, either it's taking a while or your success rate is low. So anyway, that was our motivation. But, uh, it had this other metacognitive benefit that was really important, that you read 1500 words and now you're being asked these questions. That is an opportunity for you to notice that you did not in fact absorb what was in that thing. Not that you don't remember, but that like, you know, there's- there's a word in the question that is apparently important that you simply didn't even notice.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel9:55

      Right.

   10. AMAndy Matuschak9:55

       And so not only does that give you feedback, so it tells you, "Oh, maybe you need to go reread that specific section," but it may also change your behavior towards future sections. So in interviews, readers told us, for instance, that after they reached the first set of questions, uh, or a particularly difficult set of questions, uh, they found themselves slowing down and reading more attentively, uh, or realizing actually that their- their reading practices were ineffective in general. You're kind of in the way that- that- that you were mentioning towards the start of the conversation. There's been a bunch of research on, um, the- the key phrase here is something like adjunct questions, you know, questions that go along with the text. That's kind of like what I was just talking about. And uh, they have all kinds of effects. So the adjunct questions have the- the- the kind of effects on forward material I was just describing, and- and they also have, uh, the effect of- of making you kind of reflect on what you've just learned. And, uh, in addition to the questions being asked, you- you might find yourself pondering, uh, "Well, I'm being asked about this, but why does this matter?"

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel10:58

       Yeah. On- on the point of, um, uh, adopting a syllabus from somebody else, I mean, one thing, one problem you might have as a self-learner is you have some goal, "This is the reason I'm learning this," and then you start thinking, "Well, do I really need this chapter? Do I really need this content?"

   12. AMAndy Matuschak11:12

       Yeah.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel11:12

       At this point, you're doing the metacognition that you were using s- you're trying to use a syllabus to avoid.

   14. AMAndy Matuschak11:18

       Yeah.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel11:19

       Um, should, if you are still trying to self-learn and there is a resource that is a close approximation of the syllabus you want, should you just like, "Hey, I- I don't know why I need this chapter. I'm just going to go through it."

   16. AMAndy Matuschak11:30

       Right.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel11:30

       Or should you just, should you use your own judgment there?

   18. AMAndy Matuschak11:33

       This is, I think, like, a pretty classic issue for learning in general. Uh, you have this problem where you have to sort of, to- to bootstrap yourself in a domain, you have to outsource the- the question of what is necessary to know. You might know, for instance, that you really want to build, you know, a model that can generate images given descriptions or something like that, like Midjourney, but you- you don't even know what you need to study to do that. So you know, you pick up some textbooks on machine learning and you- you're kind of outsourcing the answer to this question to the author, like, what is necessary to know to- to build things? And maybe you can find a book that's actually labeled what you need to know-

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel12:11

       (laughs)

   20. AMAndy Matuschak12:11

       ... to make an image, uh, generating model. Uh, but even then, you're- you're- you're outsourcing your answer to the author. So-You can take that answer as a start, uh, and treat it as tentative and, you know, revise it iteratively. And as you become more skilled, you can lean less on it, and you probably should. I, I think, like, a very common mistake that people make is to feel like they need to do the thing the right way, and that is exhaustive and completionist or something. If they fail because they find themselves bored or unmotivated because the material doesn't actually seem to relate to what they want to know, but, but they're just kind of going on faith that, like, "Well, if I follow what the author says, you know, everything will be good." Anyway, they, they find themselves having trouble for that reason, and then they just stop. Uh, so this is bad. Uh, and they would be better off just skipping around according to their interest and not continuing. One other thing I'll say about this is that, uh, the role that these syllabi play is as a scaffold. This is sort of a, a term apart from learning science, but it's actually, it, it relates to the, the thing we're familiar with. If, if you want to get higher up a building, you may not be able to climb it yourself, but, but you can build some scaffolding around it and, and then suddenly, you know, you, you can reach the, that top shelf or, you know, the top of that building. Where the metaphor breaks down is that although scaffolding is ubiquitous in, in education, we, um, we give you simpler versions of questions, uh, first. That, that's, that's a kind of scaffolding. We partially work the answer first. That's a kind of scaffolding. We give you worked examples, uh, first, uh, where we might ask you to, like, predict the next step of the worked example. Um, that's also a kind of scaffolding. Where the metaphor breaks down is, is that, uh, once you become more capable, we, we try to remove the scaffolding. Um, it's called fading. The idea is that once you have solved a lot of calculus problems, you, you don't need half of it worked out and you're just, like, filling in one of the blanks anymore. Um, and in fact, doing that would not be as effective a learning experience. So the application with the syllabi might be something like if I'm studying something in computer science, which is a domain that I know really well, I don't need those syllabi. Not in the same way for most subjects. And, uh, I think that's mostly just because, uh, the amount of cognitive demand that's placed on me by the subject is just much lower than it is for other subjects. So much of it is familiar already that I can deploy my own planning more effectively as I go. But it's also the case that, um, because I know so many things about the subject, I can do a better job from the get-go of making a plan, because making a plan requires kind of modeling a path or predicting a path or saying like, "Well, I guess I need to see how this connects to that" or something like this. And it, if your destination and your starting point are very far away, then you can't necessarily see all the things in between or how to draw those lines. But if those things are only a couple hops away, you can maybe kind of infer pretty accurately.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel15:21

       Right. I guess this maybe implies that if you do want to learn about a subject, it might just be helpful to just do an intro to X subject course or textbook, not necessarily because it is instrumentally valuable to, uh, I don't know, whatever problem you're interested in, but because it'll give you the context on, by which to proceed on, like, the actual learning syllabus.

   22. AMAndy Matuschak15:45

       Yeah. That's true. It's also the case that, like, you don't even know... Like, you don't know all the stuff there is.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel15:50

       Right.

