[HN Gopher] Learning to Learn
___________________________________________________________________
Learning to Learn
Author : jklm
Score : 262 points
Date : 2024-10-22 00:01 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kevin.the.li)
(TXT) w3m dump (kevin.the.li)
| dartharva wrote:
| This is something I have personally struggled with, so I wish the
| author elaborated more. If you are a novice, how do you quickly
| identify what the foundational knowledge is? How do you know what
| makes you an expert and not an "expert beginner" as the author
| says to the extent that you can build a personal curriculum about
| it?
| ahmadtbk wrote:
| This is something that can be tricky for sure. Depending on the
| subject you might not need to start diving deep into every
| topic. Sometimes you'll have to first ask some high level
| questions like how do I get this data from this table and
| convert it to this format. Once you identify what problem
| you're trying to solve go and learn what's needed to solve it.
|
| You won't always have an optimal solution but that's okay. The
| most important is to try and use the thing you're learning in
| some real way or with practice.
| mmooss wrote:
| > The most important is to try and use the thing you're
| learning in some real way or with practice.
|
| In my experience, that's a necessary first step to learning.
| I need to get my hands dirty, get a feel for what I'm working
| with. An experience is worth a thousand pictures, which are
| worth a thousand words - you can't gain that basic
| understanding and instinct by reading, only by having all the
| sensory inputs of doing it.
|
| Then it's time to read. Now you must find an expert to guide
| you. First, you'll have too many blind spots - you can't
| possibly find all that's current, you can't find the best
| sources efficiently, and much won't be in books yet. And
| without expertise yourself, you can't distinguish the worn-
| out theories from the evergreen standards from the unproven
| innovations; the promising from the unlikely from the absurd;
| you won't know the consensus from the fringe; the guy
| advocating their personal theory - maybe even a credible one
| - from the balanced survey of established ideas. You won't
| recognize when you're reading just a side of a well-known
| debate.
| Tier3r wrote:
| I'm also wondering this. Two possibilities. One, find the first
| principles/root node/glue that holds many disparate concepts
| together in some causative way. Two, the specific
| procedure/step/concept that you keep reusing across multiple
| problems.
| xandrius wrote:
| I tried to think about this and came to a personal realisation
| that perhaps there is no strict "foundational knowledge" for
| most topics.
|
| Pick programming, is knowing binary operations foundational? Is
| knowing compilers? Is it knowing bubble sort? Or perhaps
| knowing data structures?
|
| I believe that if you have been using/working in a field,
| whatever you touch for your own goals that's enough.
|
| And perhaps the difference between being an expert beginner and
| an expert is whether you still care about such a distinction?
| If you can achieve your current and future goals and can
| eventually learn new concepts then you're good.
|
| I'd say a beginner might be someone who wouldn't even know
| where to begin.
|
| Let's pick chemistry for myself: sure, I could follow some
| video but without the video I wouldn't even conceive how to get
| started with anything.
|
| While, say woodworking, I wouldn't call myself an expert but I
| would be able to imagine starting a random project from scratch
| and eventually figure out all the parts.
|
| So, maybe: - beginner: can't complete a project without
| help/support - mid: can complete but is unsure whether that's
| the best way - expert: has completed it before somehow
| rustcleaner wrote:
| I'd argue the principles Turing and Wolfram lay out in
| regards to universal computation and computational
| equivalence are the most foundational, and then various
| systems or architectures (flow vs stack, etc), etc, are
| important as there needs to be concrete examples implementing
| the fundamentals. If you really want to get esoteric,
| programming goes all the way back with society and religion.
| Just like how a machine can compute so too can a group of
| people through their actions, if they adhere as religiously
| to their tasks as the fablic of reality seems to adhere to
| its laws in governing the motions of matter. Programming is
| the building abstract structures which, when represented with
| matter in the right ways that can take advantage of the
| moment-by-moment Gets Things Done(tm) nature of the fabric of
| reality itself, produces useful transformations of its
| initial states. Very complex behavior arises from the
| simplest of mechanistic rulesets, and it's found universally
| in biology and in places all over reality. Computation is so
| foundationally fundamental to this place and your (dear
| reader) existence here, it is shameful it's not in standard
| middle/high schools' curricula right next to the fundamental
| theorems of arithmetic and algebra!
| j45 wrote:
| I'm surprised the course by the name of this post isn't here.
|
| The post covers a great mindset, but the math really is one
| thing, and learning how you learn and how you can learn is
| invaluable.
|
| This is a great course to start learning about your learning.
|
| https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
|
| After/with this, there is a slew of adult learning knowledge
| that will likely make you feel better.
|
| One key is learning to understand something, before learning to
| memorize it.
|
| Another is creating your own mind map of how the concepts you
| are learning fits together.
|
| Farnham street has some great books on mental models as well
| that was recommended to me as helping
|
| An expert is someone who can often explain complex things in
| very simple ways. being an innocent beginner is one of the best
| mindsets to cultivate - you learn what you do and don't know
| pretty quick, and also a sense of known vs unknown, and size
| and number of unknowns.
| dartharva wrote:
| I checked these out but couldn't find the answer to the
| questions I am asking. It tells you how to maximize
| efficiency while learning, but doesn't tell you how to
| identify _what_ you should be learning in the first place and
| what the sequence of your focus should be when you start.
| j45 wrote:
| https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
| eacapeisfutuile wrote:
| What do you specifically want to learn? What you need to
| learn will generally make itself known, if you have some
| general goal? Just starting at all is the best way to
| start.
| dartharva wrote:
| Say I want to learn web scraping. Now if I try to start,
| I see there are several layers of fundamentals and
| several potential paths, all of which seem equally
| important. Where do I start? What platform should I use?
| Should I start from the DOM and HTML parsing and go ahead
| from there, or should I start from learning Python
| libraries built for it as so many books and tutorials
| advise? Going one layer deeper, do I need to learn data
| structures before anything else? JavaScript and APIs? The
| fundamentals of TCP networking? Regex?
|
| It's all too overwhelming at times.
| eacapeisfutuile wrote:
| Yeah, start from any point A. A suggestion is where you
| can progress in some way. Don't make too many decisions.
| There's so many viable ways to learn that, just start
| where it is natural for you. You don't have to figure
| everything out or have answers to everything.
| eacapeisfutuile wrote:
| You don't. That is what you will build as you learn a topic, it
| makes no sense to "identify" it first.
|
| Do the thing you want to learn.
| dartharva wrote:
| I learnt data analytics and SQL for MIS/BI purposes on-the-
| job as a sales manager. Got pretty good at it too, built
| several dashboards and long-standing capabilities for my
| team.
|
| Now, if I say I want to get into this scene for good, I am
| immediately daunted with a mountain of diverging learning
| paths to take. Should I take to Python and its massive
| library ecosystem, or should focus on database fundamentals?
