Speed and learning: OK, so can we at least say that for anything that one person understands, another person can also understand? That our brains don't differ so much that the speed or capacity is hugely different between people. If so, all of my conclusions above are fine (intact). I'm not sure. By 'understand' do you mean 'immediately,' or do you mean 'eventually?'
Some people think that there are things that adults can learn that children can't. They're wrong; here's a simple algorithm that any child can follow to learn adult-idea X:
Become an adult.
Learn idea X.
It takes some time, but eventually the child can learn it.
This algorithm is true, but isn't very helpful in understanding how parenting should work.
This is kinda the point to my original post. Deep theories don't use up much space, because they apply to and explain lots of stuff, instead of having a different theory for each thing.
Which is fine, if you've got deep theories. Making theories deep while still keeping them accurate is hard, though.
Physics, for example, contains lots of theories that explain many different aspects of things; if we want to come up with a unified Theory of Everything in physics, it will need to explain all the things the current theories do, while taking up less space. This is a problem of compression, and compression has limits; the more reach our theories have, the more difficult it is to replace them with even wider-reaching theories. So, even with an ongoing effort to deepen our theories, we should still see a net growth in the space our knowledge takes up, which means that we'll reach a point when we have more knowledge that a single person has room for (assuming our brain capacity doesn't increase).
I'm not sure. By 'understand' do you mean 'immediately,' or do you mean 'eventually?'
Some people think that there are things that adults can learn that children can't. They're wrong; here's a simple algorithm that any child can follow to learn adult-idea X:
- Become an adult.
- Learn idea X.
It takes some time, but eventually the child can learn it.This algorithm is true, but isn't very helpful in understanding how parenting should work.
This is kinda the point to my original post. Deep theories don't use up much space, because they apply to and explain lots of stuff, instead of having a different theory for each thing.
Which is fine, if you've got deep theories. Making theories deep while still keeping them accurate is hard, though.
Physics, for example, contains lots of theories that explain many different aspects of things; if we want to come up with a unified Theory of Everything in physics, it will need to explain all the things the current theories do, while taking up less space. This is a problem of compression, and compression has limits; the more reach our theories have, the more difficult it is to replace them with even wider-reaching theories. So, even with an ongoing effort to deepen our theories, we should still see a net growth in the space our knowledge takes up, which means that we'll reach a point when we have more knowledge that a single person has room for (assuming our brain capacity doesn't increase).
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