   24. AMAndy Matuschak15:51

       And this is another key problem. This is another reason why we outsource stuff. Like, uh, there, there's a fundamental tension in unschooling, for instance. Like, just let the kids pursue what they're interested in. And like, that's cool. There's, there's a lot of good things about that. But also, like, say that a kid's, like, true passion turns out to be, like, I don't know, ocean geology or something, and they're in a landlocked country and there's just no one around them that talks about ocean geology, uh, then they're, like, missing out on some great opportunity. But, you know, if the school had a program where they are, like, bringing in guest speakers or whatever and then there's a special lecture on ocean geology from this person and it, and it lights up the kid's world, uh, even if they wouldn't have chosen that lecture, like, that's a good thing.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel16:33

       Yeah. The unschooling is actually an interesting subject to talk to you about. I'll... We-

5. 16:37 – 33:10

   Memory and forgetting

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel16:37

      we'll get back to that. But before that, I want to ask you about this, uh, excerpt from a Paul Graham blog post.

   2. AMAndy Matuschak16:42

      Yeah.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel16:42

      How You Know is the title of the post.

   4. AMAndy Matuschak16:45

      Okay.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel16:45

      And it says, "A reading, an experience, train your model of the world, and even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why." So, uh, it's a compiled program. You don't need the source code. Is it okay that we're forgetting so much of what we're reading?

   6. AMAndy Matuschak17:07

      Yeah. Yeah, I mean, what he's saying is true to some extent. Whether or not that extent is sufficient is gonna depend a great deal on (laughs) the situation and on what you need. If your aspiration actually depends on having a, a deep, detailed understanding of the material, then, um, the, the kind of imprint on your worldview or on, uh, your, your automatic responses or something like that made by the book may not be sufficient. Um, on the other hand, if what you want is to absorb a lot of different, like, ways of looking at the world, like, that knowing the details of these isn't necessarily important, maybe just wanna know like, well, you know, Confucius emphasizes community and society as a moral patient in contrast maybe to the individualism of a bunch of, like, humanist philosophers, um, and like, that's kind of the level that you feel like you need to make decisions in that domain, then I think that's fine. Um, very practically speaking, it, it's funny that he uses the word compile, uh, because, like, one of the, one of the prominent theories of, of cognition, that, that is, like, how, how we come to know and learn things is this theory called ACT-R by John Anderson, and, uh, a, a key part of it is this, this, uh, process that he calls knowledge compilation. This is the process by which we take...... like, individual facts and turn them into higher level patterns that we can generalize and, uh, apply in more contexts. Um, and I think that's what Paul is gesturing at, that y- you read a book, it contains like a story, a case study, and by reading it you learn to generalize to some extent and you apply it in other contexts when it seems relevant. The reason why I bring up Anderson's theory is just that, like, he has a bunch of specific claims about, like, what's necessary for knowledge compilation to happen and, like, what you'll be able to do as a consequence of certain degrees of knowledge compilation. I think, like, he'd probably respond to this by saying something like, you know, actually, "I- in order to effectively compile things that you've learned into schemas that will match future scenarios effectively, then you need to be exposed repeatedly to those things, you need to, like, use them, you need to, to do a variety of things that will basically show your brain that it is relevant to apply these things in combination. And simply reading probably won't do that. Uh, but if you read and you have a lot of conversations and you're in a context where it's kind of demanding and it's drawing on what you read, then you naturally do that kind of compilation step."

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel19:42

      I've actually been thinking about this in preparation of talking with you, where I look back on some of my old conversations and, you know, I've had the pleasure to talk to a lot of interesting people across a lot of different fields, and at the time I interviewed them and had done all the prep, I actually kind of had a lot more context than I can remember now. Sometimes I'll listen back to a conversation and I won't even remember the content in the conversation, and I know, I remember thinking after the conversation, I knew so much more about this field than was compressed into this one-hour interview, right? I had to prep other things that might come up. And afterwards I'm like, "I don't even remember the things that were in this one hour." But then the other part of me thinks, "Well, I'm getting better at doing the podcast. That might imply that, you know, I've picked up something." But it is a shame that I didn't have some sort of rigorous practice throughout the time of, you know, retaining the material that I was keeping.

   8. AMAndy Matuschak20:31

      Well, yeah. I mean, I expect the main way in which you're getting better is actually not really about any of the details of those materials. I think it's about your practices, uh, as, as an interviewer, the, the way that you generate questions. Like, you probably have a bunch of patterns, wh- whether you know it or, or not. Like, you, you read a thing that a person has written in hopes of generating good questions about it, and even though you don't have this habit for textbooks yet maybe of constantly demanding things of the textbook, um, you have I think started to develop this of essays or blog posts that interesting people you're interviewing, uh, have read. And, uh, to, to point to this Anderson theory, like, in the course of repeatedly doing that, you've made it automatic, parts of it automatic, so that you don't need to do it consciously. You can focus more on the material. You can probably take on more difficult material or, um, actually understand material at a higher level than you could have before because less of yourself is engaged in this kind of question of, "How do I make the questions from the material?"

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel21:37

      Yeah. I certainly hope so. Otherwise, uh, there's a question to be asked on what I've been doing all these years.

   10. AMAndy Matuschak21:41

       (laughs)

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel21:41

       Um, so, you know, uh, having interviewed some of these people who are infowars and con- have consumed and continuously consume a lot of content-

   12. AMAndy Matuschak21:51

       Yeah.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel21:51

       ... this is something you also noticed, uh, and pointed out in your notes. But, you know, Tyler Cowen, for example, I don't think he has any sort of note-taking practice. He just-

   14. AMAndy Matuschak21:58

       No.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel21:58

       ... you know, uh, just devours information.

   16. AMAndy Matuschak22:02

       Yeah.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel22:03

       What, what is your theory of how these people are integrating things-

   18. AMAndy Matuschak22:06

       Right.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel22:06

       ... that they're-

   20. AMAndy Matuschak22:07

       Well, Tyler's, Tyler's a good example. I think he's actually a little easier than, than some others we might discuss. So let's talk about Tyler for a second. One of the other things that's so interesting about Tyler is his writing obligations. Uh, so this is a man who's, who's blogged every day since, I don't know, 2007 or something like this, and, uh, has a Bloomberg column, I think weekly, something like 1500 words, and, um, also has published something like a book a year for, I don't know, a decade or more.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel22:33

       Yeah.

   22. AMAndy Matuschak22:34

       And occasionally publishes some academic articles, plus, like, a bunch of other collateral. So like, that is notes. Um, and I, I think it's also important to note that, like, the way that Tyler writes these blog posts and the way that Tyler does these columns and even the books, um, is very different from the way that many other book authors work. Like, Tyler... The, the blog posts often have this, like, real first draft mentality to them. Like, he's just thinking out loud.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel23:02

       Right, right.