| In every choice taken there are seemingly infinite branches,
| and it is rather hard to focus if you aren't even sure you're
| on the right track.
|
| Last time I sat in an analytics/consulting interview they
| grilled me on highly specific technical questions on data
| pipelines and warehousing and testing and other topics that
| I've never had to worry about before at work. In another
| assessment, I was grilled on some AWS/Redshift-specific
| things. In yet another I was expected to know deep learning.
| It is all too hard for someone not originally with an
| engineering (or adjacent) background.
| eacapeisfutuile wrote:
| Yeah learning to actually use in practice is different from
| preparing for interviews. I would say continue where you
| already built some knowledge and branch out when you
| realize you have to, and then work on learning one branch
| as you go.
|
| For interviews you may need to lookup what type of
| questions to expect and memorize details on that,
| unfortunately. That is not useful in practice but can be
| necessary for interviews.
| quantum_state wrote:
| It is an iterative process. One would move forward with a
| baseline foundation and pay attention to the difficulties and
| inefficiencies in the learning process to triangulate the
| additional foundation needed.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >If you are a novice, how do you quickly identify what the
| foundational knowledge is?
|
| You probably can't. You need to rely on knowledge of others to
| identify good resources. And then lean that against how you
| learn in order to pick the best resource for you.Same for
| verifying being an "expert beginner". Never be the smartest
| person in the room if your goal is to grow.
|
| In a crude way: google it. You'll probably get a generic (maybe
| even horrible AI slop) on top. But you're not looking for a
| perfect guide on first Google (not unless you have a very
| popular topic). Look for _terms_ used and start googling those
| to narrow down to a more specific place. Maybe a forum post
| full of (hopefully) competent+ people answering your question.
| Maybe you find a quality guide to follow. Maybe you find you
| 're on a completely wrong rabbit hole and figure out better
| terms to Google.
|
| That's basically half my learning while on the job. Usually
| works pretty well in my personal time too.
| Tier3r wrote:
| The initial cram is an interesting concept. If you insert new
| things to learn at a constant rate, the repetition burden grows
| logarithmically. Assuming you have some fixed amount of time you
| can devote everyday optimally your repetition burden should be
| constant. So the solution is making new things to learn not
| constant, but front loading a lot of it.
| dinobones wrote:
| I've been wanting to try this approach for learning a language.
|
| In English for example, learning the 800 most common words, you
| can understand 75% of the language:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44569277.
|
| I'd love to start fresh on a new language, take 800 new words,
| try to learn 10 a day, and see where I get after 3 months. Can I
| really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall of those
| 800 words?
| Tomte wrote:
| No. Apart from grammar etc. you're missing, you might
| understand nothing while knowing 80% of the words.
| mc3301 wrote:
| Give learning Japanese a try. It's a meta-learning adventure!
| There are 3 distinct classes of characters (two syllabaries
| that each have a perfect matching pair with the other, 46 each
| plus some compounds) and the third are (mostly) chinese Kanji
| characters. Fun stuff!
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I wonder if there is a similar "Pareto priciple"-esque
| approach that one could use to learn Japanese.
| opan wrote:
| There are the "radicals" which can help you to interpret a
| new kanji, since they're the kanji building blocks.
| drivers99 wrote:
| I highly recommend this site for that.
| https://kanji.koohii.com/ which goes along with the book
| "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig (strictly
| speaking, you don't need the book, but I think it will
| help understand the idea behind the process). But the
| stories (mnemonics) on the website are better than the
| ones in the book, but also let you put in your own
| stories. You can also vote and choose existing stories,
| so there are crowd sourced mnemonics that other people
| have said work for them. One interesting side effect of
| that is a lot of people decided to use Spider Man
| whenever there is a "thread" radical, for more memorable
| stories. I did it around 15 years ago and learned how to
| write all the 2000+ commonly used kanji in a few months
| (9 months for me; 2-3 months for a more diligent person).
| It uses a spaced repetition system (Lietner box method).
| joshdavham wrote:
| Kinda!
|
| The frequency of words in every human language follows the
| Zipf distribution, which is a power law, like the pareto
| distribution.
|
| Some learners create what are called frequency lists, which
| are lists of the most common words, and learn those words
| first. In general, you get (disproportionately) more bang
| for your buck from learning the most common words than the
| rarer words when it comes to understanding.
|
| However, due to the very long tail of word frequency
| distributions, you eventually need to just start learning
| words as they come and stop trying to over-optimize with a
| frequency list.
| raincole wrote:
| Depending on your definition of "understanding".
|
| If it means you can at least take an educated guess on what a
| sentence means, then yes.
|
| If it means to understand a sentence like a native speaker does
| (just slower), then no.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > Can I really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall
| of those 800 words?
|
| This thing you're talking about is called 'word coverage'. It's
| the percentage of words you know in a given text. I've created
| lots of word coverage graphs in the past, and, as research has
| shown, you won't really be understanding much until you reach
| the high 90s in terms of word coverage. The famous number for
| being able to read English texts extensively requires a word
| coverage of around 98%. And while it depends on the text, in
| order to reach 98%, you generally need to know around the top
| 5k words in a language.
|
| Funny enough, when you understand 75% of the words in a text,
| you subjectively feel like you're understanding like 10% of
| what's going on.
| jamager wrote:
| This is exactly correct.
|
| With graded readers, thou, you can have good reading
| experiences with around 3k words (ofc depending on language,
| book, etc).
| creamyhorror wrote:
| Yep, 75% coverage is too low for significant comprehension.
| You normally need 95% for decent comprehension and 98% for
| comfortable reading.
|
| The coverage required in Japanese (my target language) seems
| something like the most frequent 15,000 words (depending on
| the definition of word) are required for 98% coverage. At
| 12,000 words it becomes viable to read with some
| comprehension and semi-frequent dictionary lookups.
|
| Also, interestingly, you need about 2x the number of words in
| Japanese as English to reach 87% coverage:
|
| "It has been reported that 2,000 high-frequent English words
| cover 87% of tokens (Nation, 1990). In case of Japanese,
| 4,024 SUWs are required to cover 87% of tokens." (Text
| Readability and Word Distribution in Japanese, Satoshi Sato)
| autumnstwilight wrote:
| In my experience, the words that carry the most information in
| a sentence are the less common ones. Here's what understanding
| 80% of a sentence is like:
|
| "I went to the sdjfkdsh and got a new ghjsakgfh."
|
| The missing words could be "dealership" and "truck" or
| "embassy" and "passport" or quite a lot of other pairs that
| change the topic entirely, so reading or listening to something
| with 80% understanding generally requires a dictionary in one
| hand to get you up to a reasonable level of comprehension. That
| said, I personally think language learning is enjoyable and
| rewarding, and tackling the most common word list is a good
| first step.
