Intuition and Mnemonics

I presume that to the uninitiated the formulae will appear cold and cheerless. –Benjamin Pierce

When I was learning group theory, my friend Merrick mentioned that the main point of groups is their inverse. All proofs about groups use the inverse somewhere. That's what makes groups special.

That observation totally changed my understanding of groups. Before, I knew groups only as a bland list of conditions. Afterwards, I understood more of their texture and character.

Nudges like the one Merrick gave me are pivotal if you want to to really understand a subject. But they're also frustratingly random. Sometimes you get lucky, and stumble upon a friend or a stack exchange answer that gives you the exact insight you need. But sometimes your vague questions don't form neatly into a question, or nobody has a good answer, and you never get that critical nudge.

The point of the Quantized Knowledge Project is to make self-learning efficient, predictable, and uniform. To do that well, we need a way to mass-distribute these nudges.

We do it with a comments section on each card. In the comments, we can aggregate stories and tidbits of intuition from textbooks, stack exchange, quora, etc. And then, as you're seeing a card for the first time, you'll also get a raft of useful hints. We can transform these nudges from lucky events into certainties.

Intuition isn't the only thing that benefits from this type of centralization. Good mnemonics make things easy to remember, but they're hard to come up with. Having a centralized store of mnemonics is a huge boon to learning density.

The best example of this in practice is Kanji Koohii. Japanese learners need to learn about 2200 characters, called kanji. Kanji Koohii provides a centralized store of memorable, funny, and brilliant mnemonics. The fact that you can leverage others' stories probably increases the rate of kanji learning by threefold.

Together, these highlight a significant benefit of assembly line learning. Traditionally, we can't make a list of "important SE answers" because everyone is at a different place in their learning. The answers that are important for some will be uninteresting to others. Likewise, for a mnemonic to be useful, you have to see it before you memorize the material by rote.

But if we the predictability of an assembly line, where everyone learns the same thing at the same time, we can time these nudges just right. That will let us scale this kind of deep understanding past places like MIT where your friends tell you what's up.