Seeing as this program has and will continue to probe the depths of human discourse, there have been many occasions when I simply couldn’t parse out the material I was engaging with.
As mentioned in the last update, it seems clear to me that the student has an easier time remembering what they understand than what they don’t understand. Remembering the latter would seem to require memorization, and memorized information would seem to decay in memory much more rapidly than understood information, knowledge that can be conjured and reiterated intuitively.
So my approach now, when faced with terms and concepts I don’t understand, is not to memorize them, but to try to understand them. That is, unless the structure of the information is itself arbitrary, i.e. proteins named after scientists rather than proteins with a semantic bearing, in which case memorization would seem necessary, unless a more systematic means of association can be developed.
But if it takes a while to understand some portion of discourse, that is, if it takes a while to develop an intuitive footing, it seems the student may have to rely on memorizing said portion of discourse in the meantime, especially if it is only one topic in a rotation of many.
While understanding the terms themselves is an effort almost universally aided by understandings of semantics and etymology, concepts have proven, at least in my case, to be considerably more difficult to systematically parse out.
In other words, while an understanding that Greek “tropos” translates to “a turning” may shed an etymo-semanticly figurative light on “troposphere” and “anisotropism,” terms in different fields altogether, the same root-seeking approach seems much less obvious when trying to understand concepts.
So when new terms are encountered, the student can turn to etymology. But when new concepts are encountered, it is as if the student has less to inherit an understanding from.
I’ve generally found that, while I may often forget explanations I have encountered of concepts that I have yet to understand, I don’t tend to forget that I have encountered those concepts, that I have had difficulty with them.
For example, the concept of voltage is something that I’ve had difficulty wrapping my mind around. I do not understand what a unit of energy per unit of charge means, nor do I fully understand what electrical potential difference means. I’ve encountered more explanations of these things than I can remember, and it seems the reason I don’t remember more of them is because I never understood them enough in the first place.
Something of a catch-22 there. If I better understood what I was engaging with, I would have an easier time remembering it. But remembering it would seem an important step toward understanding it.
So I tend to view this as an ongoing effort where some inefficiency in cognitive labor must be suffered, namely the effort of remembering things you don’t understand, things you are liable to forget in relatively short order, chiefly because you don’t understand them.
But once an understanding is reached, it is almost as if you can afford to forget the memorized knowledge, seeing as you can now intuit your way through the material you once had to memorize your way through.
Retention of un-understood knowledge is of a lower priority than building an understanding of that knowledge, an intuition that can guide deeper probes yet into the discourse.
Retention of un-understood knowledge is but a transitory means to building such an understanding, at which point the retention level would seem to improve anyway, i.e. it is easier to remember what you understand than what you don’t understand.
In any case, exciting progress is being made with this program.