Doing the work
In my final undergraduate year (fourth, for a Masters in Physics, considered undergraduate in British Universities), I had a class about lasers. It did not begin well. It was the first time that course had been given, and I didn’t really understand it. So much of the appeal of physics to me had been first principles: when you really understand a principle and its mathematical formulation, you can reason well about arbitrary problems related to it. This course seemed like a bunch of knowledge, just an assemblage of facts, with little unifying theory. That probably speaks as much to my inclination as to the course, but I know I wasn’t alone in feeling somewhat mystified.
I was fortunate, come exam time, to have a great study group. We met every weekday and spent hours together doing problems and memorizing equations. We’d book a room with four blank whiteboards and try to reconstruct the key equations from memory. Literally rote and repetition.
A strange thing happened. It started to congeal. By doing this rote work, we began to see the connections. “Oh, that equation is just this one with a damping term, but the notation is different, I hadn’t noticed that”. Understanding emerged.
I did well at school, but exams were always an anxious time. That exam season is perhaps the only one in my life where I felt adequately prepared and at ease. I walked in confident, solved the problems, and walked out knowing that I had done a good job.
I’m not advocating for rote memorization of facts. Not per se. But engaging in the minutiae of the thing most definitely built up my fluency in the subject. I don’t think I’d have engaged nearly so deeply if a little theory had been presented to me alongside 20 modifications to it. It would have been too easy to gloss over. The material could have been better structured, sure — it was a new course! — but there was value in having to wade through it.
I worry for students and professionals alike beginning to rely on the Answer Anything Machines. It’s so easy to simulate understanding, but true understanding is won through labour. Everyone likes the power fantasy of eliding the details, focusing on the bigger picture. But the details are The Thing. They are the value. The answering machines make it too easy to convince yourself you understand something — I do it all the time — when you do not (which I also do all the time). The cost of this mistake depends on what you’ve misunderstood. If it’s some subtlety of concurrency (something I’ve been working on, and consulting the answer machines about a little, lately), you might end up writing a deadlock or whatever bug into your software. If you’re a student, you might fail a test. If you’re a CEO, you might get rinsed by a journalist for a mistake.
In many cases there’ll be no consequence whatsoever, and you’ll never know that you did not, in fact, understand the thing. Nonetheless, we are impoverished for it.