I've tried everything, but the only reliable way I've learned hard things is by diving straight in to something way over my head. Grinding through something with a dozen StackOverflow (or equivalent) tabs open is how I taught myself Javascript/React, HTML, Unreal Engine, and even Audacity. Note taking is probably "better", and I use spaced repetition if I have to memorize things, but the core method is just grinding on something I'm deeply interested in.
I am similar but I cannot for the life of me understand game engine workflows. Other libraries and frameworks I get after a while of reading docs etc, but the workflow for game engines is so different than what I normally do that I get thrown off course lol. Any tips for unreal?
After spending a ton of time with React/Javascript/Html/CSS it worked in my brain like this:
- Game logic is your Javascript
- Animations/Models/Textures are your CSS
- Game objects (i.e. the character you control, NPCs) are like React components
- Levels/Maps are your "database"
Now that I've typed that out, it almost doesn't make much sense. But that's how it fit together in my brain.
I don't know about a engine workflow, but I was inspired to make a few games in JavaScript after reading the book/website http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com by Robert Nystrom
That helped me understand frame-tick/physics-tick aspect at least, and how you could offload some processing onto separate queues of events.
If we're talking about skill acquisition, I like to learn through making up random projects to do. Usually I'll read until I get the gist, start going as far as I can go before hitting a wall, then read some more. I don't have the patience to sit through videos; in-depth technical writing with realistic examples works best for me.
Not OP but i find the story part is very useful when I'm in an unfamiliar space. The stories provide insight into how the teller thinks about the problem - this is helpful to make a mental map of the topic. It helps that humans seem wired to understand narative (or maybe just my culture) in a deep way.
Similarly, when joining a new team I like to gather war-stories because when people tell you those, they are also telling you how they work (and allow you to infer a good strategy for working with those folks while also learning about the warts of the system).
Spaced repetition works great for me. Especially because it binds well with a pragmatic approach of professional learning : if I encounter a problem multiple times it is worth it to learn the solution to have it quickly. If I only encounter it once I don't need to.
My process is usually this one :
- Understand learning space ontology. Once I am able to visualize the concepts associated with the field and their relationships, I stop digging the theory and go to practice.
- Start practice: try to solve a simple problem in this learning space. Maximally use all information sources available to solve problems as we go (articles, youtube, wikipedia, blogs, anything). If I get confused I recognize that I missed some theory and go back to square one.
- Solve real use case, go back to step 2 if I get confused or blocked.
I usually get where I need in less than 6 steps. I use this in Software Engineering, Physics and Mathematics.
When I encounter a problem in an Ontolongy space I already encountered, I go directly to step 3.
I have recently got myself back into studying mathematics as a hobby. The last time I studied mathematics for a considerable length of time was 18 years ago! I picked analytic number theory as the topic for this new hobby. I did a Tell HN [1] too about it 6 months ago. Thanks to that post and the awesome HN community, we now have a book club around it that has been going consistently since then. In fact, incidentally I published a new blog post about it discussing the learning experience about half an hour ago. [2]
I talk about this book club here on HN often, so at the risk of repeating myself, I do want to mention on this thread that as a result of these ongoing book club meetings, I realized something interesting. I realized that studying and learning in a social setting like this ensures constant progress. The risk of discontinuing the learning activity due to other priorities of life becomes lower. No matter what, barring exceptional circumstances, I know that I need to sit with our book club for 40 minutes everyday and work through a few pages of the book together. I think that kind of consistency is very important while learning an abstract topic like this that we are learning purely for the joy of learning! Further, the insights that the book club members share with each other during the group study is a nice bonus!
I'm doing the same thing with a different approach. I'm rubber duck debugging my learning by typing things out and going into lots of numerical examples with the help of Python.
It's a very verbose way of learning but i can say i now truly understand Euler's theorem and Fermat's little theorem. I'm continuing this right now. The end goal will be to go deep on everything about RSA including the state of the art factorization algorithms.
Can you do rubber duck learning with any topic? I always wanted to learn Fourier transformations and related topics, but I completely forgot all high school and uni math, so I have to start from scratch and it seems like a huge commitement.
