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The Value of Learning "Useless" Things | Scott H Young
Direct practice is not the opposite of deep understanding.
A naive approach to mastering, for example, physics problems, is to continue practising exam questions. But practising limited exam questions is not the same as the range of problems you will find in the real world. To solve real problems, you need a deep structure for understanding the problems, not just memorised solution patterns that you cannot apply.
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