Understanding Is Just Graph Memory - A Thread

Imagine a town you've never been to. You don't know that it exists. Unconscious incompetence.

Imagine you're airdropped on to a random spot in this town. Now you're aware that you don't know this town. Conscious incompetence.

Now you slowly start exploring the town. You try to remember landmarks, signposts and milestones. Conscious competence.

You reach the town intersection and explore all streets branching out. Now you can orient yourself relative to the intersection. Unconscious competence.

We always orient ourselves in relation to the intersections/roundabouts/thoroughfares around us. People rarely remember street names and locations. Even people living in the given street's vicinity don't always remember their surrounding streets.

We somehow remember roundabouts better than streets. We navigate a city by traveling from roundabout to intersection to thoroughfare. Roundabouts are called "chauraha" or "chowk" in Hindi. It literally means 4 streets.

Now imagine a city as a system of nodes and branches. Nodes are your thoroughfares and intersection and branches are the streets connecting them. All thoroughfares are intersections but all intersections may not be thoroughfares.

The difference is just the number of streets branching out from them. The more streets that branch out of it the more 'thorough' the 'fare'. You either live right in the middle of 2 nodes or surrounded by 3 nodes.

As long as you remember your nearest nodes you can get home without asking anybody. When you're in an unfamiliar place you don't know the nodes well enough and you depend on your path memory and that's why you have a tough time.

WTF does it have to do with understanding or memory you ask? Any concept you're trying to understand is a node. Let us take a simple one - Y = mX + c. You can imagine a line as a huge circle that's so big that it looks almost straight.

This means you're coming at Y = mX + c intersection from the circle chauraha via approximation street. You can visualize it as aX + bY + cZ = 0 where Z=0. This means you're coming at Y= mX + c intersection from 3d geometry chowk via substitution street.

Don't worry about the math but just notice that we've constructed 2 roads to reach this roundabout. We can also come at it from Trigonometry thoroughfare via slope street. The more branches that intersect with the Y = mX + c node the more thought traffic we bring to it.

Slowly this lonely intersection becomes a thoroughfare and you can freely connect this concept to many other concepts all over your thought city. You remember all the nearby nodes and therefore all the streets that connect them (aka derivations).

You now have unconscious mastery over navigating this concept. You can home in on this concept playfully taking detours if you feel like it. You can take the shortest route of you're in a hurry. Congratulations, now you understand it.

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