Via R-Bloggers, a discussion on learning versus remembering with respect to data science:
If you’re like most aspiring data scientists, you’ll try to learn this code by using the copy-and-paste method. You’ll take this code from a blog post like this, copy it into RStudio and run it.
Most aspiring data scientists do the exact same thing with online courses. They’ll watch a few videos, open the course’s sample code, and then copy-and-paste the code.
Watching videos, reading books, and copy-and-pasting code do help you learn, at least a little. If you watch a video about ggplot2, you’ll probably learn how it works pretty quickly. And if you copy-and-paste some ggplot2 code, you’ll probably learn a little bit about how the code works.
Here’s the problem: if you learn code like this, you’ll probably forget it within a day or two.
This is a thought-provoking article that applies to all disciplines, not just data science.