A Reductionist Approach to Learning and Understanding

My sister is going back to school, and I asked for her examination results. She gives me her logins to her school's portal, a website where her school displays all her semester results hidden behind her index number and password.

Among the courses in one of the semester results is French and she passed excellent. So I raise my head looking and her and asks "Tu est parle francais"? and she says "Oui", I ask in surprise "Where did you learn French from?", forgetting that her junior high school taught French.

Scene 2: Sign Language.

I looked at her and started telling her, how I have been learning French and my interest in languages. Deep within me somewhere, I wish could speak couple of languages French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and other esoteric languages/codes like Braille, Morse Code, Sign Language, because I want to understand the world better.

I tell her, I want to learn sign language, and she tells me how she was taught sign language alphabets, in school. I pull up a quick video from Youtube on learning sign language, and boom! I am lost, as if I have forgotten that learning languages are hard, it hits me up all again, the complexity involved in understanding an esoteric language like sign language.

I remember what my good friend said in his blog post

Probably this has happened to you before, you get a book that covers a topic that you wish to learn but sort of not ready to start studying it yet, sometimes, you might think the book is a hard book to study - hard been definitely relative here - and you just want to skim through to see if there is a little paragraph in there that you will understand. Mostly, I don't understand what I read, and it sort of makes the book more difficult to approach, so when I read this it made a lot of sense to me. So yeah, if the material looks difficult, to go through, skimming through wouldn't make it more approachable. And that was just the mistake I made with pulling out the sign langauge video from Youtube.

Scene 3: Car Engines.

I grow up in a house with a KIA truck, my mum and dad had one each, it was used for conveying firewood, and transporting market people to and fro the local markets surrounding my district. Suffice to say, I was exposed to their engines on the daily. When they break down and mechanics come around to repair them, I helped through out the process. One thing that always fascinated me, is how humans built such complex systems. I mean take a look at an airplane engine, a rocket engine, how do all this tiny, micro pieces all come together to make something work. I never got an answer but I was just marvelled by such things, I would only get a realization to answer this question myself years later.

Scene 4: Talking to computers.

One day, I started learning how to code and started with basic things like variables, functions, loops a huge part of programming is full of such discrete things. On their own, the parts of a programming language are simple, easy, and understandable ideas and organization of thoughts on how to talk to a computer. With such simple primitives, I am able to build a web application, that allows users to sign up, create and store information, edit and destroy information, interact and this units of the software all add up together to fulfill a business need. Then we have the Facebooks, the Googles, Windows and Android OSs etc, Tim is not happpy but this is my blog! right? right. And isn't that how life came about? starting from atoms, molecules, organs, organ systems till we have a functioning human body, that does amazing things?

Just like that I realized how car and airplane engines are built. They don't start complex, they start from basic parts, get combined in very specific ways and at the end we have a complex system. You can think of the whole process as a tunnel, little pieces that can fit into your back park and occasionally bigger parts are passed through this tunnel and at the other end of the tunnel, you have an engine. That is a magic tunnel except that in the real world, it is not magic, it is knowledge, domain expertise. People who have spent 10000s of hours learning and working on parts of the engines and when these people come together and work together in specific orders, something complex and amazing systems get created.

Scene 5: Don't be Scared.

So back to what I was telling my sister. I told her sign language is hard but on a second note, nothing is really complex. So I tell her to imagine a very large book, let's say an Encyclopedia, you will probably think it is difficult, to study and I understand and that is true.

But what I am saying is that nothing is really hard to study, now take the big book and break it down, If you have learnt and since you have been able to read this far, I am right to assume that you have some good level of English literacy be you a human or a robot. But you are human right? 🙄 right?? Right??? 🙄. Right 😎. Now forget that we are dealing with a big book, The book is written in English, it is my example and I am saying it is written in English, you have a problem with that? ... Good, I thought so. Now that we have established that you agree with me, let's break the language the book is written in further. The English alphabet is made of only 26 letters. Right that entire book, you will only see 26 distinct letters, letters and symbols are less important in this case, says me again. Structurally you will realize that the book is broken down into Chapters and these chapters have been further broken down into paragraphs and even better paragraphs are broken into sentences.

Even better, sentences are made of words. We have broken the whole book to a level that is tiny enough for us to reason about. Let's break further, sentences are made up of words and these are made up of the 26 letters we talked about prior. What we need to know is basically what the word means and what part of speech it falls under. Adding a little context, there is a great tool in languages called grammar. With an understanding of grammar, where the words appear in the sentence, we can derive meaning of what the sentence is trying to say. Now that we understand the sentence through the words which are basically a combination of the 26 characters in the English alphabets, we can make sense of the paragraph. From time to time you will meet words you don't know their meaning, all you need to do is to look it up, understand it, fix it into the sentence and read ahead.

If we understand the sentence then we will probably understand the paragraph and move up to understand the whole chapter. Just like things are built from small pieces, topics/subjects are made up small sentences, small ideas. While you learn, there will be concepts you don't understand, even never heard but all you need to do is do to the concept what we did to words we didn't understand. Through years of learning complex subjects, I have come to understand this method - really I don't know it is a method - I only came up with the title when I was about to write this thought down. Things can be broken to their fundamental pieces, no matter how complex they may seem to be at first glance, find the fundamental parts, break it down and take it from the bottom up.

Gracias, Merci Beaucoup, Amigos, Mon ami, Je t'aime.