Buy yourself a copy of; Who Is Fourier?: A Mathematical Adventure (any edition will do) and study it. Check reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. This is a great book written in Manga style which is highly approachable.
I created /r/teamdo to enable something like this in general as I felt there is nothing existing. Perhaps there is but I am not aware. Unfortunately just creating a subreddit is not enough, there is hardly any traction.
If I seriously want to learn something, then only from books. Videos or the Internet distract me too much. I sort my notes into a Zettelkasten system and once a month I write an essay of min. 15 pages to deepen the knowledge. I turn off Internet, music and phone because I don't want to be distracted.
My best learning situations have been times where you read a little bit (or watch a video), and then have exercises to complete to implement the information, and good examples to refer to. You think you know it just by reading/watching, but once you try to use it, you find out you haven't really learned it (yet). Some of the examples that come to mind are old (1990s), but still stand out to me as a great way to really learn.
1. Teach Yourself Access in 24 hours (or something like that). It was a book that had a chapter/lesson and then exercises to utilize what you learned.
2. Learning Perl (the camel book). Same thing.
3. Nand2Tetris (I did the first course. Still need to do the second one.) I watched the video lessons, then did the exercises and submitted them for automatic checking.
Probably not what you're asking for, but it's been working for me great and I don't see many people doing this.
When I need to learn a lot of material quickly and it's not interesting, I do 1 hour learning and 1 hour mentally consuming entertainment (gaming, Netflix) interchanged, as long as I have to. 30 minute intervals if the subject is really boring.
Keeps me concentrated and I can sustain it for extended periods of time.
Generally a good tutorial, video with keystrokes, or blog/page format as long as they have the steps, videos without editing are more likely to not miss a step. I will generally only do tutorials that seem to be along the direct task I want to do, and I'll alter it to be the task I actually want to accomplish.
I'll also do 2 or 3 of them to see the task from multiple conceptual angles, it helps me to see how multiple people think about and solve an issue.
I have a lot of trouble learning things that are not related to what I want to do. Not sure how I made it through college but I think I generally had a good idea how many classes applied to what I wanted to do...
I try to make whatever I'm learning fun and relatable. That means making it not boring. Usually I don't follow any technique I just set a goal and mindlessly try to achieve it by learning things along the way. If it's a programming language I start with a project. If it's a mathematical or physical concept I implement it, use it or explain it to someone else. I usually go to Wikipedia or a good textbook then slowly start diving into the literature. I usually then read a recent review paper and one of the old seminal papers related to the topic.
I do the same. Read enough about the topic that I'm sort of aware of what's possible and to get some terminology right.
After that it's project time. If I don't have a project of some sort it's impossible for me to get going. Then picks the simplest sub-problem, and build from there.
If it is something I absolutely need to know how to do, then I do it over and over only muscle memory kicks in. When I need to learn how to use LVM I most have create, delete, recreated expanded, reconfigured and killed a hundred volumes.
Last year I started to handwrite notes, in cursive when possible, after 25 years of typing notes. My memory is quite poor. Handwriting notes has improved memory/recall/remembering by multiple orders of magnitude. At least it feels this way.
I am currently learning Spanish.
- Use Babbel to bootstrap conversational Spanish [learning enough to express myself, but also those quick wins that keep it fun]
- I handwrite the conjugations to learn verb tenses and moods [diving into the specific details]
- I use anki (spaced rep) for learning verbs and nouns [expanding knowledge]
- And I talk to native speakers, who have been more than happy to chat. [feedback loop]
I am not the brightest bulb in the shed and doing this with deliberate practice has gotten me pretty far in 6 weeks.
Prioritizing important work (whether its learning or executing on tasks) for the morning right after waking up
Healthy sleeping and eating habits
There are a plethora of tools out there to optimize your workflow, but I think that is more a matter of preference.
Videos can be hit or miss. The right videos can jam pack a ton of information and get you learning complex topics very quickly. Books and articles have their place too, though I tend to read later in the day into the evening when I'm more keen to winding down.
One common thing I tend to do: I may end my day working on something that leads me to a new pillar of information or complicated topic that I need to grok. In those situations, I stop the day there, and plan to wake up the next morning to research the topic (over coffee), and absorb any videos, articles, material I can get my hands on. Your brain can do amazing things with a little bit of caffeine and deep focus after a good night's sleep.
I tend to overcommit. E.g. take on a project or make a purchase that _requires_ me to learn the skill to be able to complete whatever that project is or use the thing I bought. I find having external "skin in the game" helps me focus on the parts of a thing I need to know. Then, once I can get into the conceptual level of whatever the topic is, I expand from there.
I'm trying to find the original source but I'm lost. Here is a good step I recently stumbled into and it makes good sense. So, here it goes (not mine) super-condensed into a list;
1. Learn the Basics.
2. Read key reading material/analysis. Read papers, analysis, articles, etc. in that space.
3. Seek out key people. Find all the key people in the space, follow them. Engage in conversations with them or see what they talk about.
4. If possible, hang out in the community.
5. Write in Public. Last but probably most important, document your journey in public.
Good q. Personally, a while back I started a "learning ladder" document to answer this question. It kind of went sideways as compared to how I thought it would end up.
At first I listed and ranked a bunch of methods of learning (see below) but I found that a general ranking isn't as helpful after a while.
The biggest takeaway for me was developing my own logging process. I always start a log on a given learning topic, to keep myself accountable and to allow myself to detach and reattach to the process.
The log template I use has headings like this (Markdown):
- Title
- Contents
- To-Do & Questions
- Tips
- Chronological Log of Lessons Learned
- Log (Meta) -- When log was last reorganized, etc.
- Resources (Web links, and so on)
Then I use my own task system, Task BATL, to help me select logs to work on and mark up the to-do lists (like that above) with symbols that establish clarity. I also use a basic tagging system throughout, with shortcuts like +lll for "Log of Lessons Learned" and +crp for "Current Position" (current philosophy / position / strategy in the topic--like how I trade assets, or write system scripts) so on.
In terms of specific methods--books, articles, and videos, I also tend to ask my intuition what it thinks the best one will be for each given topic. Usually one specific method comes to mind. Over time, I rank them for each given topic/log.
I'd also add these:
- Image search
- PDF search
- Reddit posts & other forums
- Slideshare
- Podcasts (useful in topic review or topic updates)
- Writing and publishing my own guides or tutorials on blogs, etc.
- Creating HTML start pages for the topic (friendlyskies.net/radio was one of my first)
- Online courses
- In-person courses
- Get-togethers (for ham radio this has been a really good one; I'd add nets to that as well)
- Volunteering
- Certifications
- Teaching courses
- Shopping/buying things related to the topic in a well-informed way
- Starting profit-projects / businesses
Anyway, good question, I think it goes super deep too.
In previous iterations of this thread I think various people recommended the "Learning How to Learn" course on Coursera. I think the consensus for learning tech related concepts in the aforementioned thread was that many people learn well by building things. I like to read books for most forms of learning, although for things like complicated algorithms I prefer to watch videos. I also like to use spaced repetition for more specific uses like vocabulary - anki/supermemo seem to highly recommended here for automating spaced repetition.
I'm 48 and have gone through this process countless times, it feels like familiar rote:
1. Explore the subject almost randomly. Neither depth-first nor breadth-first; just follow threads that seem most useful or most interesting. Books, articles, videos, classes, whatever - it doesn't matter as long as you don't get bored. Dabble in all of them. If there are any practical skills involved (motion, writing code, etc) start doing those immediately.
2. At some point you get the ah-hah! moment. It is like the fog lifts and you can suddenly see the landscape. You don't know everything but now it seems like further knowledge is just a process of filling holes. You wield your knowledge to accomplish what you need by filling specific holes on-demand. Everything fits together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.
The time between #1 and #2 can be short or long depending on the complexity of the subject. But the experience of #2 is a massive dopamine rush. The main thing you need is patience; don't get frustrated and give up, you know that if you just keep poking around, eventually that dopamine rush will come.
