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Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

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Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#101

Post by 9dev »

SoftTalker wrote: post #31
ido wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the reason is that most late-teens/early-twenty-somethings are not responsible/emotionally mature enough to put in the required amount of work in the relatively free environment of university where nobody is checking if you’re doing your homework or show up to class.

Related, for me, was that high school just wasn't very challenging. I got As without ever really studying or feeling that I was working very hard. I took that approach into university and it worked for my freshman and most of my sophomore courses. Then things got actually tough and I realized I could not just intuit my way through exams, and I had never really learned how to study.

Failing to realise that school was just about learning how to learn was also the main mistake I made, for the same reason as you. I was always good at soaking up stuff I found interesting, but to this day learning something because I have to is hard, awful work.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#102

Post by [deleted] »

brosco wrote: post #10

I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while. As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track…

[deleted]

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#103

Post by tehnub »

marcodiego wrote: post #63

I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code ever…

Richard Hamming in his "You and Your Research" talk compares it to compound interest:

    What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#104

Post by weitendorf »

Aurornis wrote: post #65
Almondsetat wrote: post #12

The real truth is that the good advice has always been dispensed, it's just that students don't want to listen. 1. Follow actively the lessons. 2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance

The problems were more obvious to me when I was older and trying to mentor college students. Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary) The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent sou…

The problem with cynicism and seeing everything as bullshit and unfair is that it's self-reinforcing. I used to wallow in that too because it was the only way to make sense of the world, because I just was not very happy and couldn't see what I would be able to do to change that.

Once I graduated from college and started working that completely changed for me, because I finally for the first time had some semblance of agency and real stakes in my life, and wasn't forced to spend all my time with other people my age who were just as lacking in real perspective and experience. Someone gave me real responsibility over something actually pretty important, I could speak up and do and change things in ways that weren't explicitly decided for me ahead of time, it wasn't all just a game anymore.

Being a student is essentially modeled as a zero-sum audition for the real world that is simultaneously extremely low stakes (nobody else really cares about what you're doing) and high stakes (if you fail you could seriously harm your future life). You live completely at the whim of institutions with deadlines and gameable processes. The students who seemed legitimately happy to me were either the ones who didn't feel the same kind of pressure to succeed or those who legitimately found it meaningful to participate in school clubs and work professors for higher grades (go to all their office hours to get help with homework, argue for higher grades). Of course there was fun to be had too but the entire environment is engineered for cynicism, it forces you into a ghetto of inexperience and helplessness.

That is not to say that cynicism is good, and obviously the students who used it as an excuse not to learn or take accountability for their own actions or lack thereof were seriously harming themselves. But I do not think it is entirely irrational, given their perspective of the world as one in which they have very little agency and the rules are almost all artificial, to perceive it that way.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#105

Post by fn-mote »

vector_spaces wrote: post #89
chongli wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fun to do during lectures but in my experience only about 5-10% of my learning happened in math class. The other 90% happened at home as I worked through the problem sets. Essentially the lectures served as an inefficient way of delivering me a set of notes which I’d then reference during homework sessions. I could often predict what was coming next in the lecture but the really hard parts were the key parts…

The viewpoint of a lecture as an inefficient note delivery system is a pretty common and reductive view. Your "Let's Play" analogy was pretty apt though. I think their (potential) value seems pretty clear when you look at language courses -- you can't possibly hope to develop fluency in a language by studying it in isolation from books -- forming your own sentences and hearing how other human beings do the same in re…

I consider the value in math lectures to come from the speaker’s explanation of why to expect certain things. Is this an obvious fact in another context, rewritten for this application? Is this a surprise? What reasons besides the rigorous argument are there for believing the theory?

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#106

Post by quacked »

random9749832 wrote: post #51
quacked wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. I put in a great deal of effort in college and struggled to learn. After college I changed the way I interacted with information, and found that I could learn and remember orders of magnitude better by using studying and practice techniques that mapped more closely with how I thought about information.

Learning is a loop of reading/listening > applying/questioning. The rest is gobbledygook. And when I say learning, I mean understanding the material, not just remembering a bunch of information for an exam.

Your quote:

> Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science.

This is wrong. Not every "learning method" is pseudo-science, neither is comparison of the efficacy of different learning methods. As a trivial example, flat lecture and individual textbook reading is inferior to one-on-one discussion and tutoring with a native speaker if the aim is to learn a foreign language.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#107

Post by neilv »

Some good advice, but two of the pieces surprised me:

> Go to the prof before final exam at least once for office hours. - Even if you have no questions (make something up!) Profs will sometimes be willing to say more about a test in 1on1 basis (things they would not disclose in front of the entire class). Don't expect it, but when this does happen, it helps a lot. Does this give you an unfair advantage over other students? Sometimes. It's a little shady :) But in general it is a good idea to let the prof get to know you at least a little.

Were I a professor, and a student showed up to my office hours, to disingenuous BS me (e.g., making something up to get face time to advance their sociopath career, or to try to get exclusive hints on the exam), that would not be to their advantage.

ProTip: I wouldn't be thinking "What a wonderfully go-getter young person; I should write them a good recommendation, to help them gain more influence. Stanford hasn't inflicted nearly enough people like this upon the world."

> If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, jug an energy drink. - They work. It's just chemistry.*

Half of the students are already drugged to the gills. Students don't need celebrity alum endorsement of that.

You don't want people graduading as drugged-out zombies and narcissists, to then go on to found or lead sociopathic companies that make society worse.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#108

Post by random9749832 »

quacked wrote: post #106
random9749832 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning is a loop of reading/listening > applying/questioning. The rest is gobbledygook. And when I say learning, I mean understanding the material, not just remembering a bunch of information for an exam.

Your quote: > Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science. This is wrong. Not every "learning method" is pseudo-science, neither is comparison of the efficacy of different learning methods. As a trivial example, flat lecture and individual textbook reading is inferior to one-on-one discussion and…

You missed the keyword "mostly".

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#109

Post by Cpoll »

neilv wrote: post #107

Some good advice, but two of the pieces surprised me: > Go to the prof before final exam at least once for office hours. - Even if you have no questions (make something up!) Profs will sometimes be willing to say more about a test in 1on1 basis (things they would not disclose in front of the entire class). Don't expect it, but when this does happen, it helps a lot. Does this give you an unfair advantage over other st…

> sociopath career

If someone's seems obviously a sociopath from a single innocuous interaction, they're probably not a real sociopath. I'm not sure what the litmus test is for a "made-up" question vs. a genuine question based on the course material; the only difference is whether the student already knows the answer.

I think we're a bit too eager to throw around "sociopath." When I nod along to my boss' vacation story and ask him follow-up questions, I guess that also makes me a sociopath, because he's not a good storyteller and I'm not interested in Machu Picchu (this is a made up anecdote for illustrative purposes).

Were you a professor you might also be a bit more sympathetic to the pressure academia puts on students to make them suck up like this.

> Half of the students are already drugged to the gills.

He did advocate ample sleep and not pulling all-nighters, near the top of the article.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#110

Post by Jach »

SoftTalker wrote: post #48
quacked wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every undergraduate student I met over the age of 22 was much, much better than their young counterparts within the same ability cohort.

I've read that the highest levels of brain development are not complete until about age 25.

Unfortunately this is a pop-sci myth similar to the "you only use 10% of your brain" myth.
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