Gain familiarity and background (exposure to facts and ideas without struggling to understand them fully). Dig into particular paths of interest. Get my hands dirty--or discuss with someone.
Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
#32Obsidian. I copy/paste what I think are the "atoms" of the thing to learn. And i build a small graph of interconnected .md files in Obsidian. To me, it is very important to break the medium that brings the information into a graph that suits you the most. (call that process my knowledge ETL, and the result .md files my personal knowledge graph :) PS: the funny thing is that you indeed refactor your graph when you com…
Thank you for this - I'm really like the way you've described your process and am going to steal your method for myself :).
Obsidian looks really cool - I'm doing a lot of projects in a very chaotic manner and have been wanting something for personal knowledge management, that graph / links thing is really cool.
I chuckled when you mentioned refactoring your graph being an interesting process - because I've done similar but with notes and folders no visual linking system just pretty much putting notes in the right folder/book/whatever I'm using - and it's a right pain in the ass compared to this way.
Re: Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
#33Andrew Huberman has some really good podcasts describing how learning habits and how you can change you day to day to help learn more
https://youtu.be/hx3U64IXFOY
Re: Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> spaced repetition is for memorization; I'm not trying to memorize Only if you use it as such. SRS is a scheduler to help you optimize your time, to not spend time on things you probably don't need to refresh. The actual memory/learning part is orthogonal. I use SRS to plan different practices of things (in my case programming languages or concepts). If I consider that I did one of them well, I mark it as such and w…
This is accurate and interesting. I initially thought this was incorrect from strong association with it as a flashcard system, though your technique is consistent with the definition provided on this wiki created by community members [0]. I’m curious. If you would be willing to share, could you demonstrate an example of a prompt? My learning items have almost always been questions and answers, and occasionally image…
You can just put it a whole math practice problem and solve it (with pen and paper, outside of the app), then mark it in the app.
Re: Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
#35Learning is an exercise in creating space in your mind to represent a new map of interrelated symbols. When you start something new, all the symbols are "too close together" and it takes time and repetition to increase the "resolution" on that map so that you can put the symbols into position with more precision and not have them confused with one another. You don't yet have a good intuition for the significance of e…
> Learning is an exercise in creating space in your mind to represent a new map of interrelated symbols. That might be how you learn, which is a good thing to know, but the presentation of your personal understanding of yourself come off like “this is the way for all”, which gives me the yucks. For me I need to re-formulate things in my own words (or my own code) until I understand which parts of a system I have blin…
> That might be how you learn, which is a good thing to know, but the presentation of your personal understanding of yourself come off like “this is the way for all”, which gives me the yucks.
Not sure why you assume OP is speaking about his own personal experience?
I am unsure what OP background is, but I will assume he knows what he is taking about.
there are theories of the mind that actually supports this view.
It goes back to early attempts at AI [0], and different perspectives on this also caused a split amongst researchers.
> If I can express it in simple language in a way that hangs together, and go into detail about complicated parts of the system, I’m getting somewhere.
What you have said does not actually contradict what OP has, but rather could be used to support what he said.
Yet it seems you believe it contradicts him?
Re: Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
#36This might sound kind of bizarre, but I don't really try to learn. I think I have a minor learning disability where I have a very hard time remembering things that I deem (consciously or not) as unimportant in the long term. Instead, I try to focus on extracting the nature and patterns of relationships, instead of the specific details. An example might be: learning the purpose of a wristwatch and its power source, versus understanding how all of the gears work together. Unless I'm working on a specific problem involving how the gears work together, I won't remember it. Even then, I'll put it in my working memory just long enough to solve the problem and then forget it. But the patterns of relationships stay forever, and it's easy to associate with other patterns of relationships, once you forget the specifics.
In tech this can be an obstacle when communicating because many engineers have an extremely fine-grained memory, seemingly all the time. I will hand wave different concepts as a black box that we don't need to know right now, where they are happy to explain them at length, in detail. But if it's not relevant, I just don't care. They will also expect me to explain concepts that (to me) aren't relevant to the problem, and I have to say "I don't remember."
Re: Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
#37I like to use the phrase "practice makes permanent" - not "practice make perfect", cause every instructor disagrees, and not "perfect practice makes perfect" because perfection is subjective and a fool's errand. In a nutshell, whatever you do in practice will be what you do in application.
This leads to then what I consider "foundational knowledge", or refining your understanding on Bloom's Remember, Understand, and Apply categories. I think we try too hard to push students toward the Analyze, Evaluate, and Create categories too quickly, which results in poorer performance, especially in the classroom context where the next course assumes "mastery" (another term I dislike, I prefer proficient). Once a student is proficient, then we can talk theory all day.
So, in my classrooms, I mirror the methodology I commonly see in martial arts - warm-up, demonstrate technique, drill the technique, and (depending on the art) spar, or apply the technique. If you are struggling at one of these steps, then we can identify the issues and provide intervention practice at the appropriate level. Traditional classrooms don't really allow for extended spaced repetition, but I do believe it helps form autonomy.
More specific to your question since most of the above is just my general opinions on learning:
- Notes are good and writing notes is better than copy-pasting them [1]
- Highlighting your notes for important details is a lower level practice that is also beneficial [2]
- If you are given a technique/algorithm, attempt to do it on additional practice problems. If you can, through spaced repetition. For example, if you were learning the A* Search algorithm, change the starting and goal nodes in your current examples or make a new one with randomized numbers.
- Chi's ICAP Framework has a few additional points as well on which lower level practices are better than others [3]. However, as I'm arguing in my dissertation, better overall may not be better for the individual. If a student is struggling in a Constructive activity, I'm arguing it may be better to 'downgrade' them to a lower-level activity to reinforce understanding (again, my thoughts toward foundational knowledge).
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1240624.1240773
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/036147...
Re: Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
#38I just note terms I dont know. I write one or two sentences about concepts. Sometimes, I will go back and rewrite/group common ideas if I notice commonalities. It all depends on the subject matter.
When I studied neurology, there was a lot of memorizing- thats just how it is. When I studied philosophy, it was distilling big ideas down to concepts I could remember.
When its a completely new subject, like UX design I'm studying now, I use immersion- I took an online course that was a broad overview, wrote down terms I didnt know, subscribed to rss feeds on the subject, found groups, now I'm taking a more detailed course online.
Re: Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
#39While I've generally been pretty good at picking up things by just doing them I was always a just ok student. Later in life when I wanted to start learning some things outside of work I took the coursera course "learning how to learn" and found it very helpful. It has the strategies above plus others. You can find links to the course as well as books by the instructor on her website - https://barbaraoakley.com/
Specifically though I use different methods for different materials. For some specific things I need to memorize verbatim I use hand written index cards/spaced repetition. For learning math, programming, etc there is no substitute for doing example problems with solutions you can check. For general reading I write my own summaries, notes.
Re: Ask HN: What's your learning strategy?
#40if it's a book, then I note down key points after every chapter. if it's a video course I just passively listen everything then take a practice test, then see where I am struggling then rewatch those videos (problem is that lot of times videos are NOT worth taking notes and you only realize after the end whether video was worth it or not, so it kills me to be taking notes continuously)
best combo I found was text to speech feature of online textbook, I'd listen to it and if I found anything even remotely important I'd stop the recitation and copy the text in notepad or something, and by the end id have compilation of important notes. The act of highlighting/copying/pasting was enough to form a good memory.