To expand on 1, I think it's been important for me to have some anchor points along the way. Some things I can "accomplish" however small they may be that, if nothing else, help me feel like I'm making progress I won't lose, even if full understanding takes much longer. Otherwise, backsliding in interest can mean the next time I get interested, I'm faced with the prospect of starting over from scratch, which can sometimes mean I just move on to something else.
Completely agree. I usually start with a trivial step and then build from it. Keeping notes on paper, in a markdown doc or jupyter notebook as appropriate is also useful. I have notes that I still look back at to remind me of details of areas I haven't used in a while.
This resonates to my own experience! I'd only add that the step #2 (ah-hah! moments) are not singular, but milestones in a cycle. Being patient and pushing through #1 is definitely rewarding and expands to new fronts.
The don't get bored part is really important. If it's not something you are required to learn, but instead you want to, then keep being interested and passionate is the best thing. There's no use in trying to optimize your learning at the very beginning if you drop it entirely in a month
> But the experience of #2 is a massive dopamine rush. The main thing you need is patience; don't get frustrated and give up, you know that if you just keep poking around, eventually that dopamine rush will come.
I completely agree with you. I remember feeling the dopamine rush when I saw the 3b1b's video lectures on linear algebra and Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Lecture.
Although I strongly feel that simply reading books and watching video lectures are not the best way to learn on your own. You have to re-read them, use them, do the exercises and talk with peers to really get the underlying ideas. Maybe some better explainations exist, but hoping that you randomly stumble upon them as you browse through online articles is not a good idea, IMHO.
I like this quote from Prof. Michael Jordan:
"the first time you barely understand, the second time you start to get it, and the third time it all seems obvious."
You have to work with the material and come back to it again and again to really understand.
I have created a conversational learning medium, Primer, that is designed for self-learners. Our goal, right now, is to create conversational undergraduate-level computer science courses for anyone to learn on their.
It's primary focus is to bring resumability in play which books and video lectures lack. What I mean by that is that when you learn something from a book and video lectures, you start forgetting about it the minute you stop. After a month or so, your memory of the topics are maybe less than 30%. And if you haven't created flashcards or notes, then you have to skim over the book or watch the lectures to recollect.
On Primer, flashcards are automatically generated and your responses stored in the platform along with inline completions help to retrace & recover what you have learned. You can do the course for a while and resume again after quitting for a couple of months or years. Your responses act as memory breadcrumbs to help you retrace what you have learned.
You can test our two free courses over at https://primerlabs.io. ( No signup required ).
I have also created two comics-post about conversational learning that some of you may find useful.
In the end, you have to treat everything as something you will eventually come back and update. That's why I like networked-thoughts tool like Roam and obsidian, a little too much maybe.
This looks cool. Your product overlaps somewhat with Oppia (an open source tool for creating interactive 'explorations'). If you haven't seen it, I recommend you check it out.
Reminds me a bit of HyperCard. What is your interest in Oppia? I dabble in these things, but was thinking of working on some shared "decks" with my kid.
In the exploration I linked, the only types of interaction offered to the learner were either ok/proceed, or 'answer this textual multiple choice question'. This may make it seem like Oppia doesn't do much more than software for interactive fiction.
There are more similarity between things like Oppia and interactive fiction, I don't see them at odds. It is is wonderful that Oppia has a musical notation interface.
If you zoom out far enough, everything could be considered a quiz.
I'm home-schooling my daughter in math because Zoom and it not agreeing with her. She did great last semester and tests several years ahead and has a very intuitive sense of why things work the way they do, I'd like to keep her interest.
However, we're now on to pre-algebra and using this book [0], "Prealgebra: The Art of Problem Solving". The first chapter is all about axioms, proofs of some sort, breaking down "obvious" conclusions back to their constituent proof-from-first-principles and it's not agreeing with her at all. Since this is the first week I'm struggling to find a way to have it all make sense, and I've concluded we need to kind of skip much of this first chapter (we'll look at the summary) and get to the later content which is more intuitive and applies "obvious" principles, and come back periodically to revisit the more mechanistic content in the first chapter. I think the parent post's description of exploring a topic matches how my daughter will come to understand the whole "algebra stack." (Wish me luck.)
