Redefining learning

As always, I start my guides by making sure we’re all on the same page. What is learning? What is our concrete goal? Most people have two clear ideas about this: how learning should work in general (informed by our educational system) and how they personally learn (informed by experience).

To my dismay, both of these are usually wrong. Don’t worry, you can correct that—you’re reading this guide after all! I was in the same boat. At a young age, I knew school wouldn’t teach me anything, but it still took me years to realize all the bad habits it did instill in me.

The educational system

Let’s start with the first. How does school work?

• You sit in a classroom for hours each day
• While somebody tells you stuff, optionally with some interaction
• When you get home, you read more of that stuff, or make homework about it
• Then, a few weeks later, you get a test: write answers to specific questions within a specific timeframe or format.
• At no point do you get to choose what you want to learn or follow your passion

See what I see? All these bullet points are terrible for learning!

• Sitting the whole day is bad for physical health
• Listening to somebody is probably the most passive way to learn in existence
• If you don’t allow rest or downtime, there’s no chance to actually learn and put information into memory
• Standardized tests don’t actually test skill or knowledge. They test if you happen to write down some right answers at a specific time to specific questions.
• If something isn’t useful, or you have no intrinsic motivation to learn it, it’s always going to be an uphill battle.

We are taught that learning happens through sitting down and listening (or reading) all day. We are taught useless facts, not understanding. We are taught that we have one shot to get a good grade.

Grades are similarly destructive. They teach kids not to value actual learning, but to value a grade or an end result. They create self-doubt and insecurity for those who fail—and a false sense of knowledge for those who pass. They destroy any inner motivation students might have had, by attaching external punishment or reward. (More on this in the chapter about Intrinsic versus Extrinsic.)

For me, the biggest crime is forcing kids to do all these things and taking away their youth. But that’s not the topic of this guide, so let’s skip past that.

No, this is not what learning is. At best, it’s forced labor to put useless facts into your brain—which you’ll forget immediately a few weeks later.

Forget all this.

Learning styles

Many people give themselves a “learning style”. Maybe they say: “oh, I’m a visual learner! Text doesn’t work, I need pictures.”

The truth is that there is no evidence for this at all.

I’ll explain this in further detail in the next chapter. For now, try to forget any assumptions about your “learning style”, at least until this guide is finished.

The game loop

I work (among other things) as a game developer. I’ve discovered so much about learning through making games or studying them.

Why? Because any game, at its core, is a learning experience. That’s why I’m against terms like “educational games”—every game is educational!

A good core “game loop” is always as follows:

• You can do something (as the player character)
• To try and achieve some goal
• You either succeed and get a bigger goal
• Or you fail and learn from that
• Then you try again

Interaction with a game is a constant learning experience. We enjoy games because they let us grow and progress. Yes, learning should be fun. We are hardwired to enjoy it.

Notice how far removed this is from the common ideas I described above. Nobody is telling you exactly how to play the game. (Or to play the game at all, for that matter.) There isn’t a written test at the end of each level, and you certainly don’t have only one try.

You have infinite tries. You have infinite ways to try and win the game.

You have infinite ways to fail—and thus infinite ways to grow back stronger.

And that’s the crucial ingredient to growth and progression.

So what is learning?

That’s what learning is to me. And the older I get, the more this rings true.

It’s a constant loop of: try something new, make a mistake, learn from it, then go again.

This has two important side-effects.

Effect 1: learning doesn’t always mean improving! It’s falling and rising. You might be worse at something for a while, before it gets better.

The machine learning example is very interesting. Within that space, researchers understand how such a network learns as efficiently as possible. They understand they need to …

• Just simulate many games (“do something a lot”)
• Give feedback (only the best scoring networks are kept)
• But also experiment (you need to add a good dose of randomness and variation to new networks, otherwise it will get stuck and never progress anymore)

It’s funny how we apply this to design algorithms that will take over the world in ten years, but absolutely fail to do any of that with our schools.

Effect 2: this is mostly a subconscious process! You don’t know how good you are or why you’re skilled at something.