Learning

Learning is a process where we make progress in understanding something by eliminating misconceptions and integrating that understanding into the mind's ecosystem.

“Learning” isn’t a commodity you accumulate, it’s what happens when a mind is actively solving problems.

“Fast learning” is often either (a) reuse of a small set of good explanations across many superficially different tasks, or (b) doing a lot of already-solved problems with minor variation.

Learning is conjunctive; prevention is disjunctive.

There is no general, actionable condition whose presence is reliably positively diagnostic of learning across contexts, because learning depends on an open-ended conjunction of requirements and we cannot, in general, know that the relevant conjunction is satisfied.

Whereas:
There exist many conditions whose presence is negatively diagnostic (they shut down error-correction) because they instantiate a violated prerequisite.

See also: Brett Hall's Tweets About Learning

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Adjacent Possible