1
3 Comments

Ruminate vs Learning. What is the best ratio?

I want to start ruminating more on things I have learnt rather than reading new information. I think that by doing this, I’ll have a solid foundation to attach new information and also refresh my memory on concepts that I have forgotten. Where your mind is a garden, you should be tending to existing plants rather than adding new ones. But what’s a good ratio of ruminating vs acquiring?

Imagine a gambler sitting in front of multiple slot machines. Their goal is to get as much money as they can from as few lever pulls. They have to explore which of the machines will payout the most. He decides on a strategy of randomly choosing a machine 10% of the time, while the rest of the time he pulls the lever on the machine he knows will have the highest payout. The strategy used by the gambler is called epsilon-greedy, and the problem the gambler faces is called the multi-armed bandit problem.

The multi-armed bandit problem is not far away from the ruminate vs acquire information problem. You should exploit existing information 90% of the time, and learn new information 10% of the time. This approach could also work for phone addiction, too. You should spend 10% of your day on your phone, and 90% on resources like re-reading books and articles you have collected.

  1. 1

    There is a paper on this using graph theory (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-00985-7?fbclid=IwAR2beFVHKDIyhidWP8K0pYGSmHVdb1DjBeDjOYFD-DL7GS7rTrJZZlNtcng).
    The authors analyzed two knowledge gathering patterns:

    1. Hunters: Target one concept and learn about topics that are closely related to that core concept. This would be similar to your idea of learning or exploitation. It's about drilling into an area.
    2. Busybody: Do not target any particular topic, but jump from topic to topic.

    If you'd draw a sociograh ( a network graph) with concepts as nodes and the relation between concepts the links between the nodes, hunters and busybodies have different graphs: Hunters have clustered knowledge graphs while busybodies have hardly any clusters and long chains (paths) between nodes.

    The authors introduced the topic of 'knowledge depirvation' - being deprivated of knowledge. This lack of knowledge creates an urge to find out more. The authors argue that it is knowledge deprivation is the driver for curiosity. People who are high on knowledge deprivation (aka more curious) have a hunter knowledge network: They focus on a small number of related concepts and learn about that.

    1. 1

      That's interesting. I would imagine Hunters remember information better, too.

      While this is about curiosity (exploring and exploiting), I wonder what the best approach is to remember information? I've recently tried Elon Musks[0] approach, where you create a tree graph of what you read. It would like something like this:

      • Curiosity
        • Learning
          • Understanding
          • Memory
        • Exploration
          ...

      I've been having good results from using this because it breaks down an article into its essence. But I can't remember more than 3 nodes on a branch or more than 3 words on a leaf node. How do you typically remember information?

      [0] Elon got asked how he learns so much on Reddit: "It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to."

      1. 1

        I'll say if you can't remember it you (a) haven't understood it, or (b) it's not important to you.

        The danger of focusing on trees is that you neglect building associations between different branches. Without associations, you develop "cognitive entrenchment", good at what you are doing but bad at dealing with changes in your domain.

        I try to remember things by applying them. If I can't apply them because of lack of time, resources, etc I try to write about it. If writing takes too long, I'm asking myself if I need to learn more about the topic or if I care about the topic enough to want to understand it.

        I think there is a time where you need to be honest with yourself and stop doing things where progress is slow. When you do this, depends on personal circumstances.

    2. 1

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 14 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments