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Jun 17·edited Jun 17Liked by Wisen Tanasa

It seems like all learning somehow builds off of existing knowledge. When you are learning something new and don't understand it yet, you have this abstract concept floating around in your brain but it's not connected to any existing scaffolding.

I wonder if a concrete example is something that tries to locate existing scaffolding in your brain so that the concept can latch on a point. The "aha" moment.

The more examples, the more points where the idea can hook into existing scaffolding and the abstraction or concept becomes stronger.

We need high quality training data for our neural nets!

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Interesting, I think of the word scaffold the opposite way - an example is the scaffold. It's like you're trying to understand what abstract concept or conclusion has been formed in someone else's head, but sometimes without a shared scaffolding, it's hard to reach the same conclusion.

For better or for worse, I think of an abstract concept like how planets are formed. That tiny abstract mass will have a gravity that starts pulling other masses forming a bigger mass. Up to a certain point, it's no longer debris, the interconnected interactants become a planet.

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