| mchaver wrote:
| This post will give you a sense of what understanding 80% of
| the text looks likes
| https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-...
| kebsup wrote:
| 800 is definitely too little. I'm building a language learning
| app based around this exact strategy. Right now, I've around
| 7000 German lemmas tracked in the app and still regularly
| encounter sentences which I don't understand, because I lack
| the vocabulary.
| mrccc wrote:
| While the answer to your question is "no", there is still
| something you'll be able to do: to express yourself and to
| understand spoken language.
|
| Like other people said here, understanding will probably still
| be limited, esp. in writing. But expressing even complex things
| becomes easier.
|
| E.g. instead of saying "Do you have medication against
| migraine" at a pharmacy you could say "Do you have something
| for pain here" while pointing at your head.
|
| This is what we call fluency, and starting at 800 words I would
| argue you have basic fluency in the language. And also
| regarding understanding spoken language - those words might be
| enough to express that you haven't understood something and ask
| people to simplify.
|
| Words are not enough, though - pronunciation and grammar also
| play their part.
| keeptrying wrote:
| A big hole in this article is that you need to find the very best
| learning resource there is. This is a must.
|
| Eg: For RL it would be Barto&Sutton book.
|
| Sometimes the best source is not intuitive. Eg: The best way to
| become a safe driver is to go to performance drivign school - its
| a bit expensive but they tell you how to sit and stay alert in a
| car which I have never seen outside of these schools.
|
| One of my most common things nowadays is to ask ChatGPT is to ask
| to build a curriculum. Creating and understanding what a great
| curriculum looks like is 20% of the work of understanding a
| field.
|
| You can LEARN ANYTHING now if you have the time and inclination
| and elbow grease. Truly nothing is beyond your grasp - NOTHING.
| Its a magical time.
|
| I'm actually building a tool that will do all this for you and
| get you started down the learning path faster than what we have
| now.
|
| And for the curious - the best way to learn medicine is not a
| textbook. There are solutions out there like Skethcy which work
| much better for anatomy.
|
| My own learning project - learn Medicine "on the side". It seems
| ludcirous that we give up the keys to our health to doctors just
| so we don't have to learn 2 years of courses. Am going to fix
| that!
| cbracketdash wrote:
| Would love to hear more about your thoughts on learning
| medicine! Why would you recommend an online program over
| textbooks?
| server_man3000 wrote:
| When I've gotten deep into a topic I've actually almost
| ALWAYS learned that textbooks are the best way to learn
| things.
|
| The internet is full of information. Sometimes it's too much,
| unstructured or tangential to the goal at hand. Textbooks, in
| my experience, are truly written by the experts. It's been
| vetted, rigorously reviewed and fact checked. It's not
| inspired by influencers or clickbait.
|
| Obviously YMMV, but when you find a top recommended textbook,
| it's usually miles beyond a YouTube video or medium blog for
| deeper level content. It usually flows better and makes more
| sense as you study consistently.
| keeptrying wrote:
| U=I bought more or less every book on this.
|
| https://meded.ucsf.edu/sites/meded.ucsf.edu/files/inline-
| fil...
|
| Start with Anatomy.
|
| Start with a problem you HAve personally. And understand the
| anatomy and physiology. Use that to learn every abstraction
| you bump into. Example you'll definitely need to learn about
| the skin for example
|
| Also go to uptodate.com for your condition. Thats basically
| what a doc uses anyways.
|
| For inspiration go to r/medicalschool .
|
| Constantly use
| keeptrying wrote:
| Realize I didn't answer your qeustion.
|
| Online courses aren't really holistic enough and not
| fundamental enough. They are usually dertivatives which are a
| translation of sorts from source documents.
|
| For medicine you want the source documents which you can
| really trust.
|
| Meidicine isn't static - it'll keep changing but its
| important to know source mateiral and tracking how outlooks
| and fixes for diseases change from there.
|
| UptoDate.com has the best deciison science -newest knowlege.
| Thye are about 18 months old from cutting edge research.
| (Which is a good thing).
| owobeid wrote:
| > One of my most common things nowadays is to ask ChatGPT is to
| ask to build a curriculum.
|
| I've been trying to do this for some rabbit hole I decided to
| go through. It's great for generating a list of topics but good
| luck getting actual existing books or papers. In some instances
| it would generate a paper title and link it to some other paper
| that might be slightly relevant.
| sam29681749 wrote:
| It's not foolproof, but some universities publish their course
| textbook lists online (and in some cases recommended readings
| too). As a bonus, textbooks often have recommendations for
| further readings.
| keeptrying wrote:
| Yep ... UCSF does this.
|
| Weidly its the only good one I Found.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >you need to find the very best learning resource there is.
| This is a must.
|
| I think there's a line around "good enough", unless your goal
| of course is to be on the road to "become the very best". I
| think the better metric is making sure you have a accurate
| resource over a quality one. The 15-20 hour "sprint hard"
| methodology isn't stopping after that first sprint, just
| slowing down.
|
| So if you find/can now access a better resource later, just
| start the sprint again on that. I know from experience (in real
| time, unfortunately) how easily "find the best resource" can
| end up becoming "spend weeks collecting resources but not
| consuming them".
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| The other problem is: How do you recognize what is "good
| enough" if you lack the skills/competence required to be able
| to say "this is good enough"?
|
| For example, I'm a frontend developer who wants to learn
| backend. And let's say that I chose C# and .NET for this. I
| can either do tutorials in Microsoft docs and then reach out
| to Reddit or some other community for resources, to receive
| the commonsense advice "just build something", and we're back
| to zero because now the goal is to build something for
| learning's sake therefore what is "good enough project" to
| build to maximize gains?
| chrisvalleybay wrote:
| ^ This is exactly it. It's Dunning-Kruger.
| neonsunset wrote:
| I understand the struggle but may not be able to offer an
| exact solution. People usually expect you to just throw
| something together without structure, but if you don't have
| preliminary experience with doing _anything_ similar at
| all, you are stuck with a blank piece of paper and no
| ideas, and it _feels_ absolutely terrible.
|
| I don't know what works for you, but what worked for me was
| finding open-source projects in a domain I'm looking to
| write an application or a library in and using them as a
| reference. With time, you become able to determine which
| ones are of high quality and are a good example, and which
| ones are not. You could also ask Claude/ChatGPT for
| references to starting point.
|
| On C# specifically, I can recommend looking at
| https://github.com/bitwarden/server which is more
| "traditional" style but does not have much nonsense/bloat
| you would usually see in an enterprise codebase. That's
| what I always reference as a style and project layout guide
| for newcomers that don't already know how they want the
| project to look. And then as you go through the code, you
| can always dump the snippets into a chatbot and then cross-
| reference the replies with documentation if needed.
| Chatbots also great at quickly sketching up project
| structure - it can be a terrible one but it's easier to do
| "hey, I don't like this, let's change it to X" than trying
| to come up with everything from the scratch.