   24. AMAndy Matuschak23:03

       Um, and he's got decades of practice thinking out loud and, like, writing down a decent take the first time and so he, you know, he gets something pretty good th- the first time much of the time, and that, that works for him. So like, that kind of is a note, right? Like, uh, get, doing the thing the... Or I guess, like, your initial thoughts on the subject is, is kind of what you would write in a note.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel23:22

       Yeah. One of my former guests, um, Scott Young, was comparing Bryan Caplan and T- Tyler Cowen's books and he said, "When you read a Bryan Caplan book it was like a chess game."

   26. AMAndy Matuschak23:30

       Right.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel23:30

       Like, you... The, the opponent is... If you try to move a pawn up on this case for education, I've got this, you know, rook that I can move here. Um, but with Tyler it's more like, you know, he's like shooting the shit out of the subject basically.

   28. AMAndy Matuschak23:41

       Yeah. Yeah.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel23:42

       Uh...

   30. AMAndy Matuschak23:42

       Bangladeshi train stations. (laughs)
6. 33:10 – 40:07

   Andy’s memory practice

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel33:10

      When did you start your memory practice? Presumably it was after, after Apple?

   2. AMAndy Matuschak33:15

      Yeah.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel33:15

      Okay. So let me ask you this. So at Apple, you were in charge of a bunch of important, uh, flagship features on iOS and I'm guessing other things. Presumably, you were, you didn't have some sort of practice, but since you were encountering these things day to day, that natural f- frequency and way in which problems came up, did you have a worse understanding of these problems and the things now knowing what you do, uh, and knowing, having the practices you do, you're able to comprehend now? I don't know if that question made sense.

   4. AMAndy Matuschak33:44

      No. No. That's a great question. So I mean, like, here's a fun thing. I was much better at what I was doing then than I am at what I'm doing now. Um... (laughs)

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel33:55

      (laughs)

   6. AMAndy Matuschak33:55

      That's pretty funny. So I mean, it was just totally different. Uh, let, let, let's talk about this a little bit. This feels very, very juicy for me. Most of what I was doing was engineering, some of it very difficult engineering, but mostly engineering, mostly on like things that were fairly well understood. So I wasn't trying to decide what, what should be done u- usually. Sometimes I was from a technical perspective, but certainly rarely from a product perspective w- was that a relevant question for me. Um, I was kind of like a somewhat design-minded engineer and I did a bunch of kind of engineering and design-ish things on tasks which were set out for me. At that point, I had been programming for a really long time, I don't know, 13 years maybe by the time I joined Apple, longer, um, and programming in Apple's ecosystem for probably two-thirds of that time, three-quarters of that time. So everything was just really familiar and like, it was mostly flow all the time, every day. I was kind of like, I was just in it. Uh, I knew the stuff that I needed to know. I was very well practiced and the space didn't change that much. You know, like engineers, most engineers at Apple most of the time are not like pushing the frontier of what is known, like trying to discover. They're like doing very difficult technical work, mostly applying things that they already know and understand quite well, um, to problems which are usually, not always, moderately well, like pretty well understood let's say. Memory was essential to me doing that job well, but I had already built most of it by the time I got there. I'd already built just tons of stuff for Apple's platform and I had to learn a lot of stuff. I, I learned a ton of stuff about the internals of those systems, but because I already had such a rich understanding both of Apple's platforms and of computer science and engineering in general, uh, I had this really rich network for stuff to slot into. So learning stuff is easier when you, you have other stuff to connect it to. It's, it's a, a nice principle. Metacognitive load on me was lighter, um, because others were figuring out what we should be doing. So just like by contrast now, in doing research, like I'm trying to discover things that are not known, I'm trying to make things that didn't exist, the hard questions that I answer are mostly like what should be done or like what should I do? And that question is not just a technical one of like, "How should I implement this like feature that needs to get built?" But like, "What intervention on a reader should be taken?" That requires synthesizing lots of different unfamiliar literatures.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel36:31

      There's two different threads I want to go on. May- maybe I'll just mention the other one. I... This is also related to the thing we were talking about a few minutes ago, uh, with, uh, LLMs and there's this thing that I, I'm sure you've talked about yourself as well, the Swanson linking where this guy was just, um... Have you-

   8. AMAndy Matuschak36:44

      I don't know Swanson linking.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel36:45

      Oh, okay. Actually, uh, Michael Nielson has written about it (inaudible) .

   10. AMAndy Matuschak36:47

       Oh, okay. Cool.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel36:48

       Um, but this guy was just somebody who read the medical literature and, uh-... if you were just like familiar with a lot of esoteric results. And one of the, th- so different things would come up and he would be able to figure out, uh, different things are connected. For example, I think he noticed in one case that headaches are linked to some other symptom and that other symptom is linked to magnesium deficiency and so apparently a whole bunch of people's headaches were solved once they were given a magnesium supplement and he noticed that connection. Again, this is the kind of sort of, um, combinatorial thing, uh, that you wouldn't notice otherwise. Uh, but on this, on this subject itself, so listen, there's this natural way in which you're able to get up to speed in all the things that are happening at Apple.

   12. AMAndy Matuschak37:32

       Mm-hmm.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel37:32

       And, i- i- is it possible it may be advantageous to do similar kinds of things in other fields? For example, instead of doing an explicit spaced repetition system when you're trying to absorb material from books, you just read a cluster of books and hopefully things will just come up that are relevant to get them again. Or is there a value in having explicit practice-

   14. AMAndy Matuschak37:51

       Yeah.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel37:51

       ... of setting up cards and so on?

   16. AMAndy Matuschak37:52

       Yeah, right. So, so again, the answer is gonna be, it depends. I, I think that the, the maybe the most familiar example of what you're talking about is immersion learning a new language.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel38:02

       Right.

   18. AMAndy Matuschak38:02

       So immersion learning is, like, a great thing, um, and it's gonna be more interesting and more effective-

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel38:08

       Yeah.

