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What to Learn

danluu.com

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Re: What to Learn

#51

Post by dominotw »

bla3 wrote: post #28

I think the answer depends on "why do you want to learn?". The implicit answer to that question for this blog post seems to be "to advance your career". That's a fine answer, but not the only answer.

i am currently researching cancer due to my diagnosis. Its a fascinating world that will keep me occupied for a long time. I am learning statistics p-values, multi-variate analysis , kaplan-meier ect. A little bit of genetics and cell anatomy, mutations when i am bored of stats and reading about human side of cancer in the book 'emperor of all maladies'. I am really enjoying this part of the journey, learning something from scratch, beginner gains.

Re: What to Learn

#52

Post by willchang »

This wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't comment that ACTUALLY a random walk of n steps will get you sqrt(n) in some direction, which is much better than log(n). I guess my special skill is being pedantic.

Re: What to Learn

#53

Post by cratermoon »

xyzelement wrote: post #34
MA6 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing at the issues of someone and saying if only they fixed it is very similar to pointing at poor or disabled people and saying the same thing. Its is known as denial of personal responsibility. You see someone who needs help, either go figure out how to help and help or shut the fuck up and keep walking.

So basically your approach to life is to "not teach a man to fish" ?

> either go figure out how to help and help or shut the fuck up and keep walking.

No, he's saying that you don't tell someone who is hungry "if you would learn to fish, you wouldn't be hungry" and leave it at that. Especially don't do this if you don't know how to fish yourself. But do, if you know that "learning to fish" is good, team up with the other person and learn to fish together. At the very least, you can help them find an angler to teach them.

Re: What to Learn

#54

Post by allenu »

premek wrote: post #31
xyzelement wrote: post #19

I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is crucial. The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT t…

> solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life. How do you do that?

I feel like in this particular case, the first step is to recognize there's a "problem" at all. I don't know the person in this story, but it seems like to them, communication is not that important. Maybe the most important thing for them in their work is technical achievement. (I've definitely been in that boat before.) As a result, they are likely never going to work on the communication aspect.

This is like the quote of "Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget and I'll tell you what you value." Before you go and try and improve yourself, it's good to be honest about what you value and what your goals are. If what you value is moving up the corporate ladder, then learning even more about C++ is not going to help. On the other hand, if it's to be even better technically, then go for it. If you value improving your business all around, then the communication angle is a better place to spend your time.

Re: What to Learn

#55

Post by groby_b »

borroka wrote: post #49
groby_b wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detecting managerial quality up-front is a rather hard problem. I believe it's mostly rooted in the fact that anything meaningful you do as a manager plays on a long timescale (months & years), so you can't directly verify. And it's sufficiently fuzzy that in a short conversation, managers can lay down enough smoke screen to make it hard to see flaws. So, what you need is getting some kind of long-term view on that m…

"Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)" - This is common advice anytime one talks about relationships and communication. Listening is a skill, listen 10, talk 1, almost to the point that is difficult to understand who's doing the talking if everybody is getting the same advice of…

Knowing and doing are two very different things. It might look easy, but it really isn't. Listening is challenging work, and we get little training to do it well.

So, yes, incompetence is one of the reasons. And worse, it's often incompetence we're actively unaware of - "it's listening, how hard can it be".

There are also advantages in not listening, but I really believe this "looks easy, but actually hard to do" split is what creates a lot of the problems. We live in an entire culture that's rooted in aggressively talking (cf. school debate club), with little value attached to patient listening.

Managers, like everybody else, are a product of the surrounding culture. Breaking out from that conditioning is hard. That's why it's rare.

Re: What to Learn

#56

Post by WJW »

borroka wrote: post #49
groby_b wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detecting managerial quality up-front is a rather hard problem. I believe it's mostly rooted in the fact that anything meaningful you do as a manager plays on a long timescale (months & years), so you can't directly verify. And it's sufficiently fuzzy that in a short conversation, managers can lay down enough smoke screen to make it hard to see flaws. So, what you need is getting some kind of long-term view on that m…

"Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)" - This is common advice anytime one talks about relationships and communication. Listening is a skill, listen 10, talk 1, almost to the point that is difficult to understand who's doing the talking if everybody is getting the same advice of…

What make you think it is not particularly challenging to do, especially given your earlier acknowledgement that almost nobody is a good listener?

Re: What to Learn

#57

Post by xyzelement »

cratermoon wrote: post #53
xyzelement wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically your approach to life is to "not teach a man to fish" ?

> either go figure out how to help and help or shut the fuck up and keep walking. No, he's saying that you don't tell someone who is hungry "if you would learn to fish, you wouldn't be hungry" and leave it at that. Especially don't do this if you don't know how to fish yourself. But do, if you know that "learning to fish" is good, team up with the other person and learn to fish together. At the very least, you can he…

I get the point you are making and the "hunger" example is obviously a painful one. But I actually think feedback should be shared freely.

EG: if I have bad communication skills, yes ideally someone coaches me. But at least, random feedback of "wow that meeting went badly" - hearing that from many people over and over - may make me aware of the area and look into it myself.

Like, if I am starting to get fat, I want people to tell me when they see it, even if they don't have a diet and training regiment set up for me.

Re: What to Learn

#58

Post by karmakaze »

willchang wrote: post #52

This wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't comment that ACTUALLY a random walk of n steps will get you sqrt(n) in some direction, which is much better than log(n). I guess my special skill is being pedantic.

I've come to realize that 'exponential' is so often used to describe anything nonlinear. This would be the exact corollary. Good to pick up on it. I'll look out for this too now.

Re: What to Learn

#59

Post by parenthesis »

hintymad wrote: post #46

Regarding a few skills, Rota interestingly has similar advice for mathematicians: https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-l... "5 Every mathematician has only a few tricks A long time ago an older and well known number theorist made some disparaging remarks about Paul Erdos' work. You admire contributions to mathematics as much as I do, and I felt annoyed when the older mathematician flatly and def…

In that same article you quote there is also a bit about Feynman, that

"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!" "

I've come across this before, but it got reversed in my mind to: every time you come across an unsolved problem, try using all your standard tricks on it. Probably none will help. But perhaps eventually one will and you'll seem like a genius for thinking of applying that trick to that problem.

Re: What to Learn

#60

Post by brezelgoring »

xyzelement wrote: post #17
itsmemattchung wrote: post #5

> All of us have strengths and weaknesses and we spend a lot of time talking about ‘areas of improvement.’ It can be easy to feel like the best way to advance is to eliminate all of those I struggle with this. All the time. I always find it difficult to strike a balance between leveraging my strengths and filling gaps in my weaknesses. For the large part of my career, my attention was directed on the latter: constant…

Well, a weakness is a weakness only to the extent that it neutralizes your strength. Like - is it important to spell? If you become very successful in your field despite not spelling well, then spelling is a waste of your time. On the other hand, if that flaw keeps you from getting jobs/being taken seriously then you need to fix it.

>a weakness is a weakness only to the extent that it neutralizes your strength

Agree wholeheartedly. Floyd Mayweather doesn't know how to read, or so I hear, yet he's one of the very best at what he does, and no one can take that away from him.

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