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Learning to Learn

kevin.the.li

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Re: Learning to Learn

#111

Post by marginalia_nu »

systems wrote: post #104
cloverich wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counter point, or maybe complementary point (b/c I agree w/ the quote). I killed myself trying to do more than 8 pull ups in a gym for ages; at times I'd be going to the gym 4x a week doing full body workouts, always working hard, always sweating, always gassed at the end; consistently doing pull ups to exhaustion on multiple sets. Yet 8 was a kind of ceiling. At some point I stopped working out, but got a pull up…

how much weight did you loose during that time? you either lost significant weight, or added significant muscle .. no other way .. the end result here is more significant than how you reached it for pull up, loosing weight is usually far more important than adding muscle, so i am leaning toward you lost weight

Eh, you can also improve your lifts by just not being exhausted every time you go to the gym. With lifting, more is not always more. Fatigue and failure to properly recover is a fairly common reason for plateaus, especially with full body pulls.

Re: Learning to Learn

#112

Post by keeptrying »

Arisaka1 wrote: post #48
johnnyanmac wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you need to find the very best learning resource there is. This is a must. I think there's a line around "good enough", unless your goal of course is to be on the road to "become the very best". I think the better metric is making sure you have a accurate resource over a quality one. The 15-20 hour "sprint hard" methodology isn't stopping after that first sprint, just slowing down. So if you find/can now access a be…

The other problem is: How do you recognize what is "good enough" if you lack the skills/competence required to be able to say "this is good enough"? For example, I'm a frontend developer who wants to learn backend. And let's say that I chose C# and .NET for this. I can either do tutorials in Microsoft docs and then reach out to Reddit or some other community for resources, to receive the commonsense advice "just buil…

Get in front of an expert and ask them what they should have read first.

In most fields the best will know. And the process of getting inf ront of the best will also teach you about the field.

Re: Learning to Learn

#113

Post by shmel »

blackoil wrote: post #40
zfnmxt wrote: post #26

Posts like this that talk about learning "efficiency" always come off as soulless and dystopian to me. I think learning should be fun and that fun learning is the most effective---that's the only thing I optimize for and I certainly don't think about efficiency percentages. What a drag that would be.

I would say "fun" is overrated. We have become so focused on everything being fun that everything including fun itself has become tepid and mediocre. It is important to slog through the hard parts to cross the barrier of expert beginner. We are over downplaying the value of hard work and grit.

There is a big difference between learning something to become a skilled professional versus just a hobby. A lot of things I learned are for myself. I want them to be fun. There is no end goal. I don't want to compete with anyone, I don't want to prove anyone I am very good at this. I am learning new skills for fun and I intend to get enjoyment from practicing them. Throwing at a hobbyist "now repeat this 1000 times to get it perfect" is how you kill motivation.

Re: Learning to Learn

#114

Post by kwar13 »

will-burner wrote: post #105
kwar13 wrote: post #79

I cannot recommend reading A Mathematician's Apology enough. It was written by GH Hardy and I think it's one of the best non-math texts out there to understand how a mathematician's brain works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology Fairly short and beautifully written.

I also like mathematician's apology and would recommend it for understanding now a mathematician's brain works and in particular a mathematician's perspective and mindset on being a mathematician. But I'm curious what prompted you to bring that up in this thread? I don't see how it's connected to the blog post.

Oops! Thought I was in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909564

Thank you friend!

Re: Learning to Learn

#115

Post by epiccoleman »

bityard wrote: post #89
zer0tonin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is complete bs. I've learned 2 languages to fluency by mostly watching movies. I've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server for my friends in high school. I've learned programming by making IRC (and later Discord) bots for communities I was part of. All of this was fun, and it worked better than staring at a textbook and hoping that my "effort" pays off.

I think there is some conflation in this thread between "learning" and "practice" which are fairly different things. As an ADHD person, nothing shovels the dopamine into my neural receptors quite like going from zero to "knows enough to be dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge. That's the fun part. But climbing the experience curve much further than that requires some amount of _deliberate_ study and beyond…

> nothing shovels the dopamine into my neural receptors quite like going from zero to "knows enough to be dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge.

Man, this describes me to a T. I love that feeling of the "first 75%" (or whatever percentage it is). Then I tend to lose interest in the long tail.

Re: Learning to Learn

#116

Post by creamyhorror »

joshdavham wrote: post #21
dinobones wrote: post #7

I'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?

> Can I really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall of those 800 words? This thing you're talking about is called 'word coverage'. It's the percentage of words you know in a given text. I've created lots of word coverage graphs in the past, and, as research has shown, you won't really be understanding much until you reach the high 90s in terms of word coverage. The famous number for being able to read Engl…

Yep, 75% coverage is too low for significant comprehension. You normally need 95% for decent comprehension and 98% for comfortable reading.