   20. AMAndy Matuschak38:09

       ... than doing spaced repetition practice. It's gonna be integrative. You're, it's gonna be, um, socially based. So like, there's a bunch of stuff about social learning that's relevant. A problem is though, is that like say that you decide you want to learn Swahili today, um, and you, like, go down to, like, the local Swahili community center, uh, and you're like, "Cool, I'm gonna immerse myself." Like, good luck. (laughs)

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel38:29

       (laughs)

   22. AMAndy Matuschak38:29

       You know? Yeah. You can't even get started.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel38:31

       Yeah.

   24. AMAndy Matuschak38:31

       So through this lens, explicit practice is a way to bootstrap yourself.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel38:35

       Right.

   26. AMAndy Matuschak38:35

       Likewise, a great way to become a better musician... All, all of the best pianists at, um, sight reading that I knew in, in university, uh, played with churches. They were so good at sight reading because, you know, they had to show every Sunday and they were playing a different thing. Uh, new hymn every Sunday, right? So this is immersion also. Um, and you know, over time, they're learning all these cadences and these things that are really common in whatever. Um, but like, you can't show up and be the church pianist every Sunday in the first place if you don't already have, like, some decent foundation. So this is sort of a bootstrapping argument that, like, one role for explicit practice of this kind is to get yourself into a position where you can more naturalistically reinforce.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel39:17

       I see. Okay, got it.

   28. AMAndy Matuschak39:18

       But there's still gonna be instances where the naturalistic reinforcement isn't gonna work. So, so for example, the, the linking that you brought up-

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel39:26

       Yeah.

   30. AMAndy Matuschak39:26

       ... one issue for doctors is rare diagnoses.
7. 40:07 – 44:27

   Intellectual stamina

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel40:07

      Here, here's a question I actually have. So when we were doing the practice or when we were doing the, the quantum mechanics textbook, it was like three hours and afterwards, I was just exhausted. And I was actually surprised that you went the entire three hours without interruption. And so afterwards, I was packing up and you were like, "Hey, I'm about to actually go to my piano lesson."

   2. AMAndy Matuschak40:28

      (laughs) Right.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel40:29

      And I was so confused at how you had the stamina to keep going. Is, is this stamina just, uh, inherent in you or is that something you did to develop?

   4. AMAndy Matuschak40:37

      So one of the things that I, I think is funny about stamina is, is first off, there, there's some kind of weird grass is always greener kind of situation where, like, I often feel struck by other people's stamina and feel like I have very little of it. I struggle with energy. Um, I've actually written extensively about all my struggles with energy and, like, ways of managing energy. I s- spend a lot of time thinking about it and, like, managing my energy levels, structuring my day around it. So I think there is something where, like, one often feels maybe lower stamina than one actually is because one misapprehends others' stamina. Okay, so, so in that particular situation, how do I explain why three hours of studying, et cetera? First off, social. So uh, if I were alone and studying that book for three hours, um, and I weren't effectively trying to perform for you, Prakash-

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel41:23

      (laughs)

   6. AMAndy Matuschak41:23

      ... uh, it wouldn't have been nearly as energizing for me and I definitely would have taken breaks. I still would've been able to go for three hours, I think, um, and part of the reason for that is that it's simply way less hard than things I normally do. In some sense, learning quantum mechanics, like, should be, like, much harder and it kind of is cognitively demanding in a lot of ways.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel41:46

      Right.

   8. AMAndy Matuschak41:47

      Um, it's much more cognitively demanding in kind of a direct way than what I actually do day-to-day, but it's much less, it's much less demanding on what William James calls the energies of men, which is something like, like a life force that permits you to act according to your will or something like that. Maybe it's gumption, maybe it's willpower, maybe, you know, some people call it spoons. I don't know. These aren't all the same thing exactly, but, um, sitting and staring at a page and deciding what you should do next on a research project is incredibly draining on that resource. Uh, the not knowing, sitting and not knowing is, like, the hardest thing that I do in my work. And so there's something, it's like a wonderful vacation-

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel42:32

      (laughs)

   10. AMAndy Matuschak42:32

       ... to be presented with, uh, "Oh, great. Somebody else is gonna tell me what to do."

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel42:37

       Right. (laughs)

   12. AMAndy Matuschak42:38

       (laughs) This is great. (laughs)

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel42:40

       So although it might be less demanding than your usual work, it is definitely more demanding than the way in which I or most people approach, uh, textbooks or other material in the sense that, you know, I would just, like, read through and then once I get to the exercise, I'm like-... "Let's see what I didn't understand." (laughs) Um, whereas just the attention and the intensity to go through sentence by sentence and consciously being, paying attention seems, like, way more exhausting than...

   14. AMAndy Matuschak43:07

       Yeah. I mean, so this is sort of true, like and it's definitely the case that I will occasionally do some of this, like, before bed reading where I think like, "Oh, like, you know, let me just do a little bit more." You know, and it's like it's basically useless.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel43:18

       Yeah.

   16. AMAndy Matuschak43:19

       Um, but I- I wanna make the case that there is a kind of pocket that you can fall into, maybe you call it flow, I don't know, where, like, the demandingness that you're bringing to bear is matched to your ability, the book is not overwhelming, like, you feel like you can make your way through it, and, um, this is actually more engaging. Uh, so I occasionally will- will find myself reading as an undemanding reader and finding my attention kind of slipping because I- I feel like I- I'm just not that attached to the text emotionally. I'm kind of reading dutifully, I'm, like, trying to get through it.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel43:56

       Yeah.

   18. AMAndy Matuschak43:56

       That produces sometimes, like, an adversarial aspect where the text is in my way, uh, or it's kind of something to be, I don't know, like, like, accomplished.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel44:09

       Yep.

   20. AMAndy Matuschak44:09

       Um, and often then I will find that I need to bring more gumption to bear to kind of power through and like, you know, make myself sit there and keep flipping the pages than I need if- if I actually just, like, open my curiosity and open my- my attention and- and really start engaging with the book.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel44:26

       There

8. 44:27 – 58:51

   New media for learning (video, games, streaming)

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel44:27

      are sorts of ideas that people come up with for different pedagogical tools which, uh, or mediums that give closer connection to the reader. One is, you know, you have some sort of fiction account where a concept is introduced and reinforced, uh, or you have a video game with characters you care about and, as far as I know, there isn't something that has really taken off, uh, using these sorts of new mediums. What- what- why do you think that is? Is it just an inherent limitation of everything but text and lectures or people just haven't given it the right, uh, content and-

   2. AMAndy Matuschak45:00

      Yeah.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel45:00

      ... uh, design?