Breaking things down to their basic axioms and rebuilding them with proofs is arguably quite an advanced approach. By Terry Tao's three stages of of rigour classification [0], this perspective isn't typical until undergraduate study.
It doesn't seem like a bad idea to give a taste of it significantly earlier, but I don't think it's surprising if someone without a more mature relationship with mathematics doesn't find much value in 'going back to basics.' If your daughter is doing well with a more intuitive approach it sounds like a good idea to stick with it for now.
There's two hurdles for the pre-algebra student: numbers being generically represented as letters and the idea of axioms being generic rules for numbers. Check to see which issue or both is misunderstood. If it's numbers as letters, show them any interactive programming environment and demonstrate the idea of letters as generic numbers. From there, axioms are just more interactive demonstration.
I remember my mom struggling to teach me pre-algebra ahead of the school curriculum. My uncle (a math teacher) mailed us a bunch of "part-is-to-whole-as-part-is-to-whole" word problems of increasing complexity and various forms, and working through those made a lot of things click. The concreteness helped, and it also made me understand the equivalence between proportions, fractions, decimals, percents, and their real-world concepts, plus it has some simple solve-for-x attached to it. And it's learning-by-doing instead of learning-by-reading.
Art of Problem Solving is great - I think they take credit for the US Math olympiad team's performance. I use books from the same organization at elementary school level and find them very good and fun to teach. I would recommend going a level lower among the books published by them [1] to see if that is a good starting point for your child. Their website also has some placement tests etc. to evaluate the right level for a student.
I tutored algebra students and I reccommend the following approach with Khan academy/Openstax resources.
Order of Operations(No Variable)
Order of Operations(One Variable)
Advanced Order of Operations (One Variable)*optional
- Logs, Roots, Exponentials
- Polynomial multiplication/Factorization
Change the variable to random symbols
- Greek characters, shapes, animals
Order of Operations(Multiple Variables)
Introduce functions
- f(x) = mx + b
Connect Order of Operations with Functions
- Simplify an equation and plot as a function
Introduce units (basic physics equations)
- Simplify to formula and Plot
The goal in formal classes is to introduce order of operations with variables, the concept of functions, and how to manipulate those functions. If you are stem oriented, then this is the perfect time to introduce dimensional analysis(units) and physics-based functions. Instilling a sense of confidence and comfort with algebraic manipulation is critical. Prepping her for physics and working with functions is just smart.
It's fairly similar from what I've observed myself, but I'd say the ah-hah! moment for a given subject is not a singular event, but can be repeated if you look at the same subject from a different angle and get a different insight, deeper understanding of the solution or even of the problem. But maybe that's because learning in my case often is very much intertwined with trying to solve a problem.
And there's:
-1. Come across the solution by talking to people, reading books, articles, videos... long before actually needing it, sometimes not even being able to recall it in the next steps until the ah-hah! moment.
0. Have an actual need for that solution due to a problem you're trying to solve. And having that feeling of "there is a solution for this" but not being able to put your finger on it.
Talking to people helps a lot to speed up the process because everyone will have their own view on things which helps to shape your own understanding of the subject.
I agree with this. I would add that for me part of 1 is almost akin to pain. The frustration and annoyance I feel makes this part painful, but also when I get to 2 it's amazing. I hate feeling around in the dark but when the light comes on...
175 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadNow that I've typed that out, it almost doesn't make much sense. But that's how it fit together in my brain.
That helped me understand frame-tick/physics-tick aspect at least, and how you could offload some processing onto separate queues of events.
Similarly, when joining a new team I like to gather war-stories because when people tell you those, they are also telling you how they work (and allow you to infer a good strategy for working with those folks while also learning about the warts of the system).
My process is usually this one :
- Understand learning space ontology. Once I am able to visualize the concepts associated with the field and their relationships, I stop digging the theory and go to practice.
- Start practice: try to solve a simple problem in this learning space. Maximally use all information sources available to solve problems as we go (articles, youtube, wikipedia, blogs, anything). If I get confused I recognize that I missed some theory and go back to square one.
- Solve real use case, go back to step 2 if I get confused or blocked.
I usually get where I need in less than 6 steps. I use this in Software Engineering, Physics and Mathematics.
When I encounter a problem in an Ontolongy space I already encountered, I go directly to step 3.
I talk about this book club here on HN often, so at the risk of repeating myself, I do want to mention on this thread that as a result of these ongoing book club meetings, I realized something interesting. I realized that studying and learning in a social setting like this ensures constant progress. The risk of discontinuing the learning activity due to other priorities of life becomes lower. No matter what, barring exceptional circumstances, I know that I need to sit with our book club for 40 minutes everyday and work through a few pages of the book together. I think that kind of consistency is very important while learning an abstract topic like this that we are learning purely for the joy of learning! Further, the insights that the book club members share with each other during the group study is a nice bonus!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26366464
[2] https://offbeat.cc/blog/our-trip-to-the-prime-number-theorem...
It's a very verbose way of learning but i can say i now truly understand Euler's theorem and Fermat's little theorem. I'm continuing this right now. The end goal will be to go deep on everything about RSA including the state of the art factorization algorithms.
Current start documented here:
https://rawcdn.githack.com/AReallyGoodName/RDM/5391c5a90fe39...
Edit: All my formatting was messed up. I'll fix it when i finish, i'm sure it's not a mystery that the powers are meant to be superscripted though.
The play part is how i get it. eg. Writing python code to generate exponents... Oh now i get why exponents loop under modulo!
Buy yourself a copy of; Who Is Fourier?: A Mathematical Adventure (any edition will do) and study it. Check reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. This is a great book written in Manga style which is highly approachable.
Edit: The material, in this case, will often be a niche Internet forum.
If I remember where in the book information I need during the project is I'll use that, if not, DDG.
I also enjoy reading/hearing anecdotes from others, though that's less to learn details generally, and more to learn what's out there to learn about.
1. Teach Yourself Access in 24 hours (or something like that). It was a book that had a chapter/lesson and then exercises to utilize what you learned.
2. Learning Perl (the camel book). Same thing.
3. Nand2Tetris (I did the first course. Still need to do the second one.) I watched the video lessons, then did the exercises and submitted them for automatic checking.
When I need to learn a lot of material quickly and it's not interesting, I do 1 hour learning and 1 hour mentally consuming entertainment (gaming, Netflix) interchanged, as long as I have to. 30 minute intervals if the subject is really boring.
Keeps me concentrated and I can sustain it for extended periods of time.
I'll also do 2 or 3 of them to see the task from multiple conceptual angles, it helps me to see how multiple people think about and solve an issue.
I have a lot of trouble learning things that are not related to what I want to do. Not sure how I made it through college but I think I generally had a good idea how many classes applied to what I wanted to do...
After that it's project time. If I don't have a project of some sort it's impossible for me to get going. Then picks the simplest sub-problem, and build from there.
If it is something I absolutely need to know how to do, then I do it over and over only muscle memory kicks in. When I need to learn how to use LVM I most have create, delete, recreated expanded, reconfigured and killed a hundred volumes.
I am currently learning Spanish. - Use Babbel to bootstrap conversational Spanish [learning enough to express myself, but also those quick wins that keep it fun] - I handwrite the conjugations to learn verb tenses and moods [diving into the specific details] - I use anki (spaced rep) for learning verbs and nouns [expanding knowledge] - And I talk to native speakers, who have been more than happy to chat. [feedback loop]
I am not the brightest bulb in the shed and doing this with deliberate practice has gotten me pretty far in 6 weeks.
Making time for deep focus
Prioritizing important work (whether its learning or executing on tasks) for the morning right after waking up
Healthy sleeping and eating habits
There are a plethora of tools out there to optimize your workflow, but I think that is more a matter of preference.
