Why don't we re-learn things from great teachers more often?

Or you should just re-watch Andrej Karpathy's talk...:-)

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable re-reading books and re-watching movies I’ve loved. I was always reluctant to do it before, because I thought “this could be time used to learn/enjoy something new!” As I learned more things and as time passed, I’ve grown comfortable re-visiting things I’ve forgotten and reading different takes on a similar subject.

In fact, I remember telling someone that for certain subjects - product development or engineering in particular - you could take the same or similar classes again but a different teacher would generally help you learn something different and if you approached the learning the right way, it could reinforce and even compound what you already knew.

This is all just a long-winded way of saying, the 3.5 hour Andrek Karpathy video deep-dive on LLMs might be the best example I’ve seen of this in a while.

My first reaction on hearing about the video was “I think I know how all of this works…and it’s 3.5 hours!!!” - I also don’t go over 1.5x speed for most things that involve learning and I watched this one mostly on 1.25x. It didn’t feel like it would be a good use of my time, but I found myself recommending it to others since I was pretty sure it would be at least as good as his other videos that I’d watched.

But I started watching earlier in the week, and couldn’t stop. A great teacher - defined both by mastery over the material and a knack for help others understand it - will explain something you already know in a way that makes you get it even more deeply or re-frames some of your assumptions. I’ve felt this way sometimes when I’ve read or re-read economics or strategy books after a while, but that’s generally because it’s also refreshing my memory on something. I’ve never felt like I got so much out of a lecture on a technical subject that I thought I knew already reasonably well.

I feel like I should watch this again in a few weeks even. Bascially, consider watching the video… even if you think you know it all. :-)