Learning to Learn
kevin.the.li
Learning to Learn
1–10 of 142 posts
Re: Learning to Learn
#2This is something I have personally struggled with, so I wish the author elaborated more. If you are a novice, how do you quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is? How do you know what makes you an expert and not an "expert beginner" as the author says to the extent that you can build a personal curriculum about it?
Re: Learning to Learn
#3This is something I have personally struggled with, so I wish the author elaborated more. If you are a novice, how do you quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is? How do you know what makes you an expert and not an "expert beginner" as the author says to the extent that you can build a personal curriculum about it?
This is something that can be tricky for sure. Depending on the subject you might not need to start diving deep into every topic. Sometimes you'll have to first ask some high level questions like how do I get this data from this table and convert it to this format. Once you identify what problem you're trying to solve go and learn what's needed to solve it.
You won't always have an optimal solution but that's okay. The most important is to try and use the thing you're learning in some real way or with practice.
Re: Learning to Learn
#4This is something I have personally struggled with, so I wish the author elaborated more. If you are a novice, how do you quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is? How do you know what makes you an expert and not an "expert beginner" as the author says to the extent that you can build a personal curriculum about it?
This is something that can be tricky for sure. Depending on the subject you might not need to start diving deep into every topic. Sometimes you'll have to first ask some high level questions like how do I get this data from this table and convert it to this format. Once you identify what problem you're trying to solve go and learn what's needed to solve it. You won't always have an optimal solution but that's okay. T…
> The most important is to try and use the thing you're learning in some real way or with practice.
In my experience, that's a necessary first step to learning. I need to get my hands dirty, get a feel for what I'm working with. An experience is worth a thousand pictures, which are worth a thousand words - you can't gain that basic understanding and instinct by reading, only by having all the sensory inputs of doing it.
Then it's time to read. Now you must find an expert to guide you. First, you'll have too many blind spots - you can't possibly find all that's current, you can't find the best sources efficiently, and much won't be in books yet. And without expertise yourself, you can't distinguish the worn-out theories from the evergreen standards from the unproven innovations; the promising from the unlikely from the absurd; you won't know the consensus from the fringe; the guy advocating their personal theory - maybe even a credible one - from the balanced survey of established ideas. You won't recognize when you're reading just a side of a well-known debate.
Re: Learning to Learn
#5The initial cram is an interesting concept. If you insert new things to learn at a constant rate, the repetition burden grows logarithmically. Assuming you have some fixed amount of time you can devote everyday optimally your repetition burden should be constant. So the solution is making new things to learn not constant, but front loading a lot of it.
Re: Learning to Learn
#6This is something I have personally struggled with, so I wish the author elaborated more. If you are a novice, how do you quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is? How do you know what makes you an expert and not an "expert beginner" as the author says to the extent that you can build a personal curriculum about it?
I'm also wondering this. Two possibilities. One, find the first principles/root node/glue that holds many disparate concepts together in some causative way. Two, the specific procedure/step/concept that you keep reusing across multiple problems.
Re: Learning to Learn
#7I've been wanting to try this approach for learning a language.
In English for example, learning the 800 most common words, you can understand 75% of the language: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44569277.
I'd love to start fresh on a new language, take 800 new words, try to learn 10 a day, and see where I get after 3 months. Can I really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall of those 800 words?
Re: Learning to Learn
#8This is something I have personally struggled with, so I wish the author elaborated more. If you are a novice, how do you quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is? How do you know what makes you an expert and not an "expert beginner" as the author says to the extent that you can build a personal curriculum about it?
I tried to think about this and came to a personal realisation that perhaps there is no strict "foundational knowledge" for most topics.
Pick programming, is knowing binary operations foundational? Is knowing compilers? Is it knowing bubble sort? Or perhaps knowing data structures?
I believe that if you have been using/working in a field, whatever you touch for your own goals that's enough.
And perhaps the difference between being an expert beginner and an expert is whether you still care about such a distinction? If you can achieve your current and future goals and can eventually learn new concepts then you're good.
I'd say a beginner might be someone who wouldn't even know where to begin.
Let's pick chemistry for myself: sure, I could follow some video but without the video I wouldn't even conceive how to get started with anything.
While, say woodworking, I wouldn't call myself an expert but I would be able to imagine starting a random project from scratch and eventually figure out all the parts.
So, maybe: - beginner: can't complete a project without help/support - mid: can complete but is unsure whether that's the best way - expert: has completed it before somehow
Re: Learning to Learn
#9I've been wanting to try this approach for learning a language. In English for example, learning the 800 most common words, you can understand 75% of the language: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44569277 . I'd love to start fresh on a new language, take 800 new words, try to learn 10 a day, and see where I get after 3 months. Can I really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall of those 800 words?
No. Apart from grammar etc. you‘re missing, you might understand nothing while knowing 80% of the words.
Re: Learning to Learn
#10I've been wanting to try this approach for learning a language. In English for example, learning the 800 most common words, you can understand 75% of the language: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44569277 . I'd love to start fresh on a new language, take 800 new words, try to learn 10 a day, and see where I get after 3 months. Can I really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall of those 800 words?
Give learning Japanese a try. It's a meta-learning adventure! There are 3 distinct classes of characters (two syllabaries that each have a perfect matching pair with the other, 46 each plus some compounds) and the third are (mostly) chinese Kanji characters. Fun stuff!