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Learning to Learn

kevin.the.li

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Re: Learning to Learn

#121

Post by Arisaka1 »

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.

>I've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server for my friends in high school.

What you've learned was "enough to set up a minecraft server", but definitely not as much as "learned the linux cli", and that's without even touching the obvious question "what does someone mean when they claim they learned the linux cli"?

I fell for this trap too: I watched a tutorial by Nick Chapsas, then made my own ASP.NET Core Web API for a personal project, and thought "Wow I know ASP.NET MVC time to get a junior developer job".

After a few resumes (there's .NET demand in my area) I landed an interview with a startup. The interviewer (who happened to be the cofounder and has 15 years of .NET experience, some working directly in Microsoft) started hitting me with questions like "what kind of objects can get constructed in a using block?", "what's the difference between readonly and const", "how can we identify that a payload comes from a mobile client if the endpoints are shared?", etc.

That's when I realized that I knew enough to make me go "woohoo I have a .NET Core web API" but not enough to get a junior job. In fact, he was honest enough to tell me "you're barely entry level, and this wasn't even the technical interview it's just the screener".

Off-topic but related with the event: I obviously didn't get the job, but he left me with an advice I'm actioning: "Stop jumping around and stick to one language, I don't know if that's gonna be C#, TypeScript, Go, Python, whatever. Deep dive something well. You're only hurting yourself in the long run".

Re: Learning to Learn

#122

Post by jjice »

Pareto distributions are everywhere, and most learning ends up being one. Recently encountered this while getting into weight training for hypertrophy. The core is good form, diet, and progressive overload. Other than that, learning the basis of a specific exercise is something you can pick up as you expand.

It's so similar to most of the things I've specifically sought to learn as an adult. You get so much bang for your buck, time-wise, when learning something new. The best part is when you don't even need to dig deep past that foundational 80% and you can become pretty knowledgeable about something in a very reasonable amount of time.

Re: Learning to Learn

#123

Post by smeej »

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…

I realized this about myself years ago, but I don't (think I) have ADHD.

I have always been able to learn faster than most people. No clear reason why. It appears I was just born this way.

But if the Pareto Principle holds, and I'm learning twice as fast as average (estimating for the sake of easy math), that means when I'm a beginner learning the 20% of the skill that gives me 80% of the results, I'm learning like 32 times faster than somebody learning at an average rate who's in the 80% of work that produces 20% of the results, even though they're better at what they're doing. I look like an absolute rockstar out of the gate.

Problem is that my ego has been tied up in that since I was little. Early life is all about learning high-leverage things as quickly as possible, and since that's also when you're forming your sense of who you are, it's a sticky trap. I have really struggled to build the patience for the rest of the grind, where even if I'm still learning twice as fast as average at the harder level, any average newbie is learning/improving twice as fast as me.

The end result is that I'm moderately proficient in dozens and dozens of things, but I'm not an expert at anything except obtaining moderate proficiency.

Re: Learning to Learn

#124

Post by johnnyanmac »

keeptrying wrote: post #98
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…

By the very fact that the resource is "good enough" implies that it won't have the holistic and beginner-tolerance required of a good instruction set. A great text will get you upto beinngin in 2 weeks - month. A "good enough" will mean a year if it isn't your primary focus. Try learning RL from any other text than Barto-Sutton.

Well yeah. Time and budget can be limited. The "best" way to learn a language is to travel to a country native to it and immerse yourself, constantly attempting to speak to others. But that may not be accessible in time nor costs to travel and live. The "best way" to learn many topics is to immerse in a community that's a mix of learners or experts. ie. A classroom setting. A place to constantly iterate and quickly correct mistakes. But education is only getting more expensive, and not all communities are equal.

If there's a great beginner textbook out there, that can definitely help. But not every field has its Bart-Sutton easily accessible. But the time it takes doesn't necessarily matter as much as the mastery itself.

Re: Learning to Learn

#125

Post by joshdavham »

creamyhorror wrote: post #116
joshdavham wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

You sound like my kind of nerd!

You might wanna check out this analysis I did last week: https://cij-analysis.streamlit.app/

I do a little bit of Japanese word coverage analysis in it, among other things.

Re: Learning to Learn

#126

Post by coolThingsFirst »

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.

That wont work with real science. Math requires the process which he describes. As do algorithms.

In my experience it’s same with gym, lifting weights slightly too difficult.

The least productive method that Ive used with very little results is jumping to problems almost impossible for me. It did absolutely nothing.

Re: Learning to Learn

#127

Post by aoeusnth1 »

cloverich wrote: post #86
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…

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…

Did you do them in full range of motion (starting from dead hang) and slow eccentric motion on the way down? Not all workouts which are equally exhausting are optimal for strength.

Were you completely resting between sessions? How’s your sleep?

Re: Learning to Learn

#129

Post by zer0tonin »

Arisaka1 wrote: post #121
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've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server for my friends in high school. What you've learned was "enough to set up a minecraft server", but definitely not as much as "learned the linux cli", and that's without even touching the obvious question "what does someone mean when they claim they learned the linux cli"? I fell for this trap too: I watched a tutorial by Nick Chapsas, then made my own ASP.NE…

Watching tutorials is exactly what I would consider "not fun", and I'm not surprised it wasn't successful. On my side I had no problem getting into a software engineering career, so my point stands.

Re: Learning to Learn

#130

Post by credit_guy »

Part of growing up, going to school and then college, and then through life is that you learn how to learn. Everyone develops their strategies to learn.

Some think that the strategy they found for themselves is great, and they start preaching it. Like this person here. But it's an illusion. Maybe it even has a name. This particular strategy doesn't sound bad, but there are so many types of people out there, and it's certain that for many, if not most, other strategies fit better.

It's like trying to teach someone how to run. Advice like keep your back straight, or land on your toes, etc. In the end, running is the best teacher. Just go ahead and run, and your body will figure out how to keep the back straight.

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