Q&A: When Did You Start Thinking About Optimizing Learning?

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I received the following question:

“When did you first start thinking about the idea of optimizing learning? How long did it take you to spin up on the literature?”

“Optimizing learning” has basically been the primary focus of my life since I was 16 years old, when I first started taking self-study seriously and doing a lot of tutoring.

At that time, around 2012, I wasn’t really reading up on the academic literature about the science of learning, but I was getting a ton of hands-on experience and thinking very critically about it, so I gradually built up some solid intuition.

In late high school and early college I was also obsessed with brain modeling for a while, and I ended up learning a bunch of computational neuroscience while going down that path, which was helpful for building further intuition about how learning works.

2019 is when I first started reading up a bit about cognitive learning strategies like mastery learning, spaced repetition, and interleaving. That’s when Jason asked me to develop an algorithm to automatically assign personalized learning tasks in a way that leveraged these cognitive learning strategies.

And then 2023 is when I really went down the rabbit hole with a comprehensive literature search on the science of learning, when Jason and Sandy asked me to write up information about the science behind how Math Academy works.

At this point, spinning up on the rest of the science of learning mostly consisted of

1. learning scientific names for things for that I already had plenty of experience/intuition about,
2. filling out the whole picture with further details about those things,
3. familiarizing myself with the empirical studies that provide scientific backing for those things, and
4. learning about the history of the field.

Since the core of my fundamental learning was already in place going into this, I was able to make extremely rapid progress. I wrote about 300 pages of The Math Academy Way over the course of 3 months.

So, I guess it’s taken me 12 years to learn all that I’ve learned about learning – but for most of that time I wasn’t even fully aware that was the direction I was going, so I wasn’t intentionally trying to optimize my rate of learning.

(I have to say, after spending years in the field of education where so many people will try to gaslight you about what constitutes effective learning, spinning up and writing about the academic literature in the science of learning was one of the most cathartic experiences in my life.)

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