|
| If you already have experience with writing TS-based
| applications with e.g. React components, base router, etc.,
| you can more or less translate this onto structuring an
| ASP.NET Core application with controller/api handlers,
| model classes, services, ORM layer and similar. There
| really is no true right or wrong singular way of doing it,
| and people who claim there is are dogmatics from a cargo
| cult.
|
| In general, a lot of C# code out there that you will
| encounter will take more steps to solve its task than
| strictly necessary, as the generational trauma of ungodly
| horrors of 666-layer "Clean" architecture DDD-done-badly
| monoliths still haunts many, manifesting in a milder form
| of "write a small three file microservice as a 40-file
| three-project solution". It is highly useful to approach
| new patterns and anything that _seems_ ceremoneous with
| "is this abstraction strictly required or can this piece be
| removed and done in a few lines of code or maybe a
| method?".
|
| On tooling - can strongly recommend using .NET CLI which
| will be very familiar after using NPM and co.:
|
| Create new projects/solutions with 'dotnet new {template
| name}' (e.g. console, classlib, sln, gitignore).
|
| Add/remove projects to/from a solution with dotnet sln
| add/remove
|
| Add dependencies with 'dotnet add package PackageName' or
| 'dotnet add reference path/to/project' if you want to
| combine multiple projects.
|
| Run projects with 'dotnet run' (-C release). Hot-reload for
| most scenarios is possible with 'dotnet watch'. Publish
| into a final complete application with 'dotnet publish -o
| {path}'. There are many ways to do the last one, but for
| simple back-ends doing the default output and then copying
| it to a "runtime" image in a dockerfile will suffice.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| I'm giving a C# class at a university-like institute (for
| the first time in my life) and I'm glad I had the time to
| learn the language while it evolved over the last 15 years.
| Learning nowadays is daunting because of the size of the
| language and the N ways to do even simple things. You also
| need to understand the programming landscape before C#
| (mostly C and Java) to understand some decisions made by
| language designers.
|
| As much as I like learning by myself, sometimes I have to
| admit that taking (and paying) for a class is the good
| solution. The way I organize notions for my students would
| take them months/years to understand by themselves, if at
| all.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >then reach out to Reddit or some other community for
| resources, to receive the commonsense advice "just build
| something"
|
| An expert giving bad advice isn't going to help with your
| curriculum. To give a charitable interpretaion, forums like
| Reddit are very used to getting mostly Novices coming to
| ask questions. To the point where even if an advanced
| novice is asking about how to reach "Competent" level they
| will still give novice advice. And the best way to climb
| from novice to advance beginner is to "just build stuff".
|
| There's definitely an open secret that there's plenty of
| novice material, and plenty of expert material. But the
| road to competent and proficient is basically a dead man's
| land for many subjects. I argue the curve to competent is
| harder than Proficient and Expert[0]. Such a hard point
| that you often won't find "best resources" without either
| education, consulting an expert, or simply work a job in
| that topic.
|
| I don't have much better advice if you are seeking
| resources. But the next step up if you get stumped is to
| put more effort into finding other experts who will help
| out. try to email those potentially open to give advice on
| what to find or what's good/bad. Join communities similar
| to what domains you want to explore and form relationships.
| If you are getting to that point, offer to help contribute
| to projects others are working on.
|
| [0]: Expert is steeper, but by that point you have a good
| sense of judgement to figure out what is a good or bad
| resource to study from. So it's "easier" to learn how to
| learn by this point.
| internet101010 wrote:
| I ran into this issue when diving into the world of Rust.
| What ended up getting me to move forward was asking
| Claude/4o to design a curriculum that would teach me the
| basics in a way would lead to completion of a project I had
| in mind.
|
| I ended up dropping 4o and going exclusively with Claude.
| Claude is amazing at teaching.
| keeptrying wrote:
| Get in front of an expert and ask them what they should
| have read first.
|
| In most fields the best will know. And the process of
| getting inf ront of the best will also teach you about the
| field.
| keeptrying wrote:
| By the very fact that the resource is "good enough" implies
| that it won't have the holistic and beginner-tolerance
| required of a good instruction set.
|
| A great text will get you upto beinngin in 2 weeks - month. A
| "good enough" will mean a year if it isn't your primary
| focus.
|
| Try learning RL from any other text than Barto-Sutton.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well yeah. Time and budget can be limited. The "best" way
| to learn a language is to travel to a country native to it
| and immerse yourself, constantly attempting to speak to
| others. But that may not be accessible in time nor costs to
| travel and live. The "best way" to learn many topics is to
| immerse in a community that's a mix of learners or experts.
| ie. A classroom setting. A place to constantly iterate and
| quickly correct mistakes. But education is only getting
| more expensive, and not all communities are equal.
|
| If there's a great beginner textbook out there, that can
| definitely help. But not every field has its Bart-Sutton
| easily accessible. But the time it takes doesn't
| necessarily matter as much as the mastery itself.
| kashunstva wrote:
| > My own learning project - learn Medicine "on the side". It
| seems ludcirous that we give up the keys to our health to
| doctors just so we don't have to learn 2 years of courses. Am
| going to fix that!
|
| While I admire the drive to become knowledgeable in the field
| of medicine outside of a professional curriculum in the
| disciplines, I'm not aware of any curriculum that proposes
| competency as a medical doctor in two years. Though I haven't
| practiced medicine in many years, I do have a degree in
| medicine and went through internship, residency and fellowship.
| Trust me, it was far more than two years. Further, I don't see
| how you would be able to (legally) gain experience in any of a
| range of procedures without following the consensus training
| path.
| apwell23 wrote:
| Can you tell me why doctors are totally useless in diagnosing
| extremely common issues like acid reflux. Why do GI
| specialists have no freaking clue what is causing acid
| reflux. Why do they not know what how exactly my a1c is
| relevant to heart disease instead of just prescribing me a
| statin.
|
| I personally know couple of doctors who themselves are
| clueless in fixing their own chronic conditions. Let alone
| helping someone else.
|
| Sure go to the doctor if you broke your arm but they are
| totally out of their depths if you have any chronic
| conditions. Not sure what exactly they study for like a
| decade if they don't have answers to almost anything.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| Asking a doctor to diagnose and treat a chronic condition
| from a list of symptoms is like asking a detective to solve
| a crime from a list of evidence.
|
| There is A LOT of additional legwork and investigation
| required to get to the truth even if you're brilliant
| Sherlock Holmes (and most won't be).
|
| The best they can practically do in the 10 minutes they
| spend on your case, is try to treat symptoms.
| keeptrying wrote:
| And this is why you need to study Medicine!
|
| https://meded.ucsf.edu/sites/meded.ucsf.edu/files/inline-
| fil...
| apwell23 wrote:
| > There is A LOT of additional legwork and investigation
| required to get to the truth even if you're brilliant
| Sherlock Holmes (and most won't be).
|
| I got all the additonal tests though. I got upper
| endoscopy, a appointment with ent who put some sort of
| scope down my throat, bloodwork, esophagram, barium
| swallow test. He said he got nothing else and i am on my
| own and admitted that almost 90% of time they don't find
| anything.
|
| Mind you this is one of most common conditions not some
| rare disease that needs sherlock holmes .
