Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learning to Learn

kevin.the.li

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 142 posts

Re: Learning to Learn

#51

Post by jackphilson »

zfnmxt wrote: post #47
blackoil wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many ways I agree with your opening sentence---maybe I shouldn't have written "fun". I think I was trying to get at something more like that the experience of learning itself is itself a good thing (even if it's not fun, even if it's suffering, even if it's hard) and I think mechanical and stoic recipes to optimize the process fail to adequately appreciate that fact. The best part of learning piano isn't getting g…

I think 'fun' is a prerequisite for optimal learning, you can definitely have both.

And I think greater purpose is definitely a thing if you subscribe to a utilitarian moral framework

Re: Learning to Learn

#52

Post by tokinonagare »

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…

I'm giving a C# class at a university-like institute (for the first time in my life) and I'm glad I had the time to learn the language while it evolved over the last 15 years. Learning nowadays is daunting because of the size of the language and the N ways to do even simple things. You also need to understand the programming landscape before C# (mostly C and Java) to understand some decisions made by language designers.

As much as I like learning by myself, sometimes I have to admit that taking (and paying) for a class is the good solution. The way I organize notions for my students would take them months/years to understand by themselves, if at all.

Re: Learning to Learn

#53

Post by jvans »

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.

If I'm not having fun learning something I can't stick with it. Efficiency without tenacity/grit is useless. It's kind of a tautology that "more efficient is better", but I agree it's pointless without fun. Being less "efficient" but having fun will yield better results imo

Re: Learning to Learn

#54

Post by vonnik »

For me, there’s always an early social element to learning: trying to figure out who the experts are; getting them to point you toward the best resources; and if you’re lucky, bouncing your mental models off them to be corrected. A good LLM can take you part of the way on many subjects, which removes some of the initial friction.

Not every field is like that though.

Some problems are wicked and new, lots of knowledge is basically enacted more than known, and the solutions one seeks often require several disciplines.

Re: Learning to Learn

#55

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>then reach out to Reddit or some other community for resources, to receive the commonsense advice "just build something"

An expert giving bad advice isn't going to help with your curriculum. To give a charitable interpretaion, forums like Reddit are very used to getting mostly Novices coming to ask questions. To the point where even if an advanced novice is asking about how to reach "Competent" level they will still give novice advice. And the best way to climb from novice to advance beginner is to "just build stuff".

There's definitely an open secret that there's plenty of novice material, and plenty of expert material. But the road to competent and proficient is basically a dead man's land for many subjects. I argue the curve to competent is harder than Proficient and Expert[0]. Such a hard point that you often won't find "best resources" without either education, consulting an expert, or simply work a job in that topic.

I don't have much better advice if you are seeking resources. But the next step up if you get stumped is to put more effort into finding other experts who will help out. try to email those potentially open to give advice on what to find or what's good/bad. Join communities similar to what domains you want to explore and form relationships. If you are getting to that point, offer to help contribute to projects others are working on.

[0]: Expert is steeper, but by that point you have a good sense of judgement to figure out what is a good or bad resource to study from. So it's "easier" to learn how to learn by this point.

Re: Learning to Learn

#56

Post by pfortuny »

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.

This is exactly why drills exist: to make reasoning mechanic. The same as in the military... You can only decide (know) if you have the basics memorized to the core, and this requires... boredom in most of us.

I graduated in mathematics. Proving that Projective Space is a noetherian scheme is not exactly a thrilling challenge. But you have to go through the motions if you want to be able to "think" about algebraic varieties.

Same in any other field of "knowledge".

Re: Learning to Learn

#57

Post by kebsup »

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?

800 is definitely too little. I'm building a language learning app based around this exact strategy. Right now, I've around 7000 German lemmas tracked in the app and still regularly encounter sentences which I don't understand, because I lack the vocabulary.

Re: Learning to Learn

#59

Post by mrccc »

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?

While the answer to your question is "no", there is still something you'll be able to do: to express yourself and to understand spoken language.

Like other people said here, understanding will probably still be limited, esp. in writing. But expressing even complex things becomes easier.

E.g. instead of saying "Do you have medication against migraine" at a pharmacy you could say "Do you have something for pain here" while pointing at your head.

This is what we call fluency, and starting at 800 words I would argue you have basic fluency in the language. And also regarding understanding spoken language – those words might be enough to express that you haven't understood something and ask people to simplify.

Words are not enough, though – pronunciation and grammar also play their part.

Re: Learning to Learn

#60

Post by jamager »

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…

This is exactly correct.

With graded readers, thou, you can have good reading experiences with around 3k words (ofc depending on language, book, etc).

Post reply on HN