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Andrej Karpathy

# on shortification of "learning" There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients. Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn. I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero. So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn. And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.

6:10 PM · Feb 10, 2024

Amitav Krishna

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terminally onλine εngineer

thanks for this post

Would you then agree with this

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rohitsabu.com

@rohitsabu_

May 30

Replying to @suekhim

I see everyone glazing this product. And I understand why theoretically it sounds amazing. But here’s the problem. You cannot speedrun education. When you went home from school and did your homework, you had no assistance whatsoever. If you were wrong, you were wrong. You

Sebastian Raschka

> And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality.

for technical or ML content, a rule I use is that I need to code something along with what I am learning or reading. Short videos are automatically filtered out because of this. Long form content is the best way to learn and go deeply into a topic. This is why I prefer to

+++ wrote a long post on why learning is not supposed to be fun How to Learn Better in the Digital Age:

How to Learn Better in the Digital Age

Online content makes edutainment the norm among curious and intelligent people, who don't realize that they aren't actually learning what they think they are.

I think finding fun ways to get people excited about a topic is step 1 to getting them to WANT to do the “brain sweat” work. Excitement and enjoyment of the topic will let some get the surface level and inspire others to want to dive even deeper.

Not necessarily true. One hour of treadmill, one hour of hike in the woods, or one hour of football roughly provide same amount of workout but their “fun” varies widely. Similarly, with right design choices, learning can both be effective and fun. (It’s much harder though)

hundreds of my students have come to me over years and complained, “I’m stressed. I’m confused. I’m exhausted.” my answer is always the same: “That’s what learning feels like. You’re doing it right.”

tbh if it don't feel like this you're not really learning

I disagree. I enjoy learning and YouTube videos and long form posts can be a lot of fun without any “sweating” involved. Agree on TikTok though! It’s mostly trashy

youtube.com/playlist?list= Interestingly that makes “how boring is this?” a great heuristic for quality.

Theory of Computation

Patrick Collins

You need to be able to shorten your content. I strongly disagree on how going the middle route clamps to zero. Memory is the residue of thought, so more time is more better yes, but if they are busy thinking about the wrong things, or not attaching the knowledge to prior

~2h long video Took me about 3 or 4 h or so if you include the time to actually think it through (2 sittings) Best education I've gotten since university. Didn't actually code it through though. That wasn't the goal and It'd have taken far more time.

dang. why you gotta do garden veggie straws dirty like that?

Coding Challenges is a real workout. You get the problem, you get the inspiration and the background, but you have to write the code all by yourself.

Coding Challenges - Intro | Coding Challenges

From codingchallenges.fyi

AshutoshShrivastava

@ai_for_success

My take as a learner : Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn. Every single word here was a gold

Turns out attention isn't all you need, INTENTION is what you need

Interesting thoughts. Thank you for sharing. There is a lot to be said for sweating, and no shortcuts to learning deeply. It does take a significant amount of effort. On the other hand I think there is a category of “light” learning where an audience that doesn’t want or need to

I disagree. Learning can and should be fun. For an example, try the #HourOfCode learning activities on Code.org, or check out the short videos at Code.org/videos

Free K–12 Curriculum for Computer Science and AI | Code.org

99% of people are having fun from the process and anticipation of success. Most of them wouldn’t enter the whole game if there was only long form content. So short content is doing exactly what you say it does. But why do you think it’s bad? Anticipating of success is just fine

I agree and disagree on a few accounts. Maybe the biggest one is the illusion of sweat = "real learning". The only thing that hard study means is that the study was hard. I've studied things extremely hard that were useless due to how shallow they were but felt valuable, and I've

Valeriy M., PhD, MBA, CQF

@predict_addict

everyone who studied serious subjects knows it.

this will also help one get out of a rut or the valley of disappointment mental masturbation is too common

Says someone who explained Rubik’s cube in 30 minutes on YouTube (there’s now 3M views on that vid) :)

What are some of your favorite textbooks?

Antonio Loquercio

, you might find this article on learning vs the feeling of learning interesting to read:

Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the...

We compared students’ self-reported perception of learning with their actual learning under controlled conditions in large-enrollment introductory ...

I get notes regularly from folks both inspired and learning useful concepts from my short videos. Everything has a place.

This is true in normal school too. If you don’t get a topic, and a friend or tutor explains it, you might think in that moment that you get it. Nope, that means your friend gets it. You actually have to do the work and work problems. Then you’ll get it.

I agree with the premise but don’t sleep on the 10 minute YouTube workouts, some of those are crazy intense

The best way to learn is in a flow state. I'm not sure what you call fun, but being in a flow is definitely very pleasurable. Game designers know this. It's just there are very few educational tools out there that do this.

Whole business model of duolingo too right here

Could create a multimodal ai system that is finetuned on educational value + entertainment value. Then have in churn out a wide range of content, could do this for long form and short form video content. Create videos based on user recommendations data. Ai Education TikTok.

This is

true. Being a software developer for many years now and having created software being used by millions of users, I can vouch that learning is indeed mental sweating

Just like you can’t hit your health goals without a sweat.

Haitham Bou Ammar

In my channel I am trying to do just that, but then it is boring and barely gets views

There are a lot of not polished lectures and talks are YouTube that are amazing though

Or, another way to put it: we need to build more "gardens", and fewer "streams" on the internet (and in society) Gardens promote depth of knowledge, connecting ideas, self-organizing to generate new insights. Streams are the feeds of chronological, real-time info.

