Live quantum mechanics study session with Dwarkesh Patel

Andy Matuschak

Thanks for the nudge! I may make that happen…

João Guilherme Madeira Araújo

Thank you very much for this! Your "How to write good prompts" was already an amazing guide, but watching you take notes and making flashcards really helps getting the tacit knowledge about how to do it in practice. Would love more videos like this

Can Sar

Thanks for sharing this! I really enjoyed being able to see the process. It’s quite inspiring. It may be of less interest to you but as someone trying to integrate more of these kinds of practices myself I’d be curious to get a description of what your equivalent process looks like for the following (or even a video one day if you do find them interesting): 1) A general interest book that is less dense (including, if you ever read them, history books). 2) A non-academic article, e.g. a blog post making a complex argument or involving new information.

I have two kinds of experience with Anki clutter, when learning a new subject. I'm sure they are common... 1. in a short time, understanding improves so much that many of the early cards of the learning project are unproductive or worse ("oh by now I can look at any Hamiltonian and tell which is the kinetic term and which is the potential term, who cares what letter he uses") and 2. dropped the subject so, in a long time, understanding has not advanced at all, and the struggle to remember the signs and constants in Schrodinger's equation is clashing with the struggle to remember the signs and constants in Lewin's equation... . It's a minuscule effort to delete or edit or skip any one clutter card, but I have the feeling that the problem they create is multiplicative, 100 cards of clutter is more than twice as taxing as 50 cards of clutter. Are you perhaps better than average at handing this problem, either because you've had lots of practice or because you've been developing your own tech?

How do you think you'll react to the cards you created during this session, over the next year or so? Will you still be glad to be reminded that Griffiths uses V to stand for potential energy, will you still be forcing yourself to remember that the left-hand side is i hbar d/dt not -i hbar d/dt...

Andy Matuschak

Alas: I'd really love to continue studying it, but I have a limited number of focused hours in the day, and I just can't prioritize it at the moment. Instead, inspired in part by this experience, I'm currently using that time to study the cogpsy literature on reading comprehension!

On twitter, you described Griffiths as a textbook Patel is reading. Are you also reading it? Or only demonstrating for us, that day, how you read textbooks? I'm curious if you've gone any farther in Griffiths, in the weeks since you filmed it.