Videos can be hit or miss. The right videos can jam pack a ton of information and get you learning complex topics very quickly. Books and articles have their place too, though I tend to read later in the day into the evening when I'm more keen to winding down.
One common thing I tend to do: I may end my day working on something that leads me to a new pillar of information or complicated topic that I need to grok. In those situations, I stop the day there, and plan to wake up the next morning to research the topic (over coffee), and absorb any videos, articles, material I can get my hands on. Your brain can do amazing things with a little bit of caffeine and deep focus after a good night's sleep.
1. Learn the Basics.
2. Read key reading material/analysis. Read papers, analysis, articles, etc. in that space.
3. Seek out key people. Find all the key people in the space, follow them. Engage in conversations with them or see what they talk about.
4. If possible, hang out in the community.
5. Write in Public. Last but probably most important, document your journey in public.
At first I listed and ranked a bunch of methods of learning (see below) but I found that a general ranking isn't as helpful after a while.
The biggest takeaway for me was developing my own logging process. I always start a log on a given learning topic, to keep myself accountable and to allow myself to detach and reattach to the process.
The log template I use has headings like this (Markdown):
- Title
- Contents
- To-Do & Questions
- Tips
- Chronological Log of Lessons Learned
- Log (Meta) -- When log was last reorganized, etc.
- Resources (Web links, and so on)
Then I use my own task system, Task BATL, to help me select logs to work on and mark up the to-do lists (like that above) with symbols that establish clarity. I also use a basic tagging system throughout, with shortcuts like +lll for "Log of Lessons Learned" and +crp for "Current Position" (current philosophy / position / strategy in the topic--like how I trade assets, or write system scripts) so on.
In terms of specific methods--books, articles, and videos, I also tend to ask my intuition what it thinks the best one will be for each given topic. Usually one specific method comes to mind. Over time, I rank them for each given topic/log.
I'd also add these:
- Image search
- PDF search
- Reddit posts & other forums
- Slideshare
- Podcasts (useful in topic review or topic updates)
- Writing and publishing my own guides or tutorials on blogs, etc.
- Creating HTML start pages for the topic (friendlyskies.net/radio was one of my first)
- Online courses
- In-person courses
- Get-togethers (for ham radio this has been a really good one; I'd add nets to that as well)
- Volunteering
- Certifications
- Teaching courses
- Shopping/buying things related to the topic in a well-informed way
- Starting profit-projects / businesses
Anyway, good question, I think it goes super deep too.
coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23211184
1. Explore the subject almost randomly. Neither depth-first nor breadth-first; just follow threads that seem most useful or most interesting. Books, articles, videos, classes, whatever - it doesn't matter as long as you don't get bored. Dabble in all of them. If there are any practical skills involved (motion, writing code, etc) start doing those immediately.
2. At some point you get the ah-hah! moment. It is like the fog lifts and you can suddenly see the landscape. You don't know everything but now it seems like further knowledge is just a process of filling holes. You wield your knowledge to accomplish what you need by filling specific holes on-demand. Everything fits together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.
The time between #1 and #2 can be short or long depending on the complexity of the subject. But the experience of #2 is a massive dopamine rush. The main thing you need is patience; don't get frustrated and give up, you know that if you just keep poking around, eventually that dopamine rush will come.
I completely agree with you. I remember feeling the dopamine rush when I saw the 3b1b's video lectures on linear algebra and Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Lecture.
Although I strongly feel that simply reading books and watching video lectures are not the best way to learn on your own. You have to re-read them, use them, do the exercises and talk with peers to really get the underlying ideas. Maybe some better explainations exist, but hoping that you randomly stumble upon them as you browse through online articles is not a good idea, IMHO.
I like this quote from Prof. Michael Jordan:
"the first time you barely understand, the second time you start to get it, and the third time it all seems obvious."
You have to work with the material and come back to it again and again to really understand.
I have created a conversational learning medium, Primer, that is designed for self-learners. Our goal, right now, is to create conversational undergraduate-level computer science courses for anyone to learn on their.
