> 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 quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.
[0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1756380066580455557?lang=en
There is a related concept called grease the goove if you want to Google.
Now, regarding learning, while some parallels between muscle building and studying exists, I find it a stretch. Yes consistency is often key, but now suppose that instead of focusing for 1h every day on difficult problems I only do 5min, certainly it will work, I'll learn stuff, but not as much as someone doing consistently 1h study.
Recovery time is important in study and muscle though
Were you completely resting between sessions? How’s your sleep?
For muscle size, going to maximum is optimal, but it's less optimal for strength.
Their example was: instead of doing 8 reps of bench press where you can barely get the final rep, do maybe 1 fewer. They were more precise in the point to stop, but it's not something avg person can detect compared to their analysis, so this is just ballpark-ish.
I think learning is more like growing plants, you don’t need to get everything perfect, or even one thing perfect, but a set of things to good enough.
There are a lot of things that interfere with learning so the presence of those will inhibit learning regardless of effort.
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
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.
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 that deliberate _practice_ and experience in order to become something like an expert.
Chasing questions down rabbit-holes is fast and entertaining but only takes you so far. Deliberate practice (studying) is mostly less fun, even when that thing is your life-long passion and/or career. But necessary if you want to be highly skilled in that area.
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".
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…
Practically everyone on planet earth learns a language as a child. Learning how to use some commands in linux and and programming a bot are literally child's play. I learned to play soccer the way you speak of - i'm... ok at it. Messi did a different thing.
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.
Eg: For RL it would be Barto&Sutton book.
Sometimes the best source is not intuitive. Eg: The best way to become a safe driver is to go to performance drivign school - its a bit expensive but they tell you how to sit and stay alert in a car which I have never seen outside of these schools.
One of my most common things nowadays is to ask ChatGPT is to ask to build a curriculum. Creating and understanding what a great curriculum looks like is 20% of the work of understanding a field.
You can LEARN ANYTHING now if you have the time and inclination and elbow grease. Truly nothing is beyond your grasp - NOTHING. Its a magical time.
I'm actually building a tool that will do all this for you and get you started down the learning path faster than what we have now.
And for the curious - the best way to learn medicine is not a textbook. There are solutions out there like Skethcy which work much better for anatomy.
My own learning project - learn Medicine "on the side". It seems ludcirous that we give up the keys to our health to doctors just so we don't have to learn 2 years of courses. Am going to fix that!
It's similar to how I learned software development as a hobbyist, so I understand a little about headlines like OpenAI switching from Next to Remix, but at a deeper level, I don't really understand what it's like running Next.js at the scale of MAUs. But it's still worth learning so that I have a little more understanding about the world around me.
Yep I'm ware of Guyton and Nnja.
The marginal information that a doctor has from real life is useful but with so many medical errors, for 80% of people they aren't relevant.
I've caught surgeons literally mentioning the wrong type of incisions right before the surgery.
While I admire the drive to become knowledgeable in the field of medicine outside of a professional curriculum in the disciplines, I’m not aware of any curriculum that proposes competency as a medical doctor in two years. Though I haven’t practiced medicine in many years, I do have a degree in medicine and went through internship, residency and fellowship. Trust me, it was far more than two years. Further, I don’t see how you would be able to (legally) gain experience in any of a range of procedures without following the consensus training path.
The next two are more about interacting with a live patient in a variety of settings. Obviously this si useful.
But most of the harm created by the medical system and skewed doctor incentives (only 15 minutes to see you) can be averted by those 2 years. For example: knowing to e able to read a examination report means abiliy to ask questions immediately.
I personally know couple of doctors who themselves are clueless in fixing their own chronic conditions. Let alone helping someone else.
Sure go to the doctor if you broke your arm but they are totally out of their depths if you have any chronic conditions. Not sure what exactly they study for like a decade if they don't have answers to almost anything.
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 better resource later, just start the sprint again on that. I know from experience (in real time, unfortunately) how easily "find the best resource" can end up becoming "spend weeks collecting resources but not consuming them".
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 build something", and we're back to zero because now the goal is to build something for learning's sake therefore what is "good enough project" to build to maximize gains?
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.
Start with Anatomy. And the basic anatomical form.
Start with a problem you personally have. (Go to a doc if its serious!)
Figure out your concentric anaotmy of hte issue, the pathology. Everytime you read a textbook it will push you to a new subject.
Do this for at least 5 hours and you'll be able to relate to your doctor much better.
