I think the real issue is that you can't learn to DO just by watching, regardless of whether the watching is entertaining/fun or not.
If you just consume educational content, without trying to use it (and learning from the failures and successes than ensue), then you are at best just memorizing, or at worst just entertaining yourself.
In order to learn how to actually DO something, whether mental or physical, you need to be actually DOING it yourself. The more you practice, and overcome failures, the better you will become.
The main reasons for needing to learn by DOING are that:
1) No author/teacher is going to 100% describe all you need to know. There will be omissions due to assumed knowledge, omissions due to limited examples, miscommunication due to teacher-student knowledge differences, etc, etc. You may watch a lecture, or read a book, and think "I get it!", but you'll only discover all these gaps and misunderstandings once you try to actually apply yourself.
2) The decision making involved in acting will be based on what's in YOUR head, not that of the teacher. The words in the book reflect what was in the teacher's head, but when you are hands-on trying to solve a problem it's YOU that has to make decisions, and how the teacher may have perceived the same problem and tackled it is largely unknown and irrelevant to you. You need to learn to bridge the gap between the transmitted knowledge and your own thought processes when trying to apply it.
And DOING can absolutely be fun. At least in his tweet, Karpathy seems to be missing the experience of DOING altogether. DOING should not be by rote practice, but by diverse interesting projects that apply what is being learned.
Comments
I think the real issue is that you can't learn to DO just by watching, regardless of whether the watching is entertaining/fun or not.
If you just consume educational content, without trying to use it (and learning from the failures and successes than ensue), then you are at best just memorizing, or at worst just entertaining yourself.
In order to learn how to actually DO something, whether mental or physical, you need to be actually DOING it yourself. The more you practice, and overcome failures, the better you will become.
The main reasons for needing to learn by DOING are that:
1) No author/teacher is going to 100% describe all you need to know. There will be omissions due to assumed knowledge, omissions due to limited examples, miscommunication due to teacher-student knowledge differences, etc, etc. You may watch a lecture, or read a book, and think "I get it!", but you'll only discover all these gaps and misunderstandings once you try to actually apply yourself.
2) The decision making involved in acting will be based on what's in YOUR head, not that of the teacher. The words in the book reflect what was in the teacher's head, but when you are hands-on trying to solve a problem it's YOU that has to make decisions, and how the teacher may have perceived the same problem and tackled it is largely unknown and irrelevant to you. You need to learn to bridge the gap between the transmitted knowledge and your own thought processes when trying to apply it.
And DOING can absolutely be fun. At least in his tweet, Karpathy seems to be missing the experience of DOING altogether. DOING should not be by rote practice, but by diverse interesting projects that apply what is being learned.