   4. AMAndy Matuschak45:02

      Yeah. Uh, I'm fascinated by this question. Let's see, I can say a few things about it. One is that I- I would argue that, uh, one medium has taken off in an absolutely enormous way and that's video. People love video. Like, people will watch Grant Sanderson spend, you know, an hour going through some explanation of an esoteric math problem, people who would never crack, like, a Springer graduate textbook in mathematics or something like that. The issue is that, like, they will in general not walk away from that interaction with much understanding.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel45:31

      Yeah.

   6. AMAndy Matuschak45:32

      Uh, but they are much more engaged.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel45:34

      Yeah. (laughs)

   8. AMAndy Matuschak45:34

      So that's cool, that's suggestive, you know, and it suggests the question like, "Well, but, like, is there a version of that that I could actually produce detailed understanding?"

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel45:42

      Right.

   10. AMAndy Matuschak45:42

       Maybe. One approach to producing that might be, like, a game. My- my favorite example of this is The Witness by Jonathan Blow. Have you played The Witness?

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel45:52

       No.

   12. AMAndy Matuschak45:52

       Okay. Uh, I- I think The Witness is an absolutely extraordinary work of art. Um, so it- it's a game that- that has no text, at least no text that's relevant to the game elements. Um, in- in kind of classic Myst style, you- you wake up on an island, uh, and you figure out what's going on and the game proceeds to explain to you without using words, but just by shaping your environment, uh, a series of extremely complex mechanics basically, um, of a system that exists in this- in this world. Um, so you- you learn a bunch of stuff, um, and it gets to the point where it feels like you're in conversation with the game's designers. It's like, "Ah, he's asking me to do this here." No one's asking you, right? There's no text, but you can feel that you are being asked and you perform some interaction in the environment and you feel that you have answered, uh, and the game responds in kind. This is very, very interesting. It's- it's like it's a medium of action. Some people try to make educational games, games which are explicitly about arithmetic or something. Jonathan Blow's game is not about that. It's, the mechanics that you learn are, they're, like, about the environment. I don't think anybody has yet really succeeded in doing this about explicit subjects. There are, for instance, things like Kerbal Space Program, uh, maybe people learn some things about project management or orbital mechanics from that. Zachtronics has a bunch of games that are sort of about assembly language roughly speaking, maybe you can learn some things about that. The issue seems to be that games are ultimately... They're- they're an aesthetic form. Like, the- the purpose of the game is to have an experience that feels a particular way and so they're- they're sort of serving a different purpose than Grant's videos or a text. Grant's videos are also serving a different purpose from the text. Like, the text you might pick up because you're like, "I want to be able to build a robot," like, so you pick up a textbook on robotics or something and so is there something that you can pick up as sort of like a game insofar as it's an active environment that you'd use in a similar situation to, "I want to learn to build a robot"?

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel48:05

       Hmm.

   14. AMAndy Matuschak48:06

       Maybe. Kind of. Um, we- we don't, we don't quite have those yet. We have some things that are kind of like that. I don't know if you've seen, like, From NAND to Tetris?

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel48:15

       Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

   16. AMAndy Matuschak48:16

       This is a very interesting project that's kind of along these lines, uh, and what characterizes it, like games, is doing. It's active. So when I was asking all those questions of the book, that was active learning, active reading. NAND to Tetris is naturally active. So this is a course in which, um, you're- you kind of start with basically nothing, uh, you- you start with memory and- and you- you build a- a virtual computer and you build Tetris, you build a, uh, processor and stuff. And, um, so the whole thing's active, like, the whole time you're- you're- you're making the computer go. Uh, this is doing a similar job to the question asking that I was doing except that, um, you don't have to regulate all of that yourself.... the regulation, the choice of what activity to do-

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel49:00

       Mm-hmm.

   18. AMAndy Matuschak49:00

       ... is in the course, is in the structure of, of the material. I think there is waiting to be created some kind of mass medium that is like that, uh, but that can be applied in many, many circumstances. We have the non-mass medium version of it already and it's apprenticeship. Like, if you want to be a good, um, yoga teacher, you, like, go hang out in yoga studios. If you want to be a good surfer, like, you go to the beach when the other surfers are there and you, like, participate peripherally, uh, and you talk to them and you learn about their tactics. They might give you some feedback eventually, and you'll start to participate less and less peripherally over time, and eventually you'll be part of the community. This isn't a mass medium. We can't print a billion copies of it.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel49:46

       Mm-hmm.

   20. AMAndy Matuschak49:46

       Like we can with a book.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel49:47

       What is the experience of watching George Hotz on a stream, co-code a tiny grad? How does that compare to just being in an office with him?

   22. AMAndy Matuschak49:54

       Yeah.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel49:55

       Um, 'cause even if you're in an office with him, there's, you know, there's, there would be constraints on his time and how much engagement there would be. So, why, why isn't video a scalable way to increase apprenticeship?

   24. AMAndy Matuschak50:07

       I'm incredibly excited about streaming actually as, as a medium for this. So, so we're kind of gesturing at a particular kind of, of learning that needs to happen. Um, it's often called tacit knowledge. So like, one of the things that you have to learn to do as an engineer is to learn to deal with 100,000 different, like, weird situations where something is not behaving the right way, and eventually you learn a kind of pattern recognition, you learn ways of dealing with this, and, uh, much of this is, like, not described in any book. It's not explicitly taught. You just kind of learn it by doing it over a long period of time. So by watching George do it, uh, I think that people do absorb stuff. They can absorb some of that knowledge. That's part of how apprentices absorb that knowledge. There's a few things that are missing. You know, you're not getting feedback. There's a whole lot of chaff there. Like, there's a whole lot of stuff that probably isn't all that meaningful. It's also true for apprentices. Um, so I'm pretty, actually, I'm pretty excited about streaming videos. I, I have, um, I've complained loudly that there aren't more designer streamers. So one, one of the things that, that I think is really interesting is that we have some disciplines, like programming, where there are, like, a million books on courses a- about how to learn to program. Uh, and they don't, they don't give you everything you need.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel51:26

       Mm-hmm.