If you want to know what a dcotor looks at for decision support - you can go to uptodate.com - I think they have a free trial for 3 days or something.
The most essential idea is that a doctor is someone whose model of hte human body is much more realistic than yours.
Thus as you learn medicine keep improving the model you have of your own body and how someone elses would be different from yours - for all major body systems - lymph, respiratory, nervous, endocrine , muscular, digestive, integumentary, urinay, excretory, circulatory etc.
Weidly its the only good one I Found.
The internet is full of information. Sometimes it’s too much, unstructured or tangential to the goal at hand. Textbooks, in my experience, are truly written by the experts. It’s been vetted, rigorously reviewed and fact checked. It’s not inspired by influencers or clickbait.
Obviously YMMV, but when you find a top recommended textbook, it’s usually miles beyond a YouTube video or medium blog for deeper level content. It usually flows better and makes more sense as you study consistently.
https://meded.ucsf.edu/sites/meded.ucsf.edu/files/inline-fil...
Start with Anatomy.
Start with a problem you HAve personally. And understand the anatomy and physiology. Use that to learn every abstraction you bump into. Example you'll definitely need to learn about the skin for example
Also go to uptodate.com for your condition. Thats basically what a doc uses anyways.
For inspiration go to r/medicalschool .
Constantly use
Online courses aren't really holistic enough and not fundamental enough. They are usually dertivatives which are a translation of sorts from source documents.
For medicine you want the source documents which you can really trust.
Meidicine isn't static - it'll keep changing but its important to know source mateiral and tracking how outlooks and fixes for diseases change from there.
UptoDate.com has the best deciison science -newest knowlege. Thye are about 18 months old from cutting edge research. (Which is a good thing).
I've been trying to do this for some rabbit hole I decided to go through. It's great for generating a list of topics but good luck getting actual existing books or papers. In some instances it would generate a paper title and link it to some other paper that might be slightly relevant.
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 part is not the good part, it's the things you can do once you reach a certain knowledge level that are incredible, beautiful, even sublime.
On the other hand, take something like learning to paint, or taking dancing lessons. Unless you're hoping to become a member of an international ballet company, learning to dance is the fun part.
As another point, if you're a knowledge worker and you're likely to have situations in your life where someone basically says to you "right mate, you've got the job, here's a huge body of deep technical knowledge to learn, get up to speed, see you Monday" then a certain amount of skill in knowing how to absorb that quickly is a good thing.
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.
The best part of learning piano isn't getting good at piano---it's learning piano. And sure there are some things we have to learn that we aren't that interested in learning, but I think even those things have the capacity to be worthwhile experiences if properly framed.
I think applying the word "efficient" to this area is suggestive of urgency and greater purpose---I don't buy into either.
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".
Who is doing that?
I don't disagree, but maybe the author is making do with what they have. Maybe they only have 30 minutes ~ 1 hour of free time per day (which is dystopian on its own), and need to think about efficiency if they want to achieve a certain degree of proficiency in whatever they're learning.
Another interpretation is that they are only trying to optimize their learning process if it's work related, because they need to. Or maybe they have an engineer mindset, and make the process more efficient is a fun thing to do by itself.
Seems like decent enough advice if you ever have trouble getting started. It's actually not unlike cramming for a test, except you keep study afterwards and don't dump that knowledge the day after. "fun learning" or not, just make sure to really dive in in the beginning.
The people I've thought were most successful were not grinding their way through learning but enjoying it, letting new questions arise and pursuing them. Is that efficient? It might not seem so. But the learning tends to be more transformative; they grok the lessons more deeply.
A work colleague once told me that it's like reading textbooks in graduate school -- you read it once just to get a general sense of the vocabulary. They you start over, concentrating on the meaning. New ideas take a lot of study to learn well. "Efficient" learning strikes me as a compromise where you get a superficial understanding for the sake of speed.
Pick programming, is knowing binary operations foundational? Is knowing compilers? Is it knowing bubble sort? Or perhaps knowing data structures?
I believe that if you have been using/working in a field, whatever you touch for your own goals that's enough.
And perhaps the difference between being an expert beginner and an expert is whether you still care about such a distinction? If you can achieve your current and future goals and can eventually learn new concepts then you're good.
I'd say a beginner might be someone who wouldn't even know where to begin.
Let's pick chemistry for myself: sure, I could follow some video but without the video I wouldn't even conceive how to get started with anything.
