Reflection: Initial session on understanding

Chinese version: /zh-hant/reflections/understanding-session/

• Date: 2026-09-10
• Related goal: Current Goal
• Related drill / attempt: Practice Drill: Conditional causal claims

What I practised

Distinguishing memorisation from understanding by reasoning about force, mass, supply/demand, and a claim about study time and grades.

What I did first (before LLM help)

I answered a sequence of guided questions in my own words. The raw wording is preserved in Thinking: What counts as understanding?.

Evidence

• Correctly reasoned from a = F/m when force is fixed.
• Correctly identified inverse proportionality when mass doubles.
• Correctly rejected an overgeneralised claim about force and mass.
• Correctly identified that price and grades involve multiple relevant variables.

What worked

Using a familiar relation with clearly fixed conditions made it possible to distinguish a remembered formula from a causal model.

What was difficult

Moving from “there are many factors” to a precise conditional claim that says what must be held constant, what changes, and what result should follow.

Earliest likely cause

The current reasoning notices omitted variables but has not yet consistently converted them into an explicit model with assumptions and a testable prediction.

Lesson / correction rule

When a statement contains “always,” “certainly,” or a simple one-factor explanation, ask: under what conditions, compared with what, and what other variable could reverse or weaken this conclusion?

Next smallest drill

The learner completed the positive claim and proposed experimental papers as external validation. The next improvement is precision: replace the stronger “才能” phrasing with a probabilistic claim and specify personal measurements. Design a comparison using matched material, a fixed time budget, immediate retrieval, seven-day retrieval, and an error log.

Update needed?

• /context/learning-state/
• Current goal / breakdown
• Distilled note
• Weekly review