   26. AMAndy Matuschak51:26

       There's this tacit knowledge stuff that you, that you need to develop, but like, you know, like if you work through these courses, if you go through the MIT Open Courseware for computer science, like, you'll be able to build some stuff, uh, and, and you'll be able to lever yourself up. Um, this is not true in all domains. You know, if you're looking at, uh, well, in particular design, but lots of other domains that are sort of like that, like, uh, musical composition, architecture, something like this. Nope. Like, it's normally done in studio classes, uh, lots and lots of hands-on feedback. Um, stuff has... Like, the feedback is highly contingent, it's highly contextual. We just haven't figured out how to communicate this.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel52:04

       Mm-hmm.

   28. AMAndy Matuschak52:04

       Um, and so it's good to see lots of programmer streamers, but I really want to see the streamers in these other domains.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel52:10

       Right. On, on the point about the more programming books, I, ironically the reason why there's some more resources on programming is that it's just so legible, but it already makes it easier to understand in the first place.

   30. AMAndy Matuschak52:20

       Yeah.
9. 58:51 – 1:05:12

   Schools are designed for the median student

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel58:51

      Well, so it seems like, uh, the tools and the ideas you're developing seem especially geared towards very intelligent and very motivated students. Uh, if- if they would be different, how... what would the tools, um, that you would develop for a median student in the education system look like? Both in motivation and in other, you know, other traits?

   2. AMAndy Matuschak59:14

      Yeah, they'd be super different.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel59:15

      (laughs)

   4. AMAndy Matuschak59:16

      Uh, I- I kind of got out of the educational space in part because I don't like the framing of this problem. Like, for the median student, the education system mostly wants to make the student do things they don't want to do. It's not about helping them achieve their goals more easily or more effectively for the most part. It's about, like, achieving goals that aren't theirs. Now obviously, like, that's not always true, but for the median student right, I think it kind of is true. I become very interested... W- when I was at Khan Academy, I was kind of thinking about this problem and one of the angles that I found really interesting was... So at Khan Academy, we were mostly thinking about not just the median learner but, like, maybe the 25th percentile learner. One of the angles that felt most relevant, maybe not from an efficacy perspective, but for me from, like, a breaking out of this, getting them to follow goals that aren't their own perspective, uh, was to focus on inquiry learning and to focus on transforming the learning experience into something that actually is related to their goals. That is, we're asking questions that, uh, are authentically interesting, uh, that they authentically want to answer and that they can participate in, uh, in a way that feels natural. We did a lot of experiments with dynamic media representations of things. The idea being that, like, you've probably seen, you know, maybe these, like, plastic blocks or things that people can play with when they're kids to get an idea of numbers and number systems. Kids will play with these things unprompted because they're fun. Like, it's just, it's a pleasure to handle them, it's a pleasure to manipulate them. When you have them in hand, it's very natural to suggest, like, "Ah, can you make a pattern like this? Like, why you can't seem to make patterns like that? Uh, why is that?"... so, you know, for instance, you can start to point out things like, so Cuisenaire rods is the name for, um, uh, a set of, uh, 10 rods that have basically unit length one to 10 and they're all different colors. Um, and so you can do things like take eight and, like, the rod that represents eight and, um, put two of the rods that represent four up next to it and show that, like, this one you can, you can, like, divide into two rods effectively. But then if you take seven, like, there aren't, there is no other pair of rods that for the same color you can put it next to it. So, so you get these different patterns. So things kind of naturally suggest themselves, um, by experimenting with these materials and having conversations with people around these materials. And so one of the things we were interested in was, well, are there things that are like that that are for more advanced topics? Like, can we, can we create something that's kind of like those rods, but that is about, you know, like a, a more advanced topic in math or, or, um, or about, uh, debates in history or something like that? One of our tactics was to lean heavily on social interaction. Uh, people like talking about stuff with people if it's, like, a real conversation. Um, for, you know, and for the same reason that I had to use less willpower to study that quantum mechanics text because you were there with me, a student who's engaged in, like, a real activity with a peer will need less willpower as well. They'll also learn from their peer, uh, if you structure things right. So social learning becomes interesting. Um, but I think at a high level, I, I, I mostly have abandoned this question to others. Uh, basically everyone in the educational space... This isn't totally true, but like, you know, 90-plus percent of people in the educational space are focused on really, like, the bottom quartile. Like, not even median. Um, and there's good reason for this. Like, many, uh, not, not quite as many people who are in education, they are motivated by, um, arguments of equity, uh, and opportunity and they want everybody to have the opportunities they had. They, they're very motivated by the injustices that they see in the differing access and the differing support that different people have, and they're very motivated by the, the very real disadvantages that accrue to the bottom quartile performing students. It's also true that the, the marginal impact that you'll have on that student's life will be much greater probably than the marginal impact on, say, an 80th percentile performing student. Or so the argument goes. Like, that student will be fine, uh, which is, like, probably true.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:03:57

      But, uh, there's a, there's a big marginal difference between, uh, fine and, uh, uh, you know, supercharged.

   6. AMAndy Matuschak1:04:03

      Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's true. But any- anyway, I mean, like, I, I say all this to say, like, I, I understand why the vast majority of people in education are, are focused on what they're focused on, and I think it is good and I'm glad they're doing it and I'm, I'm mostly, uh, have decided to let them do that (laughs) and don't focus elsewhere.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:21

      Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Uh, I, I see tremendous value in focusing on the p- realistically, like, the cool new shit that's coming out, you know, where's that coming from and what, what's the way to increase that.

   8. AMAndy Matuschak1:04:32

      Yeah.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:32

      Yeah. Okay. So but it's interesting to know that the same tools might not just work across the spectrum.

   10. AMAndy Matuschak1:04:37

       Yeah. And also say, like, part of the trouble here is that, like, the cool shit is very likely to come from students who are, like, performing at the 20th percentile in school because they're, like, disaffected and bored and none of this stuff matters to them.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:50

       Mm-hmm.

