Learning

Learning

  • Learning is a process of Conceptual Compression.
  • Understand the base and build from it. First Principles Method. Seek the big picture understanding - focus on concepts not details.
  • Read about topics you care, observe the world around you and keep a beginner's mind (shoshin).
    • Find a mentor if you can and ask them questions.
  • Don't be afraid toask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.
  • You can apply The Feynman Technique:
    1. Identify the subject.
    2. Teach it to a child. Use simple vocabulary and make it short. Keep questions and answers simple.
    3. Identify your knowledge gaps. What are you missing?
    4. Organize and Simplify. Tell a story to teach. Analogies help here!
  • Follow the guidelines stated in Coursera's Learning How to Learn summary.
  • Write down the process that better worked for you. Keep improving the process with the learning of failed experiences. Learn iterating over the process.
  • There are two categories of learning. Mix them both to learn faster.
    1. Guided: Reading a tutorial, taking a course, watching a YouTube video. Anything where you're following a guide.
    2. Unguided: Creating your own projects from scratch, extending a tutorial, looking things up in the docs. Anything where you aren't following a guide.
  • Learn toask better questions. Distill what you know to figure out what part you're missing or which link is missing.
  • Learn by Writing:
    1. Pick a topic.
    2. Read and/or discuss with others (a bit).
    3. Explain and defend your current, incredibly premature hypothesis, in writing (or conversation).
    4. Find and list weaknesses in your case.
    5. Pick a subquestion and do more reading/discussing.
    6. Revise your claim / switch sides.
    7. Repeat steps 3-6 a bunch.
  • People learn when they're surprised.
  • There are two modes of thinking:
    • Focused: When you're actively trying to learn something. One task at a time.
    • Diffuse: Relaxed thinking style that connects your learning while you're doing other tasks (playing, sleeping, doing exercise, …).
  • Reading is a meta-skill. Learn to read and understand so you can trade time reading for some skills.
  • Experience ideas directly. Use the ADEPT method as a Checklist for what helps a concept click:
    • Have an Analogy about it.
    • Visualize it in a Diagram.
    • Gather Examples. Examples are an amazing way to learn things!
      • Examples are an excellent way to resolve lossy information transfer - they're a completely different channel of communication than normal. If nothing else, they serve as an error check.
      • Examples are a great way to transfer tacit knowledge, without necessarily making it legible - this is what it means to build intuition.
    • Come with a Plain-English description of the concept.
    • Then, dive into the Technical side.
  • When discovering a pattern, try to abstract it as much as you can instead of applying it only to a certain area. Once you made this abstraction you will have a new mental model.
  • Learning to program shapes the mind the same way learning a new language does. Each new word, concept or expression helps you model the world.
  • Use Spaced Repetition and get some Sleep.
  • Test your knowledge easily and often and iterate. It's the number of iterations, not the number of hours, that drives learning. Shorten the Feedback Loops. You don't need to know everything to start. Start and you'll learn things along the way (Just In Time /JIT learning).
  • Develop strategies instead of procedures. Do this by interleaving different problems. Learning to learn is an art in itself.
  • One of the most important things to encourage in the early stages of a new skill is the development of good form. Once you have it, trying harder works, whereas if you don't have it, trying harder just leads to a lot of frustration and discouragement. And of course, if you have bad Habits right from the start, they're only going to get harder and harder to fix as you ingrain them through practice.
  • Most knowledge worth having comes from practice. It comes from doing. It comes from creating.
  • To get real expertise, you need these criteria:
    1. Many repeated attempts with feedback.
    2. Valid environment (few random events, controlled, …).
    3. Timely feedback.
    4. Deliberate practice.
  • Knowledge is built up through layers. You need more basic knowledge before you can access more advanced knowledge. You can't learn things that are too far removed from your knowledge tree.
  • Lasting and solid foundations are made by experiencing.
  • For some subjects, there's no speed limit. If you're more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects.
  • A great way to spot what is probably true in any field is to find multiple people with different worldviews on a topic and see which parts do they agree upon.
  • Practice, practice, practice. Spend time in the field, practicing the relevant skills first-hand; see both what works and what makes sense. Collect data; run trials. See what other people suggest and test those things yourself. Directly study which things actually produce good results.

Even if Louis XV had offered a large monetary bounty for ways to immunize himself against the pox, he would have had no way to distinguish Benjamin Jesty from the endless crowd of snake-oil sellers and faith healers and humoral balancers. Indeed, top medical “experts” of the time would likely have warned him away from Jesty. — What Money Cannot Buy

  • We all have a web of concepts in our minds, our Knowledge Graphs. The collection of all the concepts we understand, all of our existing knowledge and intuitions, connected together. And you have learned something when you can convert it to concepts and connect it to your existing understanding. This means not just understanding the concept itself, but understanding where it fits into the bigger picture, where to use it, etc.

Learning Soft Skills

Follow this method:

  • Pick a soft skill, X, that you'd like to get better at. Then, set a 5-minute timer. Spend those 5 minutes explaining to yourself, in Writing, how to do X. Brainstorm on what the key tricky bits are, or strategies for navigating them.
  • Explore how is skill X really actually just the same as skill Y. In the sense that anyone who is fluent in skill Y already knows all they need to know to be good at X — they just need to apply their Y-skill to X. Your goal, as you do this, is to create a very short guide that enables anyone who already knows Y to hit the ground running with X.

Teaching

Resources

  • Khan Academy - Free and comprehensive early courses covering a wide range of topics
  • Udacity - Online Courses for the digital economy
  • Coursera - Online learning from the world's best universities and companies
  • Explorable Explanations - A hub for learning through play
  • Explained Visually - Experiment in making hard ideas intuitive using visualizations
  • No Excuse List - The best place on the web to learn anything, free

Computer Science

  • Learn X in Y minutes - Learn the basic of any language in Y minutes
  • Exercism - Code practice and mentorship for everyone
  • Visualizing Algorithms - Cool visualizations of common algorithms used in Computer Science
  • Google Developers Codelabs - Guided, tutorial, hands-on coding experience on Google Products.
  • Google AI Hub - Learn, build and share notebooks, models, and other AI components.
  • Katacoda - Learn new technologies using real environments right in your browser.
  • Hackr - Search for courses on any language, framework or Programming topic
  • Hardware
    • GPUBoss - Compare graphics cards head to head
    • PC Part Picker - Build guides, which cover systems for all use-cases and budgets, or create your own and share it with our community
    • Logical Increments - The PC builder's tier list

Others

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