Nate Lowry - Quantum Country interview - 2019-12-05

Nate registered on 2019-10-04. He’s done 16 review sessions, has read all three essays. He’s recently finished 5 days of retention on teleportation, and 2 weeks of retention on the search essay.
http://quantum.country/debug/userJourney?email=nate.lowry@gmail.com

Highlights

  • Nate’s reading about QC because he’s curious, because he thinks it may be an opportunity at some point, and because of some obsolescence anxiety.
  • He had a clear goal to understand quantum teleportation well. Now he says “I feel pretty confident I could explain it to a coworker.”
  • Wants learning-by-doing.
  • Used external mechanisms to intervene when he forgot a question, e.g. Wikipedia on Stack Overflow.
  • Sees the spaced repetition reviews in part as prompts to re-consider concepts and think about them more deeply.
  • Sees a strong connection between demonstrated retention intervals and understanding: if we told him he’d remembered everything across a two month span, he said that would mean he’d more than memorized it: he’d feel it in his bones

Raw notes

  • Background, motivation
    • BS in CS with EE, did a bit of physics, never quantum
    • got interested in quantum computing as a curiosity, felt it could be big… also some of the obsolescence anxiety
    • “… understand how I could use it to solve interesting problems…”
    • “… just curious about how the world works”
    • “…if this is our best model of how the world works, I should really understand how the world works, so I should not skip over this chapter in the history…”
    • read pop-sci articles but felt he didn’t understand at all
    • “I just wanted to understand teleportation” “I just wanted to feel it… and really feel like I understood it viscerally. More than just—yeah, I could tell you what the words are. I wanted to be able to explain it to my friends with three different analogies, so that one of them would stick.”
    • works as a programmer, would be talking to other programmers about it
    • wandered through Stack Overflow, then Determined videos, then over to Quantum Country (possibly via MN’s Twitter?)
  • What’s your relationship to the Hadamard gate?
    • First felt he needed to understand qubits, the basic Pauli gates, CNOT
    • At one point asked on Stack Exchange: “could you have constructed the Hadamard gate a different way?”
    • MN points out: Nate understands that it’s unitary
    • MN calls it a good question
    • At first would have given himself 2/10. Now 6-7/10. “I don’t know exactly what it’d do, but it’d probably flip one of the bits on its axes or something.”
  • How about teleportation?
    • “I think I understand it.” “Once qubits fell into place, and entanglement fell into place … with entanglement, I feel I can understand teleportation.” “I feel pretty confident that I could explain it to a coworker”
  • What would make QC more satisfying?
    • Wants interactive exercises, simulations
    • “I want to jump into Q#, break the Hadamard gate”
    • Sometimes just wants to watch a video, “sometimes I want to apply this and tinker with it right away”
    • “That’s kind of the way I learn: learn it enough, write it, debug it” more than prove it, etc
    • How useful are error messages when programming?
    • It depends!
    • Eventually they become a trigger: he recognizes the message and that cues a set of understandings and practices to fix the problem—he’s not exactly reading the error message at that point.
  • What deficits do you feel in your understanding?
    • “Some of the math stuff was a bit tricky, just because I was rusty”
    • “…conceptualizing and being able to explain ‘the entanglement stuff’”
    • feel confident for myself, but not being able to explain it… that’s one of the bigger parts
  • In what ways are the interactive elements helping?
    • “I completely 100% buy into the concept”
    • had tried before, “was more just ‘memorize this’”
    • “with this, I felt that every time I came back to it, I see the question a different way”
    • “coming back to those questions and seeing them from a different vantage point was probably the most useful thing”
    • “making progress and kind of building on the basics was super useful for me”
    • “i would do my reviews, and… if I got one wrong… those ones would tunnel me into Wikipedia, or StackExchange”
    • “I wasn’t able to just get by, pass the test, and move on… made me think about whether I wanted to be more sure about that area”
    • made a conscious choice to ignore some questions in the search essay, but in other places made the choice to go deeper elsewhere
    • in search “I know that it mirrors and rotates… but that’s my understanding”
    • but for entanglement “those ones I read them every time… I fire those neurons in my brain to think through that every time”
    • wants keyboard shortcuts
  • Are the questions providing enough different perspectives on a topic?
    • “the prompting of the questions triggers my brain to say ‘you don’t really know that’ … not the questions themselves but the asking of them”
    • Would you have wanted suggestions when you marked something wrong?
    • “Absolutely. That’s kind of what I ended up doing myself.”
  • Did you do any rereading?
    • in a couple sections, but mostly not
    • remembered that we’d suggested that
  • On interface
    • understands that exponential relates to card
    • “emails are absolutely perfect”
    • really enjoyed time estimates in emails
  • Why keep doing the review sessions?
    • “well the email comes…”
    • “I want a deeper underrstanding…”
    • “I’d probably do it for another month or two”
    • would it be helpful if we could tell you that you had remembered every question for two months?
    • “absolutely. that would mean I’d more than memorized it”
    • “I’d feel it in my bones”
  • “I annoy the hell out of all my friends, and it’s great … I’m not going to be a QC researcher, but I will know what’s going on now, and it’s been fun doing it”
    • “I would do a lot of things in this pattern if it were available”
Last updated 2023-07-13.