   12. AMAndy Matuschak1:04:50

       Right? And so, like, part of the trouble here is that by, like, opting out of helping these people learn, there, there are all kinds of interesting inventions, uh, that could probably occur that aren't, uh, occurring. So I, I don't quite know how to contend with that. I, I guess basically I'm, like, trying to bite off a, a piece of a problem that, that feels maybe

10. 1:05:12 – 1:11:57

    Is learning inherently miserable?

    1. AMAndy Matuschak1:05:12

       tractable.

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:13

       Once, you know, all the tools are built, you know, w- when you're at the end of your career, would the, would the learning process, is it supposed to feel fun or does it have to feel fun? Is there an element of even when all the tools are there, that there's just, like, a level of David Goggins, you know, this is gonna be miserable but I've decided to learn this in this way and I just had to go through it?

    3. AMAndy Matuschak1:05:34

       Where does misery come from?

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:37

       Hmm. Where does it come from?

    5. AMAndy Matuschak1:05:39

       I guess I'm asking this honestly, not really rhetorically. Let me try to answer my own question.

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:43

       (laughs)

    7. AMAndy Matuschak1:05:43

       I mean, so let me say first off, like, I, I think I am broadly speaking very opposed to what I understand to be David Goggins-esque, uh, attitudes towards almost anything. In this particular instance, I think what I think is something like if, if I ask, "Why is it miserable to learn a particular subject?" The answers that come to mind are things like, first off, "I don't care about this subject." And I think that's not what we're talking about. Like, you're asking about a world in which these great tools exist and someone's using one of these tools to, to try to do something they really care about. So another reason why it could be miserable that I think is pretty common is that you have some idea about, like, you're not going fast enough or, like, you're failing or you're struggling and the misery comes from resisting that. It comes from feeling like you're, you're doing poorly and, like, you shouldn't be doing poorly. Like, it's bad that you're doing poorly. Uh, and maybe you're feeling fearful like others are gonna judge you or, like, you don't have enough time for something like that. And I think that's basically, like, an emotional problem that needs to get healed rather than, like, a practical problem with learning. In the case of something like organic chemistry where, like, you truly do just need to learn, like, you know, 200 names or something, one answer is that, like, okay, that can be done very cheaply using modern memory systems actually. So, like, organic chemistry students suffer through this and they don't need to. But even with modern memory systems, like, you're probably gonna spend a total of, I don't know, call it 100 minutes across some weeks, uh, s- studying all of these, um, formulae.... and that still is unpleasant, so can that be resolved? And I think the answer is yes, actually. So, um, I was thinking about this in the context of the Cell Biology by Numbers book I was telling you about, where there's all of these, um, uh, things like the, the volume of a nucleotide, as that is in nanometer. So to, to like study the flashcard what's the volume of a nucleotide is like not terribly pres- pleasant. I'm not sure it constitutes suffering exactly. It's fine. Uh, you know, I'll do it while I'm waiting in line. Um, but I think there is a better version of that, which is like, uh, solving an interesting Fermi problem which involves that term. So something like, if I have a vial of the COVID vaccine, like how many copies of the COVID RNA are likely to actually be in it, uh, if the vial is a milliliter large or something? That's like kind of a fun little question, uh, and I can enjoy sitting and noodling on that. And in doing so, I will need to retrieve the, the volume of the nucleotide, uh, to help me make that approximation. So I think there's moves like that that you can use to kind of paper over any remaining stuff that feels kind of necessarily unpleasant or rote.

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:08:30

       I'm actually surprised to hear you say that, because one way in which I read your stuff is, at least some of your stuff, is that this is actually a way of endorsing the traditional way of thinking about education, but using new tools to get the traditional ends. To give you an example of what I'm talking about, you know, you go back to like a headmaster from the 1900s and you say, "Is, is it important to have the taxonomy of a subject memorized?"

    9. AMAndy Matuschak1:08:55

       Right, right.

    10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:08:55

        And you would say, "Of course it is. That's why we're going to spend a year memorizing taxonomy." And then you would say, you know, "Memorization is actually important so that you have a dictionary by which to proceed on the subject." So in those ways

    11. NANarrator1:09:06

        (laughs)

    12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:09:06

        ... but you have sort of, you know, new systems for doing that same kind of thing. So I'm actually surprised to hear you say on this part- and the reason in this particular case I was expecting you to say that no, that you have to be disciplined if you decide to learn something, is I, I expected that, you know, in the case of the three hours of, uh, intense learning followed by an intense piano session, you were just like really tired at the end and you were like, "But no, I've been, this is something I've had to do this evening." So, um, yes, I'm actually kind of surprised to hear you say that.

    13. AMAndy Matuschak1:09:33

        Yeah, yeah. No, I really enjoy this tension. Um, and I'm probably overstating my... I'm probably like reacting to the Goggins reference.

    14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:09:42

        Right. (laughs)

    15. AMAndy Matuschak1:09:42

        With like a bit of an over extreme-

    16. DPDwarkesh Patel1:09:44

        Yeah.

    17. AMAndy Matuschak1:09:44

        ... overcorrection or something. Um, but, but this really is how I feel, and, and I feel this tension all the time. Like the, the histories in educational psychology that I'm most aligned with are like the most robotic, like, authoritarian kind of histories, and also the ones that are most like kind of unschooling and Montessori-esque. Like, I really have a ton of sympathy for, for elements of both of these directions and there's kind of a weird synthesis of this in my head that I can't, I guess, fully externalize. I guess part of what I'm saying is, is aspirational, like, I mean it certainly is the case that I do, in practice, uh, uh, use willpower to make things happen. So just an- as an example of something that's totally contrary to everything I was saying, I use a tool called Beeminder which charges me if I don't do certain things, right?

