Maybe you should learn something

Post by kelvinjps10 » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

Scarblac wrote: post #55

frankie_t wrote: post #52

It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually: - energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone - correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I…

But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience. It takes up so many hours but you also don't really rest, and it also tends to keep you up too long at night. If you can replace five hours of doom scrolling with an hour of doing nothing in particular, an hour more of sleep, some time staring at a book page or soduku, some more work on chorse, you'll most likely gain an hour or so to use on something that takes…

Post by abalashov » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #80

andrew_lettuce wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs can definitely be helpful, but you need your radar set to 11 because they will convincingly feed you smart sounding nonsense when you are most at risk.

Oh yeah, but the same goes for almost any information source (especially these days).

Post by marginalia_nu » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC

abalashov wrote: post #74

bilsbie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The feeling is that it is pointless since technology would just do it for you. Why walk or jog of the car can do it for you?

I know, right? Have the AI go to the gym and work out for you.

Post by molybd3num » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

spudlyo wrote: post #53

HexPhantom wrote: post #16

One thing I wish this emphasized more is that adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning, which is why my useful rule has become: if I'm not producing errors, I'm probably not practicing yet

Meta learning can be useful, but I take your overall point. You can get lost in the weeds trying to figure out the "best" way to learn something. Autodidacts do have some up-front costs: they have to figure out how to best teach themselves a thing, which usually means researching and trying various pedagogical approaches to find something that might work for them. Language learning, for example is a huge category. Yo…

Post by sanderjd » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

cowridingbaboon wrote: post #63

mordechai9000 wrote: post #15

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only…

Knowing a lot used to be attractive too, before the septic cavalcade of reddit reduced us to wordcels and the 'actually' meme. The continued pursuit of knowledge for me has been a much more private matter in this last decade of the unravelling academic institutions I once called home.