Live quantum mechanics study session with Dwarkesh Patel
Added 2023-07-13 19:37:06 +0000 UTCI mentioned in my latest essay that my recent thinking about reading comprehension was inspired in part by recording a live study session with Dwarkesh Patel. That video is now live—enjoy! We also recorded a traditional interview, full of Dwarkesh's trademark probing questions.
The study video is unscripted. You'll see me making lots of mistakes, some of which I don't catch during our study session. You'll see us both get very tangled in an example problem for the last half hour or so. But I hope you'll also enjoy seeing some unusual study practices in action.
You'll notice the very demanding way that I'm constantly asking questions of the book and myself. This is a routine practice among scholarly readers—I'm not doing anything unique—but I've noticed that many professionals have had no exposure to this sort of close reading, and find it quite surprising. Something I find interesting about this is that it's hard for people to even know that they're unaware of others' reading practices: reading is usually invisible, private, silent.
Of course, what's less routine is the way that I'm writing memory prompts as I read. It's certainly a more overt difference from typical reading practices, but I think it's actually less important for capacity-building than the demanding interpretive work I'm doing. In any case, the two are entwined, as I described in my latest essay on reading comprehension and memory systems.
I'm already getting asked: is this prototype available for others to use? Sorry—not yet. It's held together by duct tape; a couple days of work would be necessary before a wider audience could use it; I'm not sure I want to sacrifice that time at the moment. But if I do devote more time to it, you all would get access long before a public audience.
Comments
Thanks for the nudge! I may make that happen…
Andy Matuschak
2023-07-23 22:52:17 +0000 UTCThank you very much for this! Your "How to write good prompts" was already an amazing guide, but watching you take notes and making flashcards really helps getting the tacit knowledge about how to do it in practice. Would love more videos like this
João Guilherme Madeira Araújo
2023-07-15 14:16:09 +0000 UTCThanks for sharing this! I really enjoyed being able to see the process. It’s quite inspiring. It may be of less interest to you but as someone trying to integrate more of these kinds of practices myself I’d be curious to get a description of what your equivalent process looks like for the following (or even a video one day if you do find them interesting): 1) A general interest book that is less dense (including, if you ever read them, history books). 2) A non-academic article, e.g. a blog post making a complex argument or involving new information.
Can Sar
2023-07-14 18:38:04 +0000 UTCI have two kinds of experience with Anki clutter, when learning a new subject. I'm sure they are common... 1. in a short time, understanding improves so much that many of the early cards of the learning project are unproductive or worse ("oh by now I can look at any Hamiltonian and tell which is the kinetic term and which is the potential term, who cares what letter he uses") and 2. dropped the subject so, in a long time, understanding has not advanced at all, and the struggle to remember the signs and constants in Schrodinger's equation is clashing with the struggle to remember the signs and constants in Lewin's equation... . It's a minuscule effort to delete or edit or skip any one clutter card, but I have the feeling that the problem they create is multiplicative, 100 cards of clutter is more than twice as taxing as 50 cards of clutter. Are you perhaps better than average at handing this problem, either because you've had lots of practice or because you've been developing your own tech?
2023-07-13 23:16:58 +0000 UTCHow do you think you'll react to the cards you created during this session, over the next year or so? Will you still be glad to be reminded that Griffiths uses V to stand for potential energy, will you still be forcing yourself to remember that the left-hand side is i hbar d/dt not -i hbar d/dt...
2023-07-13 22:50:45 +0000 UTCAlas: I'd really love to continue studying it, but I have a limited number of focused hours in the day, and I just can't prioritize it at the moment. Instead, inspired in part by this experience, I'm currently using that time to study the cogpsy literature on reading comprehension!
Andy Matuschak
2023-07-13 21:01:04 +0000 UTC