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Studied long time ago / studied once and then forgotten /
| no interest in getting updated / no proper channels for
| getting updated / ...
|
| Any of those could be a reason.
| timacles wrote:
| Because there are 12 different "causes" that are all very
| subtle and are highly influenced by your diet and behavior
| etc.
|
| Doctors also never want to admit they dont know the answer
| to something
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| Yikes. No. If you have doctors who aren't honest with you
| or honest about when they need to do more research to
| understand more, get the hell away and find someone else.
| I know not everyone has that choice, but if you do...
| please find a doctor who will level with you and you can
| trust. You do not want to get Dr. Deathed.
| keeptrying wrote:
| The first two years are the scientific part of a medical
| course.
|
| The next two are more about interacting with a live patient
| in a variety of settings. Obviously this si useful.
|
| But most of the harm created by the medical system and skewed
| doctor incentives (only 15 minutes to see you) can be averted
| by those 2 years. For example: knowing to e able to read a
| examination report means abiliy to ask questions immediately.
| firejake308 wrote:
| As a medical student, perhaps I can give some recommendations
| on the best free resources to learn medicine. If you like
| YouTube videos, Ninja Nerd has a great channel for learning the
| foundations. If you like textbooks, I used Guyton for
| physiology and Harrison's is probably the standard for clinical
| medicine. If you just want to look up how to treat a specific
| condition, look up "<condition> clinical guidelines". You'll
| always be missing the additional knowledge that comes from
| years of experience, but there's no harm in increasing your
| knowledge as long as you maintain the humility to remember that
| your knowledge is incomplete.
|
| It's similar to how I learned software development as a
| hobbyist, so I understand a little about headlines like OpenAI
| switching from Next to Remix, but at a deeper level, I don't
| _really_ understand what it 's like running Next.js at the
| scale of MAUs. But it's still worth learning so that I have a
| little more understanding about the world around me.
| keeptrying wrote:
| Thanks for the reply.
|
| Yep I'm ware of Guyton and Nnja.
|
| The marginal information that a doctor has from real life is
| useful but with so many medical errors, for 80% of people
| they aren't relevant.
|
| I've caught surgeons literally mentioning the wrong type of
| incisions right before the surgery.
| keeptrying wrote:
| Since this struck a note - you can find UCSFs list of textbooks
| here: https://meded.ucsf.edu/sites/meded.ucsf.edu/files/inline-
| fil...
|
| Start with Anatomy. And the basic anatomical form.
|
| Start with a problem you personally have. (Go to a doc if its
| serious!)
|
| Figure out your concentric anaotmy of hte issue, the pathology.
| Everytime you read a textbook it will push you to a new
| subject.
|
| Do this for at least 5 hours and you'll be able to relate to
| your doctor much better.
|
| If you want to know what a dcotor looks at for decision support
| - you can go to uptodate.com - I think they have a free trial
| for 3 days or something.
|
| The most essential idea is that a doctor is someone whose model
| of hte human body is much more realistic than yours.
|
| Thus as you learn medicine keep improving the model you have of
| your own body and how someone elses would be different from
| yours - for all major body systems - lymph, respiratory,
| nervous, endocrine , muscular, digestive, integumentary,
| urinay, excretory, circulatory etc.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| The biggest challenge in learning is identifying gaps in your
| knowledge. Dunning-Kruger is a real thing and you want to avoid
| that.
|
| Part of learning to learn, is learning how to identify the things
| you don't know. Then learning how to structure your 'personal
| curriculum' them in a rational way - you don't _need_ to know
| everything up front to be effective.
| zfnmxt wrote:
| Posts like this that talk about learning "efficiency" always come
| off as soulless and dystopian to me. I think learning should be
| fun and that fun learning is the most effective---that's the only
| thing I optimize for and I certainly don't think about efficiency
| percentages. What a drag that would be.
| celurian92 wrote:
| I so much agree with you. I understand and remember the things
| I learn more when I am having fun or it piqued my curiosity.
| But I guess shortness of time needs us to focus on the
| efficiency aspect of it too.
| sam29681749 wrote:
| I somewhat disagree. Although having fun is important, I also
| want to make the most of my time. further, I think some aspects
| of learning can be a real slog, but when you get through it you
| find it rewarding.
| esperent wrote:
| I studied mathematics and I think this subject illustrates my
| feelings on this perfectly. Coding, just as well.
|
| When it comes to learning maths, or a new programming language,
| there's all this tedious boilerplate you need to know. The
| rules, or syntax, the names of everything, how it all fits
| together.
|
| There's ways to make learning this stuff more fun, but
| ultimately, not _that_ much more fun. And anyway, the learning
| part is not the good part, it 's the things you can do once you
| reach a certain knowledge level that are incredible, beautiful,
| even sublime.
|
| On the other hand, take something like learning to paint, or
| taking dancing lessons. Unless you're hoping to become a member
| of an international ballet company, _learning_ to dance is the
| fun part.
|
| As another point, if you're a knowledge worker and you're
| likely to have situations in your life where someone basically
| says to you " _right mate, you 've got the job, here's a huge
| body of deep technical knowledge to learn, get up to speed, see
| you Monday_" then a certain amount of skill in knowing how to
| absorb that quickly is a good thing.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > Unless you're hoping to become a member of an international
| ballet company, learning to dance is the fun part.
|
| I think this really depends on the dance.
|
| With most relatively technical partner dances, such as
| argentine tango and west coast swing, being a beginner sucks
| and it's especially rough if you're a lead.
|
| There's this fairly long period when you're not going to be
| very fun to dance with, and you're not going to have fun
| dancing because too much of it is still in your head and not
| in your body. At the same time you need to dance with lots of
| people in order to improve, and people will throw you a bone
| once in a while for the sake of letting you practice, but at
| the same time they're not really having fun.
|
| It's only if you stick with it for a year or two and get
| through this rough patch, it becomes very fun and rewarding.
| blackoil wrote:
| I would say "fun" is overrated. We have become so focused on
| everything being fun that everything including fun itself has
| become tepid and mediocre. It is important to slog through the
| hard parts to cross the barrier of expert beginner. We are over
| downplaying the value of hard work and grit.
| zfnmxt wrote:
| In many ways I agree with your opening sentence---maybe I
| shouldn't have written "fun". I think I was trying to get at
| something more like that the experience of learning itself is
| itself a good thing (even if it's not fun, even if it's
| suffering, even if it's hard) and I think mechanical and
| stoic recipes to optimize the process fail to adequately
| appreciate that fact.
