responding a little late re: rote learning. a lot of the people in the classical chinese study discord i'm in, especially the ones that are most generally knowledgable, often post pictures of long texts they've copied, all with very careful and neat handwriting. i think copying, especially by hand, is very much a comprehensive learning method: you're not necessarily conscious of all the things you learn doing it
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daliwali
1 year ago
πππ "This week I bought and used stamps for the first time in my life." this is a whole genre of zoomer content discovering the real world for the first time
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iwillneverbehappy
1 year ago
@daliwali Yes, I was standing in the post office feeling ridiculous haha. and @bmh, I think I'm still missing out! The ones I got were festive, though. @hui I wish I could be an anthropologist who observes math professors in their lectures across the world.
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iwillneverbehappy
1 year ago
Added poem(s): "It has been calculated that each copy of the Gutenberg Bible. . .required the skins of 300 sheep."
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iwillneverbehappy
1 year ago
"New" movie review that has been languishing on my laptop and which I have tried my best to resuscitate, so that it can finally take up less room in my head
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iwillneverbehappy
1 year ago
Sorry, I didn't mean to delete your comment, siqu! Shaking my first at Neocities UI... ah well. I wanted to thank you for the observation because for all my thinking about meditativeness and sustained attention being a part of this movie, I never thought to mention it explicitly, so I'm glad you did here.
iwillneverbehappy
1 year ago
Actually, I really like your comment because it makes me think of the movie as something almost alive, with intention. Via an obscure alchemy the whole ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. Or, so much is said with somehow so little
siqu
1 year ago
a human is only living when they are /being/, not doing -- so the movie may remind (as least surmised from your observations and additional comments here) -- thanks for sharing it (Β΄ο½₯Οο½₯`)
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i love klee's angels :) cool site!
iwillneverbehappy
1 year ago
Thanks! I used to follow you on Twitter. How happy I was to see you had a site on here with your art!
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daliwali
1 year ago
neurodivergent masking is how i cope in real life. βI was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real faceβ β Franz Kafka
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iwillneverbehappy
1 year ago
I remember sitting in on office hours for one of my math classes when I saw you had uploaded that page. Fantastic timing...
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blamensir
1 year ago
I quickly read They did not expect him part before class, Iβm looking forward to reading the rest afterwards, thank you very much β¦
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letslearntogether
1 year ago
I like the analogy of math and learning an instrument. To me "symbol-manipulation" is like "bad technique"...the conditioning of a habit without real understanding of the why and how. But we shouldn't forget that instruments should be fun to play, not a chore to perform.
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letslearntogether
1 year ago
Part of my research has also gone into "raging against a machine" in a sense: https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/creation-of-computers-on-the-local-level/1017 But a couple of those links I hadn't seen before. Thank you!
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iwillneverbehappy
1 year ago
LLT, you probably know much more on this topic than I do; your post is a treasure trove of resources. Thank *you* for sharing!
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michaelmas
1 year ago
Categorization & classification is antithetical to authentic writing; try to hold your own against it!
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daliwali
1 year ago
Joost A.M. Meerloo theorized the dark forest of the web: "he is reduced to the mechanical precision of an insect-like state. He cannot develop any warm friendships, loyalties, or allegiances because they may be too dangerous for him. Todayβs friend may be, after all, tomorrows enemy." what draws me here is connecting with interesting people, not NPCs (or bots) on corporate platforms.
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letslearntogether
1 year ago
So long as you enjoy writing, I will enjoy reading it, whatever the topic may be. As the saying goes, "we are our own worst critics." Likewise, there is no pressure to conform to the expectations of an audience if we see sharing as a dialogue.
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copying is essentially a very slow kind of reading. back when the literary language was often very different from the spoken language, comprehension wasn't some immediate thing that could be taken for granted. even the surface grammatical meaning of a sentence might not be obvious. struggling with all of that leads not just to the thoughts the author intended, but all sorts of other alternate possibilities
the same thing happens when i read mathematics (esp. research papers). for close readings, you treat the written proofs as a "cookbook recipe" for reproducing the argument in your own brain. often there are steps that are unclear at first and which require deep thought, but in the course of trying to understand those, you learn other things the author perhaps didn't intend, or didn't find worth writing
e.g. many of the developments in algebraic geometry up to the 80s or so could essentially be characterized as ideas people had while reading EGA and SGA.
I guess what I'm trying to say is simply that reading is a much slower and more complicated process than we might give it credit for, so rote methods of learning like copying and memorizing are ways to trick ourselves into slowing. of course this only works when one is doing it willingly. when forced to memorize or copy by a teacher, many people manage to learn to do so without actually paying attention to the text
(sorry for writing so much -- in retrospect this probably should have been an email...)
Also, rereading these now, I realize I was basically doing some version of "redoing" by writing these: taking the ideas you wrote about and reworking them into my own words. I guess this is the particular sort of "copying" that a modern university education generally trains it's students with (as you noted with your reference to "the last few hundred years of scholasticism")
Thank you for the thoughtful comments and no need to apologize, these are all great. What is interesting to me is how pointless (close) reading is if you don't apply yourself to it 100%, yet how useful it is in learning something. And there's no external way to tell the two apart; it's even difficult for the learner themselves to tell if they are in fact learning something. The "inefficiency" of rote learning (1/2)
and how easy it is to make it an utter waste of time, plus the fact that the yields aren't immediate or quantifiable, might all be part of the reason why it's looked at so negatively in American schools nowadays, but we lose a lot if we banish it entirely. (2/2)