It's primary focus is to bring resumability in play which books and video lectures lack. What I mean by that is that when you learn something from a book and video lectures, you start forgetting about it the minute you stop. After a month or so, your memory of the topics are maybe less than 30%. And if you haven't created flashcards or notes, then you have to skim over the book or watch the lectures to recollect.
On Primer, flashcards are automatically generated and your responses stored in the platform along with inline completions help to retrace & recover what you have learned. You can do the course for a while and resume again after quitting for a couple of months or years. Your responses act as memory breadcrumbs to help you retrace what you have learned.
You can test our two free courses over at https://primerlabs.io. ( No signup required ).
I have also created two comics-post about conversational learning that some of you may find useful.
1. Introducing Primer: https://primerlabs.io/comics/introducing-primer-comics/
2. Memory Breadcrumbs & Memory Trails: https://primerlabs.io/comics/memory-breadcrumbs-comics/
In the end, you have to treat everything as something you will eventually come back and update. That's why I like networked-thoughts tool like Roam and obsidian, a little too much maybe.
Reminds me a bit of HyperCard. What is your interest in Oppia? I dabble in these things, but was thinking of working on some shared "decks" with my kid.
I'm not involved with the Oppia foundation, but I know Sean from my time at Google.
I started creating an exploration about accounting at https://www.oppia.org/explore/pepGU0qbyoUm but it's not complete and I haven't improved it since I created it.
http://inform7.com/
https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2020/04/writing-tools-...
BUT Oppia has lots of other interaction types: https://github.com/oppia/oppia/tree/develop/extensions/inter...
For example, you can input music notes: https://github.com/oppia/oppia/issues/4842
Or ask the learner to enter a fraction, or to sort some objects.
If you zoom out far enough, everything could be considered a quiz.
This will all be on the test.
However, we're now on to pre-algebra and using this book [0], "Prealgebra: The Art of Problem Solving". The first chapter is all about axioms, proofs of some sort, breaking down "obvious" conclusions back to their constituent proof-from-first-principles and it's not agreeing with her at all. Since this is the first week I'm struggling to find a way to have it all make sense, and I've concluded we need to kind of skip much of this first chapter (we'll look at the summary) and get to the later content which is more intuitive and applies "obvious" principles, and come back periodically to revisit the more mechanistic content in the first chapter. I think the parent post's description of exploring a topic matches how my daughter will come to understand the whole "algebra stack." (Wish me luck.)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Prealgebra-Richard-Rusczyk/dp/1934124... , Amazon: "Prealgebra: The Art of Problem Solving"
It doesn't seem like a bad idea to give a taste of it significantly earlier, but I don't think it's surprising if someone without a more mature relationship with mathematics doesn't find much value in 'going back to basics.' If your daughter is doing well with a more intuitive approach it sounds like a good idea to stick with it for now.
[0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...
[1]https://artofproblemsolving.com/
Order of Operations(No Variable)
Order of Operations(One Variable)
Advanced Order of Operations (One Variable)*optional
- Logs, Roots, Exponentials
- Polynomial multiplication/Factorization
Change the variable to random symbols
- Greek characters, shapes, animals
Order of Operations(Multiple Variables)
Introduce functions
- f(x) = mx + b
Connect Order of Operations with Functions
- Simplify an equation and plot as a function
Introduce units (basic physics equations)
- Simplify to formula and Plot
The goal in formal classes is to introduce order of operations with variables, the concept of functions, and how to manipulate those functions. If you are stem oriented, then this is the perfect time to introduce dimensional analysis(units) and physics-based functions. Instilling a sense of confidence and comfort with algebraic manipulation is critical. Prepping her for physics and working with functions is just smart.
Mentoring/helping others helps solidify your own understanding.
And there's:
-1. Come across the solution by talking to people, reading books, articles, videos... long before actually needing it, sometimes not even being able to recall it in the next steps until the ah-hah! moment.
0. Have an actual need for that solution due to a problem you're trying to solve. And having that feeling of "there is a solution for this" but not being able to put your finger on it.
Talking to people helps a lot to speed up the process because everyone will have their own view on things which helps to shape your own understanding of the subject.