|
| The best part of learning piano isn't getting good at piano
| ---it's learning piano. And sure there are some things we
| have to learn that we aren't that interested in learning, but
| I think even those things have the capacity to be worthwhile
| experiences if properly framed.
|
| I think applying the word "efficient" to this area is
| suggestive of urgency and greater purpose---I don't buy into
| either.
| jackphilson wrote:
| I think 'fun' is a prerequisite for optimal learning, you
| can definitely have both.
|
| And I think greater purpose is definitely a thing if you
| subscribe to a utilitarian moral framework
| pfortuny wrote:
| This is exactly why drills exist: to make reasoning mechanic.
| The same as in the military... You can only decide (know) if
| you have the basics memorized to the core, and this
| requires... boredom in most of us.
|
| I graduated in mathematics. Proving that Projective Space is
| a noetherian scheme is not exactly a thrilling challenge. But
| you have to go through the motions if you want to be able to
| "think" about algebraic varieties.
|
| Same in any other field of "knowledge".
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| > We are over downplaying the value of hard work and grit.
|
| Who is doing that?
| shmel wrote:
| There is a big difference between learning something to
| become a skilled professional versus just a hobby. A lot of
| things I learned are for myself. I want them to be fun. There
| is no end goal. I don't want to compete with anyone, I don't
| want to prove anyone I am very good at this. I am learning
| new skills for fun and I intend to get enjoyment from
| practicing them. Throwing at a hobbyist "now repeat this 1000
| times to get it perfect" is how you kill motivation.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The steps here are fairly generic and can fit into whatever
| regimen you have. It simply comes down to "find your learning
| path and grind hard in the beginning. Then you can slow down
| and relax after that first burst".
|
| Seems like decent enough advice if you ever have trouble
| getting started. It's actually not unlike cramming for a test,
| except you keep study afterwards and don't dump that knowledge
| the day after. "fun learning" or not, just make sure to really
| dive in in the beginning.
| jvans wrote:
| If I'm not having fun learning something I can't stick with it.
| Efficiency without tenacity/grit is useless. It's kind of a
| tautology that "more efficient is better", but I agree it's
| pointless without fun. Being less "efficient" but having fun
| will yield better results imo
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| > Posts like this that talk about learning "efficiency" always
| come off as soulless and dystopian to me. I think learning
| should be fun and that fun learning is the most effective
|
| I don't disagree, but maybe the author is making do with what
| they have. Maybe they only have 30 minutes ~ 1 hour of free
| time per day (which is dystopian on its own), and need to think
| about efficiency if they want to achieve a certain degree of
| proficiency in whatever they're learning.
|
| Another interpretation is that they are only trying to optimize
| their learning process if it's work related, because they need
| to. Or maybe they have an engineer mindset, and make the
| process more efficient is a fun thing to do by itself.
| adamc wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. Also, I don't think there is an ideal way to
| learn something. Different people absorb lessons best in
| different ways.
|
| The people I've thought were most successful were not grinding
| their way through learning but enjoying it, letting new
| questions arise and pursuing them. Is that efficient? It might
| not seem so. But the learning tends to be more transformative;
| they grok the lessons more deeply.
|
| A work colleague once told me that it's like reading textbooks
| in graduate school -- you read it once just to get a general
| sense of the vocabulary. They you start over, concentrating on
| the meaning. New ideas take a lot of study to learn well.
| "Efficient" learning strikes me as a compromise where you get a
| superficial understanding for the sake of speed.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| Neel Nanda did it better:
| https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/34-learning
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Identifying what the foundational knowledge is isn't easy for an
| absolute begginer.
|
| Building an efficient path to expertise is hard for a beginner.
|
| I think the fastest way to learn is asking an expert to build a
| learning path for you, starting from what you know and what you
| don't know.
| james-revisoai wrote:
| Learning depends on the environment and whether it is pursued in
| an auto-didactic sense (Even for a job, say) or whether you are
| learning for an exam/part of a cohort.
|
| It's not wrong to say Curriculum does not matter. But the level
| of curriculum is also something that needs to adjust to your
| current level and related fields you have knowledge within, to
| prevent you becoming overwhelmed.
|
| Most people stop learning being motivation dries up as Test
| Anxiety rises to the point where they are at a "low-performance"
| place in the eustress curve. A few days there and people pause
| until it becomes urgent. A lot of this is a lack of momentum, but
| also not dedicating or having access to judgements of learning
| about your own progress.
|
| In other words, if you judge your learning at all, it helps you
| manage.
|
| There is a natural tradeoff between the flow-state of "just one
| flashcard with one information principle at a time, endlessly"
| and the longer term state influencing your time in flow-state of
| "am I progressing, what don't I know, how do I feel about my
| learning and mistakes?"
|
| Think about learning databases, or CSS. When did you really
| takeoff? Probably A) Practically copying others examples
| (existing queries ran in PhpMyAdmin, or codepen code) And then
| later B) Once you overcame a big mistake and saw progress -
| suddenly what "Display" did clicked for you, and you saw how
| useful it could be to use the "fixed" option, it unlocked your
| understanding of the items in A and confirmed or disconfirmed
| your understanding of how it works.
|
| Again it all depends. Self-motivated learning, even for a job, is
| easier to work with than compulsory learning. Because there, you
| don't even have the motivation to gaze up to the horizon and
| gather any excitement or understanding for what the learning
| might later lead to. It doesn't feel like a path, it feels like a
| brick wall. In this regard, a list of subjects is somewhat skin
| to someone stacking bricks, rather than elucidating a path.
| Overwhelming anxiety while learning is a real thing. The context
| really matters as to whether this approach is always the wisest.
| vonnik wrote:
| For me, there's always an early social element to learning:
| trying to figure out who the experts are; getting them to point
| you toward the best resources; and if you're lucky, bouncing your
| mental models off them to be corrected. A good LLM can take you
| part of the way on many subjects, which removes some of the
| initial friction.
|
| Not every field is like that though.
|
| Some problems are wicked and new, lots of knowledge is basically
| enacted more than known, and the solutions one seeks often
| require several disciplines.
| sumosudo wrote:
| Piano piano si va lontano
| jamager wrote:
| IMO, how to learn depends greatly on why to learn and what
| constraints do you have.
|
| If you need to pass an exam, obtain a certificate, etc. you will
| need a different approach than if you are just curious about a
| subject and explore what it is about.
|
| There are commonalities, however. Much of the advice on
| deliberate practice (From the book Peak Performance) is valid
| even if you don't try to be a top expert.
| timwaagh wrote:
| I dont think it's going to be that important. Different people
| have different learning styles but also vastly different
| capacities making this really difficult to research accurately.
| People claim to find the secret sauce from time to time. They're
| most likely wrong.
