Is Duolingo fun or effective, What's the will to think, How to have a deep understanding

Weekly I/O #104: Duolingo Prioritizes Engagement, The Will to Think, Cultivate Deep Understanding, Say the Thing, Trade Dream for Feedback

If you're new to Weekly I/O, I share five things I've learned each week to help both you and me better understand the world and live more fulfilling lives.

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Hey friends,

I finished reading Morris Chang's autobiography this week, and books like this make me feel fortunate to be able to read Chinese!

Maybe I should write all my takeaways in English so that more people can learn about all the amazing stories?

Anyway, here's a list of things I enjoyed learning this week:

1. Any Austin on the Hermeneutics of Video Games (Ep. 245) | Conversations with Tyler

2. A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally.

3. How To Understand Things

4. Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet | Lex Fridman Podcast #471

5. Nabeel Qureshi on Slop, Care, Meaning, Learning, Palantir, Government, Art, and More

6. The Design of Everyday Things

7. Taste Is the New Intelligence

8. Andrej Karpathy on Software 3.0: Software in the Age of AI

9. Founders Fund: The Disciples

10. Morris Chang's Autobiography Part 2

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Here's a list of what I learned this week.

1. Duolingo prioritizes engagement over effectiveness because you cannot teach someone who has quit. Unlike schools that can keep students there even if they're bored, losing a learner for an app oftentimes means they will never be back.

Article: Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn on AI, gamification, and the power of freemium | The Verge

How does Duolingo balance the tradeoff between user engagement and learning effectiveness when designing the language learning app?

They always prioritize engagement. Why? Because it doesn't matter how effective you are. You can't teach somebody who's not there. When a user quits, they likely won't come back anymore.

Engagement and learning outcomes are not always at odds. But when they are, Duolingo prefers going for engagement. Intense lessons can have better outcomes but oftentimes lead to stress and frustration. Therefore, Duolingo tries to smooth frustration by converting short, intense lessons into longer, more enjoyable sessions.

Instead of teaching a complex grammar rule in a stressful five minutes, they stretch it over two hours with animations, playful interactions, and constant rewards to keep learners motivated with dopamine hits.

They opt for engagement because Duolingo is in an app rather than a school setting.

Unlike schools that hold students hostage there, even if it's boring, apps can easily lose users to other entertainment options. Even the tiniest frustration can drive users away to fall back on their easy TikTok scrolling, potentially forever. Therefore, they still teach you the material, but it will take longer and slower.

2. The "will to think" is the persistent unwillingness or inability to lie to yourself. It requires motivation and conviction to sustain the incessant need to go deeper until you have a higher resolution on the concept.

Podcast: Nabeel Qureshi on Slop, Care, Meaning, Learning, Palantir, Government, Art, and More

From How To Understand Things:

"The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved.

I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since I’d gotten the answer."

This habit is "the will to think", a compulsive unwillingness or inability to lie to yourself. As Richard Feynman put it: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."

It's an incessant need to go deeper until you have a higher resolution on an idea or concept, despite the brain's natural tendency to avoid such painful and resource-intensive processes.

Nobel laureate William Shockley believed that the "will to think" is critical to success in any field, but motivation is equally essential. A Capable thinker will be reluctant to commit themselves to tedious and precise thinking unless they believe their efforts will yield meaningful outcomes. Therefore, motivation and conviction are necessary to sustain the effort involved in deep, rigorous thinking.

3. How to cultivate deep understanding: Defamiliarization, Original Seeing, Abstraction to Concreteness, Direct Experience, and Rapid Feedback Loops.