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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

There are three kinds of learning

- new contextual framework (There is no god, armies used to be retinues of retinues)

- new skills (make fire from sticks, algebra and calculus)

- new information (Henry V won at agincourt)

The big important ones are the contextual frameworks. Without them humanity and individual humans are just floundering. And if there is any big political divide it's because people are not in same contextual framework (eg Brexit)

Skills are how an individual can contribute inside that framework - and it needs practise. And information is the last. The strawman the author is moaning about is absorbing information without practise. This seems to be the failure to leap from podcast to khan academy.

solving that one for millions of people will be an incredible leap. So far we only have "my tutor moans at me if i don't"

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Precisely.

OP has his finger in some of the right places, but is overly broad about both learning methods and objects. If you're listening to conference keynotes @ 3X... that might be fine. A tutorial probably requires multiple listens, rewinds, a transcript and some DIY work.

Im interested in your categorisation of learning. Can you elaborate on "contextual framework"? Are these your own concepts, if not where do you get them from?

The difference between Lucy (the putative earliest human found by Leakey (?)) and me is not that i am innately more intelligent, but that for decades my brain has been stuffed with the collective education of humankind. Lucy does not know about the sun revolving round the Earth, about germ theory and oral-fecal transmission, she does not know about writing or reading, about triangulation for surveying, or surveying, or maps.

But we do because you understood the above conceptual frameworks.

Germ theory is not a fact, like who won the battle of Crecy. It is a whole ever-expanding concept that with it in place in your head, can guide your future actions. Similarly atheism, or logistics, or factory method or steam power ...

Interesting. So perhaps another term for "contextual framework" is "mental model"? I like the way you've thought about this. I don't share your atheism, but without wanting to start a debate it would be interesting to hear why it features on your list as one of your most useful concepts?

Partly it's often a break through point (as in "I never knew there was an alternative allowed" - a conversation years ago with some people from Mid West reported that till a certain age they simply did not know Atheism was a thing - it was a choice between this God and that.

But more probably it is that once there stops being a prime mover, the question becomes how did the universe / world / us come into existence. I guess atheism is the model before evolution. But we needed to get to evolution first before atheism became the obvious solution.

Thank you - had not tried to work that one out before

So I have been trying to think about the major contextual frameworks - could we for example create a Ted talk that told you "everything you ever needed to know"

- Earth revolves round sun (transit of venus??)

- Earth spins (Foucaults pendulum)

I started this in "important experiments for kids" on github.

Oh I see what you mean - plucked randomly from my own synapses

You make a fire with algebra and calculus because your brain overheats, right?

Darn that transitive comma...

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