| paldepind2 wrote:
| I agree with the blog post that learning how to learn is an
| important skill. But the post offers very little beyond a few
| tips on how to actually achieve that. For people interested in
| actually learning how to learn I'd recommend the book "Make It
| Stick: The Science of Successful Learning", which offers a lot of
| details on this topic based on actual scientific research.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| that book seems to be very inline with cutting edge research on
| learning, thanks
|
| book summary
|
| "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" Summary:
|
| Key Premise: Effective learning strategies differ from common
| study methods like rereading and cramming, which provide an
| illusion of mastery but lead to poor retention.
|
| Main Learning Principles:
|
| Retrieval Practice: Actively recalling information strengthens
| memory and makes learning more durable. Self-quizzing is more
| effective than passive review.
|
| Spaced Repetition: Spacing out learning sessions over time
| leads to better retention than cramming.
|
| Interleaved Practice: Mixing different types of problems or
| subjects during study sessions improves learning compared to
| studying one topic in blocks.
|
| Elaboration: Explaining ideas in your own words and connecting
| them to existing knowledge improves understanding.
|
| Generation: Attempting to solve a problem before being shown
| the solution enhances learning.
|
| Reflection: Reviewing what you've learned and considering how
| it applies to your life strengthens learning.
|
| Varied Learning: Learning in different contexts and
| environments makes the knowledge more adaptable and versatile.
|
| Key Takeaways:
|
| Rethink study habits: Active learning techniques outperform
| passive ones.
|
| Learning is more effective when it's effortful--embrace
| challenges.
|
| Long-term retention relies on consistent, spaced, and active
| engagement with material.
| paldepind2 wrote:
| That summary is pretty good based on what I remember from the
| book. I think the second to last point, _effort_, deserves a
| bit more of an emphasis though. It's actually a common theme
| through all the effective learning methods that they require
| more effort and that more effort generally implies more
| effective learning. As an example, simply rereading a text
| takes little effort compared to doing flash cards, and the
| later is more effective.
| nbzso wrote:
| Crypto Data Live-Streamed. One article. Wisdom all around.
| personjerry wrote:
| > Very quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is.
|
| This seems to be the most important part but also has the hidden
| and problematic dependency of... already knowing (i.e. already
| having learned) what the foundational stuff is?
| lawls wrote:
| It's true.
| erganemic wrote:
| Contra to a lot of what's being said in this thread, I think a
| lot of smart people get stuck in the trap of overvaluing quality
| of input relative to quantity of input. Put another way: the
| bitter lesson applies to the AI inside your skull too.
| bckr wrote:
| Hmm. Given that Textbooks are all you need, I'm not sure this
| holds.
|
| Maybe "don't focus so much on organizing your inputs, instead
| focus on many quality input reps"?
| cloverich wrote:
| Relatedly, it took me a while to appreciate that seeking out
| and organizing the best knowledge on a topic is, for me, just a
| form a procrastination. Its ok if I'm doing it for fun. But if
| I want to learn, the key seems to be that every single day I
| start the day learning or reinforcing something, and do no
| other activity until that one is completed. A somewhat related
| thing I learned in medical school, is that many people have an
| internal cue for when you've really learned something. When you
| have re-visited something for the nth time, and the feeling you
| have is a deep level of annoyance that you are rehashing the
| same thing again, that is usually the signal that it will
| stick. May not work for all but worked well for me and the
| folks I shared it with.
| setgree wrote:
| Something from Andrej Karpathy on learning that stuck with me
| [0]:
|
| > Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be
| actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that
| of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full
| body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot
| more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental
| equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do
| anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually
| care to learn.
|
| [0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1756380066580455557?lang=en
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Judging from his name, he has been struck with post-soviet
| spirit of doom and gloom.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Doesn't make it less true though.
| sofixa wrote:
| He was born in '86 in Slovakia, so he probably doesn't
| remember much of the late communist and early post-communist
| times.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| He's also been struck with 10-100s of millions of dollars, an
| insanely successful career, and a good nature.
| cloverich wrote:
| A counter point, or maybe complementary point (b/c I agree w/
| the quote). I killed myself trying to do more than 8 pull ups
| in a gym for ages; at times I'd be going to the gym 4x a week
| doing full body workouts, always working hard, always sweating,
| always gassed at the end; consistently doing pull ups to
| exhaustion on multiple sets. Yet 8 was a kind of ceiling. At
| some point I stopped working out, but got a pull up bar at
| home. I stuck it in my office doorway. I would do occasional
| pull ups -- never more than 2-3, usually only 1. But just
| casually a few times a day, nearly every day, when I walked by
| it. It was never hard, it never felt like work. It became more
| of a way to briefly relax, an alternative to the cigarettes I
| used to smoke. Well after a year of that when someone
| challenged me to a friendly pull up competition, I was shocked
| that I could do 15 in a row easily, I still had more in the
| tank even. That always stuck with me because it taught me that
| while hard work is important, consistency is _more_ important.
| Working "hard" as such is often not only not required, but
| perhaps often not actually the thing that will help.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| That's a reasonably well known strategy to pull-ups. Start at
| one regularly and slowly build up once it becomes easy enough
| to do so.
|
| I think learning is more like growing plants, you don't need
| to get everything perfect, or even one thing perfect, but a
| set of things to good enough.
|
| There are a lot of things that interfere with learning so the
| presence of those will inhibit learning regardless of effort.
| systems wrote:
| how much weight did you loose during that time?
|
| you either lost significant weight, or added significant
| muscle .. no other way .. the end result here is more
| significant than how you reached it
|
| for pull up, loosing weight is usually far more important
| than adding muscle, so i am leaning toward you lost weight
| cloverich wrote:
| Oh, I'm pretty lightweight / lanky (hover around 165lb, BMI
| around 20-21). I didn't see any significant weight change
| at the time, perhaps I transferred muscle if that's a thing
| since I was doing less general muscle building at that
| point - just pushups and the casual pull up routine,
| running (sprints) to blow off steam.
|
| I can see weight loss being a significant factor for
| heavier people, esp. those that are heavy and strong. I am
| definitely neither (typical things like bench press / squat
| etc I used pretty light weights).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Eh, you can also improve your lifts by just not being
| exhausted every time you go to the gym. With lifting, more
| is not always more. Fatigue and failure to properly recover
| is a fairly common reason for plateaus, especially with
| full body pulls.
| nickburns wrote:
| For anyone not familiar with this methodology, it's called
| 'greasing the groove.'
