I recently taught a technologically naive group of elderly adults about the pros and cons of Chat GPT. I’ve been asked to repeat the presentation and will take your comments to heart. Thank you.
Yes! Hamming’s relentless focus on working on important problems and truly understanding the fundamentals, rather than just mastering techniques, echoes the core message here. His famous question, "What are the most important problems in your field?" is, in a way, the ultimate starting point for building a knowledge scaffold (Step 1). You can't even begin to answer it without knowing the core principles, key figures, and essential vocabulary.
Your comment makes me ponder the relationship between knowledge and asking good questions. Hamming believed the knowledge you accumulate determines the questions you are capable of asking. With AI, we now have a tool that can answer almost any question we pose. But it cannot tell us which questions are worth asking. That remains a profoundly human skill, one built not on a general "critical thinking" ability, but on the deep, specific knowledge that Hamming championed. Thanks for highlighting that powerful link.
IMO a highly motivated person can learn just about anything given time and resources. One of the greatest motivations is to solve a problem that matters to you.
Again IMO, if you want to be a skilled autodidactic, learn to be compelled to solve problems, and then be curious.
I recently taught a technologically naive group of elderly adults about the pros and cons of Chat GPT. I’ve been asked to repeat the presentation and will take your comments to heart. Thank you.
Thank you!
I see some ideas in here echoing the teachings of Richard Hamming.
I’m assuming you’ve read The Art of Doing Science and Engineering Learning to Learn?
Yes! Hamming’s relentless focus on working on important problems and truly understanding the fundamentals, rather than just mastering techniques, echoes the core message here. His famous question, "What are the most important problems in your field?" is, in a way, the ultimate starting point for building a knowledge scaffold (Step 1). You can't even begin to answer it without knowing the core principles, key figures, and essential vocabulary.
Your comment makes me ponder the relationship between knowledge and asking good questions. Hamming believed the knowledge you accumulate determines the questions you are capable of asking. With AI, we now have a tool that can answer almost any question we pose. But it cannot tell us which questions are worth asking. That remains a profoundly human skill, one built not on a general "critical thinking" ability, but on the deep, specific knowledge that Hamming championed. Thanks for highlighting that powerful link.
IMO a highly motivated person can learn just about anything given time and resources. One of the greatest motivations is to solve a problem that matters to you.
Again IMO, if you want to be a skilled autodidactic, learn to be compelled to solve problems, and then be curious.
Yep, I think you're right! Without that intrinsic drive, any science-backed framework is just an empty blueprint.