You add the sugar to the spice and you get everything nice

Another technique for learning: Chunking

This one comes up a fair amount in the Course (Learning How to Learn)

Chunking is the way you group ideas into a whole, to assist you in learning..

The analogy is to puzzle pieces. Imagine 'ideas on a topic' as many puzzle pieces all scrambled… Chunking allows you to “group the bits of information together through meaning”. Like putting all the pieces of a puzzle of a face together and the body together and eventually starting to see how they fit together into a complete picture. the knee bones connected to the... thighbone! The thigh bones... you get the idea...

This is more than just memorization. This is part of the process of integrating the ideas into conceptual level of knowledge, so that eventually you can draw upon it without having to think of it as disparate ‘facts’. This includes how it fits together with other concepts you know or are learning.

I think of this personally as part of that process of integrating the data into the whole so that you become the master.

For me, this was part of the process of learning by trying out ideas from their very smallest parts and adding to them and building from ‘first principles’. Although a more formal engineering approach than what’s presented in the course, I can see the similarities.

How Elon Musk Thinks: The First Principles Method

"Boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there."

Anecdote: I had a physics teacher who told us to throw away our scientific calculators and build the equations from the geometry of light. This was a photonics course or something…

And lo and behold the final exam was all about building the equations from the fundamental diagrams of light geometry. I remember seeing my fellow classmates with smoke coming out their ears from their brains being fried trying to figure it out. This cause they memorized parts of the course and relied on the programmable memory in their calculators for the rest.

Maybe it *was* a bit mean of him, but I certainly know the material much better because of it..