    18. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:34

        (laughs)

    19. AMAndy Matuschak1:10:34

        This sounds, I don't know if it's, you know, kind of military, but it's certainly more authoritarian than this kind of freewheeling butterflies kind of gesture I was making a moment ago. And I use it to make sure that I do my memory practice. Shouldn't my memory practice be so joyful? It's at the center of my research, right? It should be like the most interesting, exciting part of my day. But often it's not. Uh, and so I use this to do it anyway. So there's some tension here. I think I, I do want to say, you know, the reason why I'm willing to endorse this headmaster's view about the taxonomy has to do with the price. I did a bunch of rote memorization in high school and it was very inefficient and it was very uncertain. So it was like, it was emotionally difficult because like I wouldn't even feel confident that I had learned the stuff. I didn't know what it was to learn something reliably, like to be confident that I'd be able to recall it. And it also, like it was hugely time-consuming, um, because I didn't have techniques or tools. And now, you know, part of why I respond so favorably to like, yeah, just learn the taxonomy is that like for me, um, it's just trivial. Like yeah, sure, whatever, throw it in the deck. You know, like it'll, it'll consume a total of 15 minutes over the next few weeks and then I'll know it. Uh, you know, it just doesn't cost anything, so like yeah, okay, fine. Um, other things in, in learning do still have real costs and, um, those, those are maybe more difficult to negotiate.

11. 1:11:57 – 1:30:00

    How Andy would structure his kids’ education

    1. AMAndy Matuschak1:11:57

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:11:57

       Actually, this is, um, a good place maybe to ask you about, uh, unschooling and your attitude towards... Just let me ask, I think somebody on Twitter had this question, which is, your kids as they're growing up, how are you, how are you structuring their education?

    3. AMAndy Matuschak1:12:10

       (laughs) Well, okay, so to be clear, I don't, I don't have kids.

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:14

       Right. (laughs) Hypothetical kids.

    5. AMAndy Matuschak1:12:16

       And so yeah, so you're gonna hear the foolish response of, you know, like a person talking about what one would do hypothetically. This is very difficult. School, of course, has many purposes other than instructional, right? It has a social purpose, it has a societal purpose, it has a behavioral purpose, and it also has like a pragmatic purpose of basically babysitting. Those things can be unbundled. I think it's pretty interesting to consider that. If I actually did have a kid, I would probably consider that project pretty thoroughly. I think it's like pretty likely that some kind of homeschooling situation would occur. It probably wouldn't be me being the teacher, but it would probably be the people I would hire. I have some resources. Like I'm not wealthy, but I have some resources, so like that is, uh, maybe a difference. But during the pandemic, I was struck by Brian Tobol started a company which is now defunct, and so this is a fun example to bring up, and it's called Schoolhouse, and the idea was that he noticed that people were getting together in pods, right? That was a thing we did during the pandemic.And in particular, they got together in pods with, like, their classmates from school, maybe five or six kids. And some of these pods started hiring elementary school teachers who were not working because of the pandemic. And these elementary school teachers would, like, come to the backyard of one of these people's houses, and the five or six kids would get together with the elementary school teacher and, like, they'd do stuff all day. Buying this one teacher's time, split five or six ways, was actually really very tractable. You know, let's say you want to pay the person $50 an hour, maybe that seems reasonable for a teacher. Like, this is not that hard to do, uh, and actually costs less, substantially less than a private school. I, I think a schoolhouse costs something like a fifth or, or whatever the cost of an elementary school. Uh, once you got to older grades, you, you need maybe specialists. Um, it's actually not clear if you do. Uh, my friend, Alec Reznik, is, is working on a, uh, an, a very interesting school called Powderhouse in Somerville, Massachusetts that, um, does something like the model I just described where you have adults who are in more of, like, a, a coaching role. Um, and they aren't necessarily domain specialists, but they'll connect people with domain specialists. So anyway, I, I, I would explore something like that model. I'm sorry this is a little bit vague. If you, if you want to ask about specifics of anything, feel free.

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:35

       Yeah, sure, like, let me ask, uh, let me ask, so you got a twelve... th- this, this child grows up and is 12.

    7. AMAndy Matuschak1:14:39

       Yeah.

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:40

       Uh, so, at this point, you know, it's not just like, of course you have taught them arithmetic and reading and everything. Are there... uh, do you proceed in, "You have to learn your biology, you have to learn your chemistry"? Or do you just say, "What are you interested in? Are you interested in Roman history? Oh, let's learn about the aqueducts."

    9. AMAndy Matuschak1:14:55

       Yeah.

    10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:56

        Or is there an actual curriculum that proceeds until they get to college?

    11. AMAndy Matuschak1:14:59

        Yeah, this is really challenging. So, uh, one, one of the, the sort of, the heroes of the reform school movement is this philosopher named John Dewey and, uh, he has a, a lovely book called Experience in Education, sort of written near the end of his time, looking back on all of his efforts to reform schooling in a kind of un-schooling-ish direction. He was never as extreme as that, um, but broadly looking for freedom on a child's part. And, um, he has... he makes this wonderful argument that because these kids, a 12-year-old, uh, doesn't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, uh, certainly doesn't have a fully developed kind of sense of self to let them do whatever it is that their whim commands them to do in any given moment is actually not freedom, but rather is, is chaining them to whatever that impulse is. It makes them the, the subject of these tides of impulse. And I think that's a pretty compelling argument. It doesn't authorize tyranny, um, but it also suggests that, yeah, you gotta be a little bit skeptical about the, the, the planning or the plans of 12-year-olds, I guess. How skeptical should one be? I don't know. I think I would probably have stronger opinions on that if I had a 12-year-old. Uh, but my instinct as a foolish non-parent, um, would be something like a kind of mix. I, I, I would be interested in exposing the 12-year-old to lots of topics and possibilities. I would, um, be voluble in expressing the consequences of any particular actions. Like if they just wanna, like, compose music all day, we could talk about, like, well, what does that mean? What kind of life does that look like? I would try to be non-coercive in this as much as is possible. Um, and I think to some extent, the, the student should, um, or the, the child should be allowed to feel the consequences of, of their choices. This is complicated by the fact that like, you know, I, I, again, like, I'm not wealthy, but like, any, any child of mine would, like, have chances, I guess. You know, like if they made some weird choice about a career path when they're 13 and so they didn't get into Harvard or whatever, like, that would be okay. You know? Like, they, they could do... they could be 24 and finally figure it out then or 32 and finally figure it out then. Like, it would probably turn out fine. And so this, this doesn't seem like reliable guidance. You should notice I, I'm feeling very confused about that.

Episode duration: 2:22:39