Studying with Dwarkesh Patel by Andy Matuschak

Highlights

GPT4 using Machato

Use the knowledge in the book to write tasks that would help you internalize them more effectively.

When he notices things he's unfomfortable with (unfamiliar), even if he's unsure if it's important, he uses task-based retrieval pratices.

He constantly makes notes about what he doesn't understand.

He makes multiple passes when reading.

• Identifies things he need to reinforce.
• Does second pass after he has some idea of what the author thinks is important.
• He does this multiple passes on sections of the book (not necessarily by chapter or by entire book)

If he doesn't understand the concepts fully, he can't make meaningful tasks out of them. However, he still makes a note of them and sees how they evolve in the text.

The notes he make for unfamiliar text are questions, possibly prompts.

He writes a question about things he don't totally understand yet so that he gives himself reason to return to these in the future.

• We he does return, he may have a better understanding of the concept and could revise the question.

You can make a card even if you don't know the answer yet. This is rehearsing the answer. Because it will get better. The question might even be split to different questions as my understanding becomes better.

After he makes all those notes in one section of the book, he does a retrieval practice using Orbit.

During his first review, he came across a prompt that triggered him to return to the source (i.e., the comment he left beside the PDF). He seem to have made a breakthrough in his understanding that warrants him to change the answer to this prompt. To assist him in further understanding this item, he used GPT4. After settling this item, he returns to the retrieval practice until he completes it.

His advice: If you come to a book that makes use of knowledge it assumes you know to explain, and you don't know this knowledge, make note of that particular gap. However, if the book has a lot of these, and assumes you know a lot of things you don't, it might help to look for a different book altogether.

Before beginning, ask yourself what is your goal. Do you really want to thoroughly learn this?

To provide context for your prompts, add a line above them that mentions the title, author, and chapter. Then interleave your prompts together.

He doesn't learn everything this way. He only does this with subjects he actually wants to learn.

Sometimes, a learning project would involve this indepth method and a lot of informal methods along with it like conversations, doing tasks related to the topic, and just letting natural reinforcement happen, which expands it in an extended period.

If he isn't sure about his stance on a topic, he lets natural reinforcement dictate how he will learn it.

An indepth study involves multiple passes, problems, and reading multiple books. So it could really take a long time.

Write retrieval prompts about parts of the text that are most interesting or surprising to you.

Prompt writing encourages you to constantly explain things to yourself.

Andy is sometimes very critical with the text. He asks, "Why am I being asked this question?"

The task or exercise he is writing based on the text are also prompts. With math, these are mathematical exercises that use the concepts learned.

Andy makes a review practice every after a section.

If your goal with learning is simply to understand (and not necessarily to build), then there is an amount of distancing yourself from the material and returning to it later.

References

Studying with Dwarkesh Patel - “Introduction to Quantum Mechanics” by Griffiths. Directed by Andy Matuschak, 2023. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFuu4pesKf0.