[brosco]

I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while.

As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together?

When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part.

If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook.

People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.

[chongli]

This is fun to do during lectures but in my experience only about 5-10% of my learning happened in math class. The other 90% happened at home as I worked through the problem sets.

Essentially the lectures served as an inefficient way of delivering me a set of notes which I’d then reference during homework sessions. I could often predict what was coming next in the lecture but the really hard parts were the key parts in some technical lemmas that were necessary to complete the theorem. Learning how to figure out a key step like that had to come completely on my own (with no spoilers).

In a lot of ways, math lectures really started to turn into an experience similar to watching a Let’s Play of a favourite video game. Watching those can tell you exactly what you need to do to get past the part where you’re stuck but they don’t in general make you better at video games. For that you need to actually play them yourself.

[hirvi74]

I had a math professor in college that would often say to our class, "You cannot be like Michael Jordan by just watching Michael Jordan. If you want to be better at basketball, you have to practice. Math is no different." No matter how you spin it, he was correct -- unless you are like Ramanujan and a Hindu god just reveals a solution to you.

Honestly though, I believe I learn better in a similar manner to what you described. I would rather just read the textbook and learn on my own. I find that to be a far more efficient learning style for me. However, I typically always went to class for a handful of reasons:

1. To signal that I cared about the subject to the professor (whether I honestly cared or not). Though I had some classes that actually penalized a lack of attendance.

2. There is comradery in group struggle. It was nice way to meet other students that had a common goal. I made many friends during my time. Some of which I still keep in touch with a decade later. In fact, I met my SO in one of my classes -- all because we studied together.

3. The main reason being, I paid for the class, and I wanted to get my money's worth out of it. While passing the course and learning the material was the goal. I'd hate knowing I just paid to teach myself everything. I could have done that for free, so I wanted something more out of the deal.

One of thing I should add is that I am poorly disciplined and have poor executive functioning, so I probably picked up more in class that I would admit -- I didn't have a control to compare against. Still to this date, I rely heavily on solutions to the problems. Not in a way that allows me to cheat, but I would likely be unable to be certain I was teaching myself correctly if I didn't have the answers or know of a method to verify my work. I am confident that I cannot be confident in my answers to nearly anything. I am prone to too many mistakes.

If one goes far enough in math, one will encounter solutions where there are not clear answers and one must use all of their knowledge and abilities to support their answers. And that my YN friends, is why I am not a mathematician despite my love for the subject.

[vector_spaces]

The viewpoint of a lecture as an inefficient note delivery system is a pretty common and reductive view. Your "Let's Play" analogy was pretty apt though.

I think their (potential) value seems pretty clear when you look at language courses -- you can't possibly hope to develop fluency in a language by studying it in isolation from books -- forming your own sentences and hearing how other human beings do the same in real time is pretty decisive.

With math classes, YMMV, especially since they are rarely so interactive at the upper division and graduate level, but at the very least seeing an instructor talk about math and work through problems (and if you are lucky to have a particularly disorganized one, get stuck, and get themselves unstuck) can go a long way. But to be fair I regularly skipped math lectures in favor of reading too, heh

[gretch]

Agree with this comment but follow up to this tip:

Only use this as a learning technique. Do not accidentally let this bleed over into personal 1:1 conversations.

I know some people in my life who are "smart" and they will cut people off in the middle of conversation to the effect of "oh yeah I already know what you are going to say, let me go ahead and cut you off so I can respond faster".

On top of being completely obnoxious on the face of it, they are wrong enough times in their predictions to where it completely fucks the conversation.

[loupol]

I take it you are not a member of the Church of Interruption[0] then.

https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html

[brosco]

Good point! I used to be guilty of this myself, so now I'm pretty sensitive about other people doing it. I am now one of the more senior students in an academic research group, and some of the younger members would benefit from this advice. I think it's a symptom of sophomorism, and hopefully most will grow out of it.

I agree it's especially frustrating when they don't even get it right. That crosses the line for me, and I will admonish them to let me finish what I am saying.

[leobg]

Well said. And it makes sense, if you define intelligence as the ability to successfully predict the future.

And how interesting that that is literally how LLMs are trained during pretraining. Like Ilya said: To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have followed the plot, have world knowledge about physics, psychology, etc..

And that’s what you’re pointing at here. Testing yourself on the ability to predict during a lecture is like running a loss function to keep you on your toes.

[normie3000]

> To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have...

Wait, can people do this??

[whatever1]

Which is why I hate the PowerPoint presentation-based lectures. Speaker typically goes too fast, and their brain does not actually break down the arguments into logical steps. They just read the slides.

Chalk and board is the way.

[baq]

Reading from slides is the absolute worst way of delivery anywhere, whether it’s a lecture or an internal presentation to your work team, doesn’t matter. The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles.

Chalk and board though is not necessarily the best. Power point supports magic hotkeys - B and W - and allows drawing on slides. When done properly with a stylus, it’s incrementally better in almost every way than chalk, though a proper lecture hall with multiple blackboards will still hold its own.

[jll29]

I strongly agree - I started teaching from slides and shifted more and more to blackboard and chalk.

I found that they can also be combined well by showing a slide that gives some guidance where "we" are in the material, supplemented by writing and drawing on the blackboard to explain one or more bullet points or statements from the slides, and to answer student questions.

This also forces students to take additional notes, which helps them per muscle memory.

[zippyman55]

Watching someone up front and seeing them actually think is so inspiring.

[shripadt]

This is a fantastic tip, thank you for sharing! It reminded me of an article similar to this one:

Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact (The minds of social species are strikingly resonant): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch...

"... when people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronize. Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns ..."

"The experience of “being on the same wavelength” as another person is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain."

"Synchrony may be a sign of shared cognitive processing ..." "The mouse study suggested another level of meaning for synchrony: it predicts the outcomes of future interactions."

[nsagent]

This is exactly how I read research papers and how I advocate others read them as well. As you read try to figure out how you would solve the problem outlined and what experiments you would need to perform.

[jll29]

That may require some experience, which you can obtain gradually by reading lots of papers, some good, some bad, to see how they do it. Eventually, you can tell if an experiment is suitable for showing strong support of the RQ or not.

(And you will also learn to read between the lines e.g. "Our resulst are PROMISING..." = there is much space for improvement etc.)

[rocqua]

This worked great for me.

It meant that I understood the scaffolding of the course: the broad goals of the subject, the main ways to tackle them, what is currently being explored, and why are we going in this direction at this moment.

There was one class where this started to fail, which was a class without slides or a book. This meant that, without notes, when I recalled a proof technique but not the details, I had to resort to asking others for their notes. Because it wasn't documented anywhere else.

[zahlman]

There were times in university where I had figured out the material on my own (maybe even several lectures ahead), and the confirmation actually felt a bit disappointing.

[CBLT]

Great advice! Personally, I got immense value from writing notes but never when I wrote them during the lecture. 30 minutes after the lecture has ended is a perfect time time to sit down in the library and write notes for what the lecture was about. This gives enough time to reflect about the big picture, but not so too much time that the details are lost.

[esafak]

I like this idea but I always struggled to keep up with note taking. And the teachers were struggling to get through all the material. There was a race on both sides! But that was many years ago. If I were doing it today, I'd take pictures with my phone, use a computer to transcribe it, and then I'd have enough time to do what you said.

[billy99k]

My technique was to write tons of notes during the lecture. In college, I would have many pages of notes for each lecture and because writing is more of an active process than just sitting or spacing out for an hour, I rarely had to study for an exam.

[fn-mote]

There’s a whole science of learning, and this barely scratches the surface.

Spaces repetition for memory work.

Problem solving skills just be strengthened somehow.

[ebertucc]

This is good advice for the LSAT too, and baked into LSAT Demon's app. If you can predict an answer before looking at the choices, you're probably on the right track.

[hammock]

Required for success at games like Jeopardy. Guess the answer before you read the whole thing

[random9749832]

Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science. You either put in the effort to learn and struggle until you succeed or you don't. There is no secret sauce.

[wafflemaker]

I've met lot of smart guys never getting anywhere, because they were always looking for a shortcut and not to do the real work.

Linux instructor Jason Canon wrote once that there's a lot of people who spend 90% of the time reading articles on how to learn Linux, but only 10% really practicing.

OTOH it's a really cool way to stay focused and engaged with the lecture.

[quacked]

This isn't true. I put in a great deal of effort in college and struggled to learn. After college I changed the way I interacted with information, and found that I could learn and remember orders of magnitude better by using studying and practice techniques that mapped more closely with how I thought about information.

[brosco]

I'm not saying it's a learning method. And I don't see how anyone could mistake this for science, so why would it be pseudoscience? It's not really about effort either.

It's just a trick that helps me pay attention in lectures, which a lot of people struggle with. Certainly you have to put the work outside of the classroom as well.

[xmprt]

There are are a 100 different ways to struggle to learn. Some of them are better than others. I don't see how that's pseudoscience.