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmOEgK5o2yg
| zer0tonin wrote:
| This is complete bs.
|
| I've learned 2 languages to fluency by mostly watching movies.
| I've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server for
| my friends in high school. I've learned programming by making
| IRC (and later Discord) bots for communities I was part of.
|
| All of this was fun, and it worked better than staring at a
| textbook and hoping that my "effort" pays off.
| bityard wrote:
| I think there is some conflation in this thread between
| "learning" and "practice" which are fairly different things.
|
| As an ADHD person, nothing shovels the dopamine into my
| neural receptors quite like going from zero to "knows enough
| to be dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge. That's
| the fun part. But climbing the experience curve much further
| than that requires some amount of _deliberate_ study and
| beyond that deliberate _practice_ and experience in order to
| become something like an expert.
|
| Chasing questions down rabbit-holes is fast and entertaining
| but only takes you so far. Deliberate practice (studying) is
| mostly less fun, even when that thing is your life-long
| passion and/or career. But necessary if you want to be highly
| skilled in that area.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| > nothing shovels the dopamine into my neural receptors
| quite like going from zero to "knows enough to be
| dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge.
|
| Man, this describes me to a T. I love that feeling of the
| "first 75%" (or whatever percentage it is). Then I tend to
| lose interest in the long tail.
| smeej wrote:
| I realized this about myself years ago, but I don't (think
| I) have ADHD.
|
| I have always been able to learn faster than most people.
| No clear reason why. It appears I was just born this way.
|
| But if the Pareto Principle holds, and I'm learning twice
| as fast as average (estimating for the sake of easy math),
| that means when I'm a beginner learning the 20% of the
| skill that gives me 80% of the results, I'm learning like
| 32 times faster than somebody learning at an average rate
| who's in the 80% of work that produces 20% of the results,
| even though they're better at what they're doing. I _look_
| like an absolute rockstar out of the gate.
|
| Problem is that my ego has been tied up in that since I was
| little. Early life is all about learning high-leverage
| things as quickly as possible, and since that's also when
| you're forming your sense of who you are, it's a sticky
| trap. I have really struggled to build the patience for the
| rest of the grind, where even if I'm still learning twice
| as fast as average at the harder level, any average newbie
| is learning/improving twice as fast as me.
|
| The end result is that I'm moderately proficient in dozens
| and dozens of things, but I'm not an expert at anything
| except obtaining moderate proficiency.
| sksxihve wrote:
| Agreed, consistency is more important than doing a marathon
| session. Anyone who has learned a musical instrument can tell
| you this, far better to practice 10 minutes a day everyday
| than 1 hour once a week.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Yeah, but Andrej is talking about learning much harder things
| in much more depth. He's a world class research scientist and
| engineer.
|
| Practically everyone on planet earth learns a language as a
| child. Learning how to use some commands in linux and and
| programming a bot are literally child's play. I learned to
| play soccer the way you speak of - i'm... ok at it. Messi did
| a different thing.
| auselen wrote:
| Trying to provide a perspective..
|
| Let's say because of your genetics, you can enjoy playing
| basketball, and you do that, and you have fun doing that, you
| get better at it... but that's that, it won't be that easy
| for you with other subjects or even get to next level at
| basketball. Then you need to submit to discipline... or are
| you willing to wait for things to become fun?
|
| > pays off
|
| That's why it is important to chase things you are curious
| about, then you don't need to wait for some return...
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| >I've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server
| for my friends in high school.
|
| What you've learned was "enough to set up a minecraft
| server", but definitely not as much as "learned the linux
| cli", and that's without even touching the obvious question
| "what does someone mean when they claim they learned the
| linux cli"?
|
| I fell for this trap too: I watched a tutorial by Nick
| Chapsas, then made my own ASP.NET Core Web API for a personal
| project, and thought "Wow I know ASP.NET MVC time to get a
| junior developer job".
|
| After a few resumes (there's .NET demand in my area) I landed
| an interview with a startup. The interviewer (who happened to
| be the cofounder and has 15 years of .NET experience, some
| working directly in Microsoft) started hitting me with
| questions like "what kind of objects can get constructed in a
| using block?", "what's the difference between readonly and
| const", "how can we identify that a payload comes from a
| mobile client if the endpoints are shared?", etc.
|
| That's when I realized that I knew enough to make me go
| "woohoo I have a .NET Core web API" but not enough to get a
| junior job. In fact, he was honest enough to tell me "you're
| barely entry level, and this wasn't even the technical
| interview it's just the screener".
|
| Off-topic but related with the event: I obviously didn't get
| the job, but he left me with an advice I'm actioning: "Stop
| jumping around and stick to one language, I don't know if
| that's gonna be C#, TypeScript, Go, Python, whatever. Deep
| dive something well. You're only hurting yourself in the long
| run".
| kwar13 wrote:
| I cannot recommend reading A Mathematician's Apology enough. It
| was written by GH Hardy and I think it's one of the best non-math
| texts out there to understand how a mathematician's brain works.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology
|
| Fairly short and beautifully written.
| will-burner wrote:
| I also like mathematician's apology and would recommend it for
| understanding now a mathematician's brain works and in
| particular a mathematician's perspective and mindset on being a
| mathematician.
|
| But I'm curious what prompted you to bring that up in this
| thread? I don't see how it's connected to the blog post.
| kwar13 wrote:
| Oops! Thought I was in this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909564
|
| Thank you friend!
| mediumsmart wrote:
| I think the best learning resource for something is being really
| interested in it.
| nwnwhwje wrote:
| > "What's something you've learned that you believe gives you an
| edge - something that you're almost surprised more people don't
| know about?"
|
| My response: Nice try.
| will-burner wrote:
| >What's something you've learned that you believe gives you an
| edge - something that you're almost surprised more people don't
| know about?
|
| I don't know if it's just me but I would not be stoked to be
| asked this question during an interview. During interviews you're
| implicitly trying to differentiate yourself from others vying for
| the position. You usually do this by talking about your
| experience in different ways. I find it annoying when the
| interviewer explicitly asks you to differentiate yourself from
| others vying for the position. In part it annoys me because I
| think that should be the job of the interviewer to determine
| based on how I've answered their concrete questions about my
| experience. But also explicit questions like this one give such
| an opportunity for bs that I do not think they give a lot of
| signal. I guess I could be wrong though and don't spend enough
| time thinking about what makes me better than other people.
| textread wrote:
| I have a related question: Is learning interlinked with writing?
|
| PG tweeted:- You can't replace reading with
| other sources of information like videos, because you
| need to read in order to write well, and you need to
| write in order to think well.
| jjice wrote:
| Pareto distributions are everywhere, and most learning ends up
| being one. Recently encountered this while getting into weight
| training for hypertrophy. The core is good form, diet, and
| progressive overload. Other than that, learning the basis of a
| specific exercise is something you can pick up as you expand.
|
| It's so similar to most of the things I've specifically sought to
| learn as an adult. You get so much bang for your buck, time-wise,
| when learning something new. The best part is when you don't even
| need to dig deep past that foundational 80% and you can become
| pretty knowledgeable about something in a very reasonable amount
| of time.
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