Philosophy

I'm neurodivergent and didn't do well in school. I failed just about every math class I took after fifth grade. I internalized that I wasn't smart enough to learn the things I really wanted to learn: calculus, the motions of the planets in space, the physics of small particles.

I was really good at remembering facts, but I struggled to pay attention long enough to compose structures, perhaps. I shifted to art but I don't think I was meant to be a creative person either.

I failed at many things, repeatedly, but I kept messing with computers over the years, and it turned out that was potentially a good way to make money. I was able to get a degree in computer science and start writing software, making DevOps noises, etc.

But I don't feel like I have a really deep grasp of how things work. I still find Lisp confusing to read. I took Advanced Logic and Discrete Math and Calculus-Based Statistics and other advanced theory classes and I feel like I retained almost nothing. I did the homework, sometimes multiple times, but it didn't stick.

I thought when I was younger that if I was smart, I could just look at the sine and cosine laws and a couple other identities and bullshit my way through a calculus test. Well, it took me four tries to pass calculus. It turns out that I need exercises. I need problems to solve. But once I'm done, I never solve those problems again, and my brain happily discards the skill.

So I guess this is a way of trying to achieve some intimate familiarity with deep topics in mathematics and logic and computer science, and, once that is achieved, maintain it through spaced repetition. I do truly find this field fascinating and beautiful. I want to understand it more.

I don't know if I see it in terms of being able to solve new problems, although it'd be lovely if I could get a PhD in Math or CS or Complexity Science and contribute something to the scientific story of humanity. Mostly, I just want to be able to think comfortably about these things, to find them beautiful. I ache to understand them. I don't think I want to write software. I think I want to think about pure ideas that underlie the harsh complexities of reality. I'm not sure if I want to solve problems at all. Maybe I just want to play with ideas, get lost in them.

I reached the conclusion that "spaced repetition" is almost a misnomer. Spaced, yes, that's incredibly important. "Repetition" is a bit misleading because it implies you're doing the same thing over and over again. But every time you read the card, you're going to be a different person. Because of that space. And having to struggle a bit to recall or relearn the information, that's really where the value is. It's the difficulty of re-learning that's important, I think, not that you were simply exposed to the same information again.

I love projects, tutorials, and lectures. They're great fun. I learn nothing from them. I don't think you learn much the first time you do anything. If there's value in a project or tutorial or lecture, it's that it connects things you haven't connected before, repeated things you haven't done recently. A single fact, or a single mathematical or computational exercise that you can perform in your head with effort, is a little atom that other atoms will connect with repeatedly.

I'm not sure if it happens in a moment, or if you just realize in a moment that it has become instinctual. I think it's repeated exposure. I think at first all you see are numbers or letters or symbols and you learn to solve the exercise or read the sentences and eventually through practice it becomes instinctual, the way you no longer have to think about adding single-digit numbers or reading a book. You can see the characters in a novel, you can see the beauty of a mathematical expression, you can see the beauty of a proof or algorithm.

I definitely believe that struggle and confusion are helpful, because I think learning is a kind of stress that we intentionally evolve to avoid. I don't think all forms of struggle and confusion are necessarily productive. It feels a little shitty, too, to try to confuse someone or to have distractive answers that are misleadingly worded or whatever. I think the struggle and confusion of just trying to understand WTF someone else is talking about is probably sufficient.

I want to create a subject making as few assumptions of the learner's background as possible. I want this to be a site that children can use (admittedly, assuming they're strong readers). I don't think you should have had to have gotten a CS degree to learn this material. On the other hand, I don't see why a topic should be off limits. Are the people who use this site dumb? Am I dumb? Should I have to get a doctorate to be entitled to learn about some theory or other? That's really what I'd like to break down.

Someone who wants to know computer science the way they know basic arithmetic.

Like, as a drinking game? How the hell do people learn in a group? I've seen no evidence of such a thing.

"Success" on Bitwit probably looks the same way it does everywhere else: completely overshadowed by your new problems.

It's not the random Friday you blew off Bitwit that matters. It's never about the day off. Same with exercise or anything else. Take a day off. Take a week off. Be rude about it. It's that they tend to breed without discipline. You have to make up for it, but you don't, and then you get behind or don't progress fast enough and things snowball from there. The day off matters less than the day after.

Requiring additional equipment is a big disqualifier. I don't think this is a good substitute for a traditional math education, with pencil doing calculus on paper. It's certainly not a good substitute for writing greedy algorithms on LeetCode. I don't know what Bitwit should substitute for.

It's that they're math, lol. That's it. It's just the math that most people don't learn.

I think these ideas are inherently beautiful, and learning to appreciate the beauty of theory comes when learning ends but contemplation continues.

People can't use Bitwit and fail. Not and get questions right, anyway. If someone uses Bitwit and answers every card correctly and does nothing more than that, and gets nothing more out of it, then I'm the one who failed.

The basic idea. I would be completely wrong about the way I think about education and the way I think about mathematics and the way I think about beauty. Which is very possible, even probable.

Requiring additional equipment is a big disqualifier. I don't think this is a good substitute for a traditional math education, with pencil doing calculus on paper. It's certainly not a good substitute for writing greedy algorithms on LeetCode. I don't know what Bitwit should substitute for.

How about a replacement for prayer?