I examine the literature on transfer learning in humans. Far transfer is difficult to achieve, best candidate interventions are to practice at the edge of one's ability and make many mistakes, evaluate mistakes after one has made them, learn from training programs modeled after expert tacit knowledge, and talk about on one's strategies when practicing the domain.

When learning, one would like to progress faster, and learn things faster. So it makes sense to search for interventions that speed up learning (effective learning techniques), enable using knowledge and knowledge patterns from one learned domain in a new domain if appropriate (transfer learning), and make it easier to find further learning-accelerating techniques (meta-learning).

Summary.

I've spent ~20 hours reading and skimming papers and parts of books from different fields, and extracting the results from them, resulting spreadsheet here, google doc with notes here.

I've looked at [...]

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Outline:

(03:49) Recommendations

(05:30) What I Am Looking For

(07:00) Candidate Interventions

(07:04) Effective Learning Techniques

(09:12) What Didnt Work

(09:59) Far Transfer

(12:44) Negative Transfer

(13:05) Error Management Training

(14:45) Pólya Method

(16:48) Accelerated Expertise

(18:56) Inducing Transfer

(19:43) Dual N-Back and Brain Training

(20:07) Judgmental Forecasting

(21:37) Creating Self-Improving Institutions

(24:23) How Id Proceed If I Was Further Researching Transfer

(25:00) Questions

(26:30) Context

(26:42) Appendix A: My Impression of the Literature

(27:25) See Also

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 21st, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QTTCRytvyFteJgPwg/transfer-learning-in-humans

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Transfer Learning in Humans” by niplav

LessWrong (30+ Karma)