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Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#161

Post by sixhobbits »

stagger87 wrote: post #140

How much of a topic clicking is just reading from several different sources, rather than one source being particularly "good"? I often joke with a coworker that we don't fully understand a topic until we have read several textbooks/papers on it. It doesn't really matter how good any one text is. I've always wondered what the mechanism is for this. Is is just a certain amount of exposure to a topic? Or is there truly…

Came here to say this. Often I give too much credit to the "last" source, but it's a bit like "your keys are always in the last place you look".

You definitely get good sources and bad ones, and discovering a good one after weeks or months of wrestling with bad ones is hugely satisfying, but sometimes the journey really is the destination.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#163

Post by fullmoon »

cwmma wrote: post #74

I had so much trouble with English grammar until I took Latin, then it all clicked and made sense. I say this as a native English speaker.

I’ve only be learning for a year or so — will the mapping of tenses from Latin to English ever make sense?

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#164

Post by tinco »

crazygringo wrote: post #138
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #14

I had a very poor model of what people meant when they spoke of divinity, god, and religion until reading the Tao Te Ching. Whenever I heard god, I just thought of sky daddy. The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.

> All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination Just to be clear, many religions and religious viewpoints would vehemently disagree with you. The idea that all religions lead to the same place is really just one variety of religious belief. There are many others. Reading the Tao Te Ching is great, but I'm not sure it's going to give you much insight into what Roman Catholics or Sunni Muslims a…

Well of course they'd vehemently disagree, they're on a different path and they believe that path goes to a different destination, while in reality necessarily all those path lead to the same destination.

A Hindu might believe they're on a path that leads to reincarnation, a Muslim might believe they're on a path that leads to heaven or hell. At the end of their path though, necessarily something real is going to happen. Whatever their different paths are, that real thing is going to be the same thing for all of us.

The Tao Te Ching might not teach the specifics of what Catholics are speaking of but it might teach what they are trying to achieve in describing their path and what they think lies at the end of it, and how that might be abstracted over many religions in a common attempt at achieving peace, stability and purpose in civilisations.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#165

Post by snapetom »

For me, it was more general of how I finally learned to study. I struggled with attention and just general testing issues any time I transitioned school levels, 7th and 9th grades specifically, having a sub 3.0 GPA. 10th grade didn't start off very well either.

My first exam in Art History of the 2nd semester, I received another C. However in the review of the exam, it finally clicked. I drew a mental connection between the questions we were going over and how the previous lectures went. Then, I abstracted it out to all classes, all teachers. I saw how it's pretty obvious what's going to be on the tests by what the teachers focus on in class, and how the focus on certain things. I just needed to focus on that stuff. Everything else is fluff, and was a waste of my studying time.

Tests pretty much clicked instantly after that, and I was a near 4.0 student for the rest of high school.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#166

Post by jimbob45 »

The Reddit r/MusicTheory guide on musical modes made it click in a way that none of the other 50 sites I visited could do. I know it's just a silly website (a subreddit at that) and not a big sexy book or course but good educational material on modes seems to be in short supply these days.

https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/wiki/core/modes/

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#168

Post by electrondood »

luuuzeta wrote: post #148

I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else: * Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ * The Story of Asynchr…

The event loop one was a must-watch video for anyone who write Javascript. It even secured me a job offer.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#169

Post by IdealeZahlen »

time_to_smile wrote: post #116
prvt wrote: post #64

It's strange how Grant Sanderson's (aka 3Blue1Brown [1]) name hasn't come up so far. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown

While I enjoy 3blue1brown's videos they definitely fall under the umbrella of current gen "edutainment" where the goal is to make you feel like you've learned something without have anything really click. Pretty much everyone I know who claims that 3blue1brown's video helped them understand a topic... doesn't really understand that topic at all. 3blue1brown's video can be fun for topics you already know, providing a…

I think those videos are like tantalizing appetizers before you start your entrée(standard textbooks).
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