While, say woodworking, I wouldn't call myself an expert but I would be able to imagine starting a random project from scratch and eventually figure out all the parts.
So, maybe: - beginner: can't complete a project without help/support - mid: can complete but is unsure whether that's the best way - expert: has completed it before somehow
You probably can't. You need to rely on knowledge of others to identify good resources. And then lean that against how you learn in order to pick the best resource for you.Same for verifying being an "expert beginner". Never be the smartest person in the room if your goal is to grow.
In a crude way: google it. You'll probably get a generic (maybe even horrible AI slop) on top. But you're not looking for a perfect guide on first Google (not unless you have a very popular topic). Look for terms used and start googling those to narrow down to a more specific place. Maybe a forum post full of (hopefully) competent+ people answering your question. Maybe you find a quality guide to follow. Maybe you find you're on a completely wrong rabbit hole and figure out better terms to Google.
That's basically half my learning while on the job. Usually works pretty well in my personal time too.
You won't always have an optimal solution but that's okay. The most important is to try and use the thing you're learning in some real way or with practice.
In my experience, that's a necessary first step to learning. I need to get my hands dirty, get a feel for what I'm working with. An experience is worth a thousand pictures, which are worth a thousand words - you can't gain that basic understanding and instinct by reading, only by having all the sensory inputs of doing it.
Then it's time to read. Now you must find an expert to guide you. First, you'll have too many blind spots - you can't possibly find all that's current, you can't find the best sources efficiently, and much won't be in books yet. And without expertise yourself, you can't distinguish the worn-out theories from the evergreen standards from the unproven innovations; the promising from the unlikely from the absurd; you won't know the consensus from the fringe; the guy advocating their personal theory - maybe even a credible one - from the balanced survey of established ideas. You won't recognize when you're reading just a side of a well-known debate.
The post covers a great mindset, but the math really is one thing, and learning how you learn and how you can learn is invaluable.
This is a great course to start learning about your learning.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
After/with this, there is a slew of adult learning knowledge that will likely make you feel better.
One key is learning to understand something, before learning to memorize it.
Another is creating your own mind map of how the concepts you are learning fits together.
Farnham street has some great books on mental models as well that was recommended to me as helping
An expert is someone who can often explain complex things in very simple ways. being an innocent beginner is one of the best mindsets to cultivate - you learn what you do and don't know pretty quick, and also a sense of known vs unknown, and size and number of unknowns.
Do the thing you want to learn.
Now, if I say I want to get into this scene for good, I am immediately daunted with a mountain of diverging learning paths to take. Should I take to Python and its massive library ecosystem, or should focus on database fundamentals? In every choice taken there are seemingly infinite branches, and it is rather hard to focus if you aren't even sure you're on the right track.
Last time I sat in an analytics/consulting interview they grilled me on highly specific technical questions on data pipelines and warehousing and testing and other topics that I've never had to worry about before at work. In another assessment, I was grilled on some AWS/Redshift-specific things. In yet another I was expected to know deep learning. It is all too hard for someone not originally with an engineering (or adjacent) background.
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?
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 English texts extensively requires a word coverage of around 98%. And while it depends on the text, in order to reach 98%, you generally need to know around the top 5k words in a language.
Funny enough, when you understand 75% of the words in a text, you subjectively feel like you're understanding like 10% of what's going on.
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)
With graded readers, thou, you can have good reading experiences with around 3k words (ofc depending on language, book, etc).
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.
"I went to the sdjfkdsh and got a new ghjsakgfh."
The missing words could be "dealership" and "truck" or "embassy" and "passport" or quite a lot of other pairs that change the topic entirely, so reading or listening to something with 80% understanding generally requires a dictionary in one hand to get you up to a reasonable level of comprehension. That said, I personally think language learning is enjoyable and rewarding, and tackling the most common word list is a good first step.
You need a lot of input before you’ll understand 75% of the text in a language. Vocabulary flashcards (preferably with audio) can help make some very simple dialogues or stories comprehensible at the beginning but flashcards are not enough for learning a language.
If it means you can at least take an educated guess on what a sentence means, then yes.
If it means to understand a sentence like a native speaker does (just slower), then no.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology
Fairly short and beautifully written.
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.
Thank you friend!
Maybe “don’t focus so much on organizing your inputs, instead focus on many quality input reps”?
book summary
"Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" Summary:
Key Premise: Effective learning strategies differ from common study methods like rereading and cramming, which provide an illusion of mastery but lead to poor retention.
