Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail

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.

Do LLMs make memorization more or less valuable?

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.

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 to get it?

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.