The Unfashionable Art of Learning Things (opens in new tab)

(medium.com)

9 pointsrehman7mo ago4 comments

4 comments

“The irony is that in our rush to optimize everything, we’ve optimized away one of the most effective learning techniques humans have. Sometimes the old ways persist not because we’re stuck in the past, but because they actually work. Your brain doesn’t care about efficiency. It cares about understanding.“

This couldn’t be said any louder. Just finished my BA in Comp Sci as a 36 year old man. Each and every class filled with Laptops. Typing and chatGPT studying. I never brought a laptop to class, I had a good old pencil and paper, sitting down looking like a caveman from the Stone Age. Ask me what ACK is, or how to read opcodes in a line of assembly code and I got you covered. I wonder if the same could be said for my peers.

“The inefficiency isn’t a bug it’s a feature”.

popularonion7mo ago

Eh, I got my comp sci degree in the 2000s and for the most part we learned barely enough to pass the exams. Colleges weren't exactly churning out an army of disciplined professionals well versed in low level programming. Most of us ended up working on PHP or Rails or some Enterprise Java monstrosity.

Then came of the flood of Leetcode in the 2010s. If you memorized the top 100 interview puzzles, you would have had a good chance to get paid 5x more than a kernel or firmware engineer, and you could have ridden the stock market to generational wealth

treetalker7mo ago

As with physical training, fixating on the desired end state is a recipe for disaster. Instead, we must fixate on the boring, slow, consistently repeated actions that drive in our desired direction. Athletic prowess and six-pack abs don't feel how one might suppose: they feel like a couple hours per day slogging it out on the rowing machine or stationary bike and then hitting the weights and stretching for a bit; and they feel like eating sardines and vegetables within a limited daily window. (These are examples of many possibilities, of course.)

Engage with the struggle and trust the process.

shelajev7mo ago

> "...engineers often mistakenly optimize for speed of information consumption over depth of understanding, leading to superficial knowledge."

really. Learning should [never] be fun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42099596

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse