Learning Is A Space-time Tradeoff
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When learning, doing things the fast way (cheating, Artificial Intelligence) makes us lazy and forgetful. It’s a Space-time Tradeoff, you get speed and sacrifice memory.
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Hasty Work - Shame For The Craftsman
A poorly translated proverb from Bulgarian, that essentially means when you rush, the resulting work is not up to par.
In In my opinion, people learn best by troubleshooting, as I’ve noted before in my Framework. This is because effort leads to Learning and Durable Knowledge.
When does learning happen?
Link to originalLearning happens when everything goes wrong and you figure it out.
Putting an effort into reading the documentation 📖, researching an issue or even brainstorming the best way to go about a problem will only benefit you. Going the easy and fast way will benefit others (maybe Corporations).
Let’s give some other examples of this:
- In school, cheating on a test will not benefit you in life
- At work, not preparing for a meeting, will lead you to stumbling and leaving a bad impression on others
- In conversations with your peers, not being able to make a point and defaulting to “Let me ask AI” for every topic would make you seem like a fool
How To Know You’ve Lost Your Edge
For Developers, turn off AI coding assistant and start coding. You’ll notice a pause every few seconds. ThePrimeagen called this the copilot pause if I remember correctly. It’s you waiting for copilot or whatever to hallucinate what is next. This by itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but then what comes next? What was I supposed to do again? How do I do this again? And you’ll notice these questions aren’t for some complex problem, but rather for a simple language idiom that you’ve just forgotten from negligence.
Differentiating Between What Is OK To Delegate To AI And What Not
There Is a simple rule of thumb. Menial tasks get delegated, tasks that take critical thinking do not. If a task is essential for your work, never delegate.
You should never delegate your understanding of a problem.
This is valid for people and for AI, if you delegate a task, always do your own research in parallel, come up with an approach and validate against others or AI.