The coverage required in Japanese (my target language) seems something like the most frequent 15,000 words (depending on the definition of word) are required for 98% coverage. At 12,000 words it becomes viable to read with some comprehension and semi-frequent dictionary lookups.

Also, interestingly, you need about 2x the number of words in Japanese as English to reach 87% coverage:

"It has been reported that 2,000 high-frequent English words cover 87% of tokens (Nation, 1990). In case of Japanese, 4,024 SUWs are required to cover 87% of tokens." (Text Readability and Word Distribution in Japanese, Satoshi Sato)

Re: Learning to Learn

#117

Post by apwell23 »

wordpad25 wrote: post #76
apwell23 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me why doctors are totally useless in diagnosing extremely common issues like acid reflux. Why do GI specialists have no freaking clue what is causing acid reflux. Why do they not know what how exactly my a1c is relevant to heart disease instead of just prescribing me a statin. I personally know couple of doctors who themselves are clueless in fixing their own chronic conditions. Let alone helping someon…

Asking a doctor to diagnose and treat a chronic condition from a list of symptoms is like asking a detective to solve a crime from a list of evidence. There is A LOT of additional legwork and investigation required to get to the truth even if you're brilliant Sherlock Holmes (and most won't be). The best they can practically do in the 10 minutes they spend on your case, is try to treat symptoms.

> There is A LOT of additional legwork and investigation required to get to the truth even if you're brilliant Sherlock Holmes (and most won't be).

I got all the additonal tests though. I got upper endoscopy, a appointment with ent who put some sort of scope down my throat, bloodwork, esophagram, barium swallow test. He said he got nothing else and i am on my own and admitted that almost 90% of time they don't find anything.

Mind you this is one of most common conditions not some rare disease that needs sherlock holmes .

Re: Learning to Learn

#118

Post by auselen »

zer0tonin wrote: post #87
setgree wrote: post #75

Something from Andrej Karpathy on learning that stuck with me [0]: > Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the qu…

This is complete bs. I've learned 2 languages to fluency by mostly watching movies. I've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server for my friends in high school. I've learned programming by making IRC (and later Discord) bots for communities I was part of. All of this was fun, and it worked better than staring at a textbook and hoping that my "effort" pays off.

Trying to provide a perspective..

Let’s say because of your genetics, you can enjoy playing basketball, and you do that, and you have fun doing that, you get better at it… but that’s that, it won’t be that easy for you with other subjects or even get to next level at basketball. Then you need to submit to discipline… or are you willing to wait for things to become fun?

> pays off

That’s why it is important to chase things you are curious about, then you don’t need to wait for some return…

Re: Learning to Learn

#119

Post by marginalia_nu »

esperent wrote: post #36
zfnmxt wrote: post #26

Posts like this that talk about learning "efficiency" always come off as soulless and dystopian to me. I think learning should be fun and that fun learning is the most effective---that's the only thing I optimize for and I certainly don't think about efficiency percentages. What a drag that would be.

I studied mathematics and I think this subject illustrates my feelings on this perfectly. Coding, just as well. When it comes to learning maths, or a new programming language, there's all this tedious boilerplate you need to know. The rules, or syntax, the names of everything, how it all fits together. There's ways to make learning this stuff more fun, but ultimately, not that much more fun. And anyway, the learning…

> Unless you're hoping to become a member of an international ballet company, learning to dance is the fun part.

I think this really depends on the dance.

With most relatively technical partner dances, such as argentine tango and west coast swing, being a beginner sucks and it's especially rough if you're a lead.

There's this fairly long period when you're not going to be very fun to dance with, and you're not going to have fun dancing because too much of it is still in your head and not in your body. At the same time you need to dance with lots of people in order to improve, and people will throw you a bone once in a while for the sake of letting you practice, but at the same time they're not really having fun.

It's only if you stick with it for a year or two and get through this rough patch, it becomes very fun and rewarding.

Re: Learning to Learn

#120

Post by drivers99 »

opan wrote: post #13
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is a similar "Pareto priciple"-esque approach that one could use to learn Japanese.

There are the "radicals" which can help you to interpret a new kanji, since they're the kanji building blocks.

I highly recommend this site for that. https://kanji.koohii.com/ which goes along with the book "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig (strictly speaking, you don't need the book, but I think it will help understand the idea behind the process). But the stories (mnemonics) on the website are better than the ones in the book, but also let you put in your own stories. You can also vote and choose existing stories, so there are crowd sourced mnemonics that other people have said work for them. One interesting side effect of that is a lot of people decided to use Spider Man whenever there is a "thread" radical, for more memorable stories. I did it around 15 years ago and learned how to write all the 2000+ commonly used kanji in a few months (9 months for me; 2-3 months for a more diligent person). It uses a spaced repetition system (Lietner box method).
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