I feel this way about numberphile, it certainly increased my love for math, but I feel confidently I am not any better at math except for the fact that I know what the Riemann hypothesis is

Valeriy M., PhD, MBA, CQF

@predict_addict

@threadreaderapp

unroll

Ahh the delicate tightrope walk of education. A key part that also goes into this equation is how far along is the learner in their journey? New coders, for example, probably don't understand yet that coding is actually fun. Definitely risk "sweating" them out of the field.

@casper_hansen_

I once created a blog for beginners called MLFromScratch. It was fun while it lasted, but the obvious problem is that people need more motivation to read a long-form blog post on some technical subject.

there is no one way to do it, logically. What you say is true but not 100% true. It could be technically possible to have information be deployed more efficiently without shit-level boredom. But I agree that currently it isn’t likely. But you should still increase your quality.

@attractfund1ng

It's called progressive disclosure Einstein. Read a book.

this was entertaining and educational, thanks!

Rajdeep Borgohain

It depends on the topic of the video. A simple concept like linear transformation might be explained in a 1-minute video or a detailed 10-minute-long video. Short-form content is good as a starting point, but eventually, one needs to dive deep for conceptual clarity.

"You want the mental equivalent of sweating" — Love this

Andrej, this is spot-on, thank you for writing this up.

There’s no education from Edutainment.

louis030195 | screenpipe (YC S26)

Everything online is optimized for attention not for education, society is an attention market

@adamcohenhillel

Thank you

Crunch d’Grace Hopper

Just searched themathdoctors.org for "is an epsilon away from". Still learning!

John Manoogian III (jm3)

save

b/acc, context platform engineer

Thanks for sharing unpopular wisdom. And shoutout to sites like

@_davemacdonald

Learning tip: Strategically nap when you hit a wall to flush what you’ve learned to ‘disk’

@HusseinHElafifi

"learning is not supposed to be fun" I agree that some frustration has been proven necessary for optimal anterior cingulate cortex activation but I think some types of learning are only possible in play/fun situations. Cubs/kids HAVE to roughhouse in a fun playful setting.

prakyath kantharaju

Learning without discomfort is a myth. Learning is a like gradient descent you need to challenge (backprop) your preconceived idea (weights) based on new observations and information.

I agree with the need for deep uninterrupted focused time (several weekly 4-hour blocks are good) to learn concepts like Transformers, Latent Diffusion Models, RKHS embedding, etc., because the overview videos leave me making incorrect assumptions, and a deeper dive gradually

Cool explanation of matrix splitting, merging, and reshaping in Transformers, by Ketan Doshi [1]. This would not be obvious (to me) from the QKV matrix notation that often suppresses the matrix dimensions.
[1]. https://towardsdatascience.com/transformers-explained-visually-part-3-multi-head-attention-deep-dive-1c1ff1024853

curiosity is a vice, studiousness a virtue. This isn’t to say don’t have wonder and not seek to fulfill it, but that process should be active, not passive.

You may certainly be correct about many YouTube videos but as a generalization - that something fun that is largely effortless doesn’t educate you - is easily disproven. The majority of games are enjoyable and generally considered fairly effortless while you learn the game, and

I understand the sentiment, mindlessly consuming wont get you anywhere close to where real effort will get you but i dont think the issue is the fun feeling

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Vanja

@vanjajaja1

Aug 3, 2023

I think about this moment frequently, it changed the way I train & eventually the way I think about life "training should be addictive"

@GoldMagikarp42

This is a huge problem with the current internet content mill. People drinking from a firehouse, retaining only a fraction and doing nothing. There is a simple litmus test: if what you’re learning isn’t accompanied by some kind of homework that allows you to prove mastery, you

This might be the worst take ever. Is it not ok to have fun while getting in shape playing a strenuous sport? Games that simulate real world problem solving to driving. i.e. inside well done models with great UI/UX can and should be fun. Like why else do nervous systems have

I agree

That’s why I publish flow charts when trying to launch my startup. It’s real learning, hardcore stuff

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Nifal Adam

@nifal_adam

Feb 10, 2024

Product Launch, Day 14 - "Payment Flowchart" #buildinpublic Website: bannerswipe.com Feel free to use my flowchart to build a payment system for your indie app. I had to take a moment to focus on this because I felt like I was rushing to complete the app, but how do

Aaron Cash - ABetterTheater.com

*Cough cough* Neil Degrasse Tyson

@infinite_varsh

> Learning is not supposed to be fun. Don’t know if I agree with it. When learning is done right, it’s when your concentration is high on the subject and you’re most likely in a state of flow. This inherently causes rise in confidence which results in a degree of joy.

Alexandre Bairos

I can have a hard time while learning and have fun, in my state of mind. “You hit me hard! Try again! I am unbreakable!”. I can have easy videos and don’t have fun at all. So I agree with setting your intention before starting to engage with the content. Fun in the sense of

I’d argue that sometimes framing things as fun and lighter in rigor at first can be a good introductory point to progressively more rigorous study. You want progressive load at a pace that isn’t too overwhelming, just like when you go to the gym and level up over time. Also this

you gotta go crackhead mode

Learning by playing is the default state, and is fun. By imitation is the next level, also fun. By communication is what makes humans special, it's social and fun. One way communication with a book squirted out by a mediocre communicator is factory farming education. Reject it.

They call it tutorial hell for a reason. Blindly following along without reapplying the lessons to a new context means you can follow a recipe, not that you know how to cook. Snacks are good too, but you don't really learn how to prep a chicken until you get your hands in it

The reverse is also true. Just because you’re sweating doesn’t mean you’re learning. The best learners are able to evaluate their learning progress as they’re learning.

I viscerally noticed this on your NN zero-to-hero/make more/build-a-GPT YouTube videos. Everything else I could find is like a 10 minute vague description ("oh you know there's K, V, Q") but your content got into the trenches and I really made me understand! Thank you!