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Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

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Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#11

Post by dirtyaura »

wallflower wrote: post #3

"Most people say it's easier to pick up languages when you're younger," says David Green, of University College London, who specialises in bilingualism. "But people can learn languages at any point in their lives. Being immersed in a language is important. Personality is a contributing factor too - not being able to tolerate feeling foolish from making inevitable errors will make learning a new language a difficult p…

Quite interesting. I feel that my spoken English has stuck to a certain level for an opposite reason: I don't care enough about mistakes and thus I don't actively try to improve my English. I just speak and either I get understood or try to explain my thought in another way.

Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#12

Post by crusso »

tintin wrote: post #4

Isn't this all about interest? When you are interested in a subject you are more likely to try again and learn from your mistakes. People with an almost unhealthy interest in a subject (people with Asperger for example; they think Newton had this) are the brilliant people on the subject.

What does interest have to do with the article and the experiments performed?

Seems to me that the performance of the test subject depended upon the type of praise given, not the interest of the subjects (which would have been consistently random across test groups)

Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#13

Post by jackpirate »

tpatke wrote: post #5

I think about Spolsky's post on programmer productivity quite often [1]. I think the most interesting part of the post is when he says, "The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time." Obviously, I wonder if I am a programmer who can hit the high notes and, if not, what it will take to get there. When I read a post like this, I try to apply it to making myself a better progr…

It's very easy for us to forget about variance and standard deviation of programmer productivity when all other factors are equal. Let's imagine we have 1000 of the world's best programmers working for a year on creative projects. All of them will try something innovative. Only some of them, however, will succeed.

Who succeeds is a function of what projects they were working on. And that, is almost purely random and a result of circumstances. We like to think that Sergey and Larey were more brilliant than anyone else, for example, but the truth is they just stumbled into the right thing at the right time.

Don't discredit yourself as a programmer for not yet having a huge stroke of luck.

Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#14

Post by kenrikm »

wallflower wrote: post #3

"Most people say it's easier to pick up languages when you're younger," says David Green, of University College London, who specialises in bilingualism. "But people can learn languages at any point in their lives. Being immersed in a language is important. Personality is a contributing factor too - not being able to tolerate feeling foolish from making inevitable errors will make learning a new language a difficult p…

I was 22 when I learned my second language (Spanish) I was immersed because my (now) wife spoke very little english when I met her. My in-laws don't speak any english even though they know a lot of words because they are "scared to say it wrong" I just listened until I knew enough and then started to string together words even if the grammer was wrong, Now I'm fluent. Funny thing is if you get my mother-in-law drunk she magically starts speaking english!

Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#15

Post by ericHosick »

I agree that learning from mistakes is really important. I also think that memorizing and rote learning are a detriment to being fast at learning. You can't "get it" if you are memorizing.

If you have a firm grasp of something then you understand how to manipulate the concept in different contexts. Adding a new idea allows you to simply twist contexts to include the new knowledge and you've "learned" how to do that new thing.

As things get more complex, so does the contexts and thus it gets harder to "learn" if you've been doing rote learning all along. Rote learning is memorizing a new idea in a specific context and there is no room for morphing that context.

If you get good at morphing contexts to fit new ideas then you can also get good at taking two different contexts, merging them at getting new concepts out of it: this is the act of inventing.

Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#16

Post by ohyes »

tpatke wrote: post #5

I think about Spolsky's post on programmer productivity quite often [1]. I think the most interesting part of the post is when he says, "The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time." Obviously, I wonder if I am a programmer who can hit the high notes and, if not, what it will take to get there. When I read a post like this, I try to apply it to making myself a better progr…

I think the point of this article is that it doesn't matter if you are top talent. It is detrimental to your growth think that you are. It is better to approach learning anything from a position of humility and interest rather thank thinking that you are hot shit.

Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#17

Post by ajross »

crusso wrote: post #9

Really, this kind of research points to the folly of the "everyone gets a trophy", "sheltering ego is most important in learning" school of thought. The every-day evidence of that folly litters the corpse of the American public education system. Praise your kids when they do well. Point it out when they've made mistakes (in a graceful way). Teach them that doing better next time is always within their power if they a…

No, that's just a straw man arguing for the opposite extreme. It's even better established that consistent failure and lack of praise anticorrelates with educational achievement. The point is balance and sanity, not policy flamage.

Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#18

Post by trustfundbaby »

I wish I had happened on this article 10 years ago ... I was always very good at school, so I picked up what I thought were bad habits. Reading this now, it's clear that what I was doing was protecting myself from failure. When I'd do badly on a test in a class that I thought I should do well in, I'd stop taking the class seriously so that when I got a 'C' I could kid myself and say "I did that and wasn't even really trying"

Oddly enough, I never made much of the fact that if I really wanted to do well in a class (because I was in love with the subject teacher for example ... :D) I could actually put the work in to get to the top of the class ... I just put it down to being smart.

This had a lot of bad repercussions when I went to college. For the first time in my life I was not only competing with a shitton of people just as smart as me, but almost as many people who were WAAAAAY smarter. Trying really really hard to only make B's was a huge blow to my psyche and I was very demoralized and uninspired for a long time. It wasn't until I realized that not only did it take hard work, but for me, inspiration or passion was necessary to truly excel at something. That's when I realized that I just had to shun things I really wasn't interested in and devote myself to things that I really wanted to be good at.

Even nowadays, I still look at people in this field who I consider quasi geniuses (DHH, Yehuda, Resig) and wonder if I can ever get to that level, and whenever I doubt myself, I go back and read this very deeply inspiring article from John Nunemaker http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-tale...

Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#19

Post by joering2 »

hope its not too much offtopic, but if I had children right now, i would definitely use my time differently to teach them things today than 20 years ago. in schools they still _mostly_ teach you to remember useless stuff (no, I am not talking about basics of history) instead of teaching you how to get necessary information, analyze it and get to conclusions. its not a miracle to anyone living in the age of internet that most information you need could be found on internet in less than 30 seconds (you dont need to pack it all inside your brain). ergo i would teach my children fast-reading (real fast) so they can analyze data quickly, and would teach them how to analyze facts and put them together to get to solid probative conclusions. also, how to do basic PI work :) to find data you looking for by assembling big puzzle from different places of small chunks over the net.

Re: Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

#20

Post by aristus »

tpatke wrote: post #5

I think about Spolsky's post on programmer productivity quite often [1]. I think the most interesting part of the post is when he says, "The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time." Obviously, I wonder if I am a programmer who can hit the high notes and, if not, what it will take to get there. When I read a post like this, I try to apply it to making myself a better progr…

I've thought a lot about creativity by watching the people around me in art and science. I suspect that an important, perhaps defining characteristic of highly creative people is their ability to change their mind at will. (Similar to how a good scientist develops the ability to change his mind utterly when confronted with solid evidence, and change it back when that evidence is refuted.)

A factor in that is developing a strong associative memory. This means seeking out many many kinds of knowledge and experiences and constantly trying to connect them together. It's not banging "random" ideas together, because your associative memory filtera it down.

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