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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
>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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
No. Just memorizing words won’t get you there. Looking up the definition of “go” and memorizing it won’t teach you that “go over” means review, that “go under” means to go out of business, that “go on” means to continue, etc, etc, etc.
You need a lot of input before you’ll understand 75% of the text in a language. Vocabulary flashcards (preferably with audio) can help make some very simple dialogues or stories comprehensible at the beginning but flashcards are not enough for learning a language.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I will have to disagree with the author on specifics (but agree on the broad premise)
it is not what the foundational knowledge "is" - but "how" the foundational knowledge is "unpacked" by each person from the first principles.
this was articulated by Descartes in "Rules for the direction of the mind" which remains sadly unread and forgotten.
the difference between the 2 approaches is that the author's approach does not clearly delineate what is meant by "learning". In fact, it could even encourage rote-learning of the foundational material. Descartes outlines an alternative.
An interesting anecdote about Descartes is that he "unlearnt" everything he knew early in life, and attempted to "rebuild" his knowledge. Few of us have the luxury to do that.
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.
>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.
Part of growing up, going to school and then college, and then through life is that you learn how to learn. Everyone develops their strategies to learn.
Some think that the strategy they found for themselves is great, and they start preaching it. Like this person here. But it's an illusion. Maybe it even has a name. This particular strategy doesn't sound bad, but there are so many types of people out there, and it's certain that for many, if not most, other strategies fit better.
It's like trying to teach someone how to run. Advice like keep your back straight, or land on your toes, etc. In the end, running is the best teacher. Just go ahead and run, and your body will figure out how to keep the back straight.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
setgree|1 year ago
> 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
cloverich|1 year ago
zer0tonin|1 year ago
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.
stopyellingatme|1 year ago
cynicalsecurity|1 year ago
keeptrying|1 year ago
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!
firejake308|1 year ago
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.
kashunstva|1 year ago
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.
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
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".
keeptrying|1 year ago
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.
sam29681749|1 year ago
cbracketdash|1 year ago
owobeid|1 year ago
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.
zfnmxt|1 year ago
esperent|1 year ago
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.
blackoil|1 year ago
gr4vityWall|1 year ago
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.
celurian92|1 year ago
sam29681749|1 year ago
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
adamc|1 year ago
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.
dartharva|1 year ago
xandrius|1 year ago
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
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
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.
quantum_state|1 year ago
ahmadtbk|1 year ago
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.
j45|1 year ago
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.
eacapeisfutuile|1 year ago
Do the thing you want to learn.
Tier3r|1 year ago
dinobones|1 year ago
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?
joshdavham|1 year ago
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.
mrccc|1 year ago
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.
mchaver|1 year ago
kebsup|1 year ago
autumnstwilight|1 year ago
"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.
AlchemistCamp|1 year ago
You need a lot of input before you’ll understand 75% of the text in a language. Vocabulary flashcards (preferably with audio) can help make some very simple dialogues or stories comprehensible at the beginning but flashcards are not enough for learning a language.
Tomte|1 year ago
mc3301|1 year ago
raincole|1 year ago
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.
jjice|1 year ago
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.
kwar13|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology
Fairly short and beautifully written.
will-burner|1 year ago
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.
erganemic|1 year ago
cloverich|1 year ago
bckr|1 year ago
Maybe “don’t focus so much on organizing your inputs, instead focus on many quality input reps”?
Tier3r|1 year ago
paldepind2|1 year ago
wordpad25|1 year ago
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.
FL33TW00D|1 year ago
DeathArrow|1 year ago
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.
negoutputeng|1 year ago
it is not what the foundational knowledge "is" - but "how" the foundational knowledge is "unpacked" by each person from the first principles.
this was articulated by Descartes in "Rules for the direction of the mind" which remains sadly unread and forgotten.
the difference between the 2 approaches is that the author's approach does not clearly delineate what is meant by "learning". In fact, it could even encourage rote-learning of the foundational material. Descartes outlines an alternative.
An interesting anecdote about Descartes is that he "unlearnt" everything he knew early in life, and attempted to "rebuild" his knowledge. Few of us have the luxury to do that.
link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_the_Direction_of_the...
unknown|1 year ago
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jamager|1 year ago
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.
will-burner|1 year ago
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.
credit_guy|1 year ago
Some think that the strategy they found for themselves is great, and they start preaching it. Like this person here. But it's an illusion. Maybe it even has a name. This particular strategy doesn't sound bad, but there are so many types of people out there, and it's certain that for many, if not most, other strategies fit better.
It's like trying to teach someone how to run. Advice like keep your back straight, or land on your toes, etc. In the end, running is the best teacher. Just go ahead and run, and your body will figure out how to keep the back straight.
mediumsmart|1 year ago
tartoran|1 year ago
personjerry|1 year ago
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?
vonnik|1 year ago
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.
timwaagh|1 year ago
textread|1 year ago
PG tweeted:-
nwnwhwje|1 year ago
My response: Nice try.
deafpolygon|1 year ago
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.
nbzso|1 year ago
james-revisoai|1 year ago
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.
sumosudo|1 year ago
lawls|1 year ago
Gabellestaborn|1 year ago
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