Main Learning Principles:
Retrieval Practice: Actively recalling information strengthens memory and makes learning more durable. Self-quizzing is more effective than passive review.
Spaced Repetition: Spacing out learning sessions over time leads to better retention than cramming.
Interleaved Practice: Mixing different types of problems or subjects during study sessions improves learning compared to studying one topic in blocks.
Elaboration: Explaining ideas in your own words and connecting them to existing knowledge improves understanding.
Generation: Attempting to solve a problem before being shown the solution enhances learning.
Reflection: Reviewing what you’ve learned and considering how it applies to your life strengthens learning.
Varied Learning: Learning in different contexts and environments makes the knowledge more adaptable and versatile.
Key Takeaways:
Rethink study habits: Active learning techniques outperform passive ones.
Learning is more effective when it's effortful—embrace challenges.
Long-term retention relies on consistent, spaced, and active engagement with material.
Building an efficient path to expertise is hard for a beginner.
I think the fastest way to learn is asking an expert to build a learning path for you, starting from what you know and what you don't know.
it is not what the foundational knowledge "is" - but "how" the foundational knowledge is "unpacked" by each person from the first principles.
this was articulated by Descartes in "Rules for the direction of the mind" which remains sadly unread and forgotten.
the difference between the 2 approaches is that the author's approach does not clearly delineate what is meant by "learning". In fact, it could even encourage rote-learning of the foundational material. Descartes outlines an alternative.
An interesting anecdote about Descartes is that he "unlearnt" everything he knew early in life, and attempted to "rebuild" his knowledge. Few of us have the luxury to do that.
link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_the_Direction_of_the...
If you need to pass an exam, obtain a certificate, etc. you will need a different approach than if you are just curious about a subject and explore what it is about.
There are commonalities, however. Much of the advice on deliberate practice (From the book Peak Performance) is valid even if you don't try to be a top expert.
I don't know if it's just me but I would not be stoked to be asked this question during an interview. During interviews you're implicitly trying to differentiate yourself from others vying for the position. You usually do this by talking about your experience in different ways. I find it annoying when the interviewer explicitly asks you to differentiate yourself from others vying for the position. In part it annoys me because I think that should be the job of the interviewer to determine based on how I've answered their concrete questions about my experience. But also explicit questions like this one give such an opportunity for bs that I do not think they give a lot of signal. I guess I could be wrong though and don't spend enough time thinking about what makes me better than other people.
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.
This seems to be the most important part but also has the hidden and problematic dependency of... already knowing (i.e. already having learned) what the foundational stuff is?
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.
PG tweeted:-
You can't replace reading with other sources of information like videos,
because you need to read in order to write well, and
you need to write in order to think well.My response: Nice try.
Part of learning to learn, is learning how to identify the things you don't know. Then learning how to structure your 'personal curriculum' them in a rational way - you don't need to know everything up front to be effective.
It's not wrong to say Curriculum does not matter. But the level of curriculum is also something that needs to adjust to your current level and related fields you have knowledge within, to prevent you becoming overwhelmed.
Most people stop learning being motivation dries up as Test Anxiety rises to the point where they are at a "low-performance" place in the eustress curve. A few days there and people pause until it becomes urgent. A lot of this is a lack of momentum, but also not dedicating or having access to judgements of learning about your own progress.
In other words, if you judge your learning at all, it helps you manage.
There is a natural tradeoff between the flow-state of "just one flashcard with one information principle at a time, endlessly" and the longer term state influencing your time in flow-state of "am I progressing, what don't I know, how do I feel about my learning and mistakes?"
Think about learning databases, or CSS. When did you really takeoff? Probably A) Practically copying others examples (existing queries ran in PhpMyAdmin, or codepen code) And then later B) Once you overcame a big mistake and saw progress - suddenly what "Display" did clicked for you, and you saw how useful it could be to use the "fixed" option, it unlocked your understanding of the items in A and confirmed or disconfirmed your understanding of how it works.
Again it all depends. Self-motivated learning, even for a job, is easier to work with than compulsory learning. Because there, you don't even have the motivation to gaze up to the horizon and gather any excitement or understanding for what the learning might later lead to. It doesn't feel like a path, it feels like a brick wall. In this regard, a list of subjects is somewhat skin to someone stacking bricks, rather than elucidating a path. Overwhelming anxiety while learning is a real thing. The context really matters as to whether this approach is always the wisest.