Ask HN: Where to find people who love to learn?

If you're in the US, maybe a community college?

Your local public library is a great place to start. Look to their clubs and events for passionate people doing what they love.

I guess meetups for un-commercial topics, and maker spaces, especially the weirder ones.

Well, I am one of them. Always wondered about that as well, I guess there is no modern community of “toltecs”.

Reach out to me if you want. i_ts_h(ertz) atgmail com

Remove _ and ().

My wife and I are both full-time academics. She has never worked outside academia (except a dirty menial job in high school). I dropped out, wrote code for a multi-billion-dollar non-profit, and had a bunch of menial jobs.

I don’t wanna say she takes the university life for granted, but I can’t say she understands what it’s like to work in a place where you’re the one and only curious, well-read person.

EDIT: janitors, bellhops, and waitstaff are much more interesting than office plankton. But there is no culture of reading and learning in either context.

The internet isn't bad place; there are lots of great communities around (often mailing lists, Reddit, etc).

I haven't found a platform which caters to this group. I guess the approach would be find communities related to the subject matter, which unfortunately are very distributed and not cataloged anywhere.

You mentioned, that you practice intensely for months to develop a skill, talking to experts etc. I have recently started on a similar path to strengthen my fundamental skills in my subject area and, that means, learning solo and working on various domain topics for many years. Do you have any general advice on learning topics intensely for months, just curious about your personal approach to learning solo.

I haven’t managed to find a healthy density of such folks after college & grad school. Something about the nature of employment and the responsibilities of “life in the real world” seems to interfere. Curious to see what this thread surfaces. My e-mail is on my HN profile if you wanna connect.

You mean -- where to find experts that can tolerate newbie asking off-base questions and showing off their bottle half full? If you just find people with "a deep love of learning", you guys end up just bouncing shallow questions and answers off each other, right? I am not saying that is not fun, but I am not sure that is really "a deep love of learning".

From an expert point of view, where is motivation of tolerating adult "curiosities"? I can easily tolerate a 5-year old who genuinely curious and assumes no base of understanding, which I can enjoy building my explanations from ground up. You get the satisfaction of filling an empty cup and and occasionally, the naive 5-year-old may seriously challenge your fundamental understanding and you yourself learn something. Not all 5-year-olds are like that, and extremely rare to find such adults.

I think the people you are looking for, with "a deep love of learning", is every where. For example, who love reading popular books on subjects that they are not familiar. That is why there are so many popular non-fiction books. But, are you sure that you are actually seeking each other out?

IMO, if you are truly with "a deep love of learning", study text books and take MIT open courses, and then read scientific papers. Then you will find those experts -- they are always listed in the references with contact associations.

Youtube and tiktok

The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts wouldn't be a bad place to start. Eternal September and all that, but it's still home to lots of schools and academics, and the shitty weather deters people that aren't there on purpose.

me

so I guess HN is a good place.

Conferences (academic and industrial). If you’re a developer, going to a software conference like PyCon or Strange Loop (and being sociable when you’re there) will bump you up against lots of curious people.

Local chapters of academic societies (like INFORMS for operations research). Lots of people love to talk shop and learn what other people are doing.

Taking adult education courses at a good university will help you meet such people as well.

Meetups — hit or miss. Some are self filtering like functional programming or philosophy but if you go to a cloud computing meet up you’re likely to meet people who are there for professional reasons. They’re curious too but more for the sake of their jobs.

Bear in mind that these are people curious about specific things. If you want to find well rounded individuals that are curious about lots of things, well they’re rare and there’s unlikely to be a watering hole where they congregate because the intersecting set of interests between them is likely small. University clubs might be an avenue but if you’re no longer in school they’re not really accessible to you.

In my experience, you'll find people a lot of people like this at technical user group meetings, such as a local Linux User Group or Python Meetup.

The fact that someone chooses to spend their free time watching a presentation or participating in a technical discussion is a pretty strong signal that they love to learn. There are usually a few people who attend for recruiting or networking purposes, but that's pretty obvious when you meet them.

Relatedly, a lot of the people who present at meetings like this are among the most avid learners, assuming they're not delivering a sales pitch.

Personally I enjoy learning alone, and prefer reading instead of listening (if the topic is hard enough). For me, it is really hard to focus and think about details when I am discussing with others. If you want to interact with this kind of boring people, the best way might be through the internet rather than in-person.

I'd say avoid high-productivity environments, because they often contain people who love learning; but as a means to an end. They usually won't have much patience for sharing, and could look at you as competition, as easily as an ally.

Being in an environment of exploration is best. Non-profits, foundations geared towards research, etc.

I've not had much luck, finding these places, but, TBH, I haven't really looked. I've generally spent my entire adult life, focused on delivering product, and that has plenty of room for learning. I come from an ... eclectic ... educational background, and often find myself being shunned by those from more traditional backgrounds, so I've learned to find my own way.

Teachers are generally good for the kind of thing you are talking about. They need to keep learning stuff. Trainers for things like bootcamps need to stay up to date. They are also likely to have patience for those still on the journey.

Some of the high-score people on StackOverflow are actually fairly impressive, and are all about learning, but I do get a bit tired of looking up their noses.

me! discord: starstruck hash 7373

interested in math, CS, languages, biology, philosophy, history, pretty much everything it's a problem

Maker spaces, book clubs, tech related meetups, hackathons, libraries.

I'd imagine you put up posters at the university, coffee shop, or library with permission that involve a math problem, simple cipher, or so on with an invitation and/or point of contact. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/356/

The Recurse Center: https://www.recurse.com/

Their motto is "never graduate."

Eh, literally anywhere, because if you indeed love to learn, the topic isn't really important. The learning is what matters, and you can learn on any topic.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Twitter!

I hang out in corners of physics, ML, EA, and Progress Studies Twitter and have made some great connections that have turned into real friendships IRL.

Often the next step after meeting on Twitter is setting up a video chat to have a deeper conversation together, but eventually I like to set up nice walk and talks on hikes or around cities.

I now have great friends that I make an effort to see in person in cities around the US and Europe!

You'll find them in every pursuit.

Just pick one that interests you and involves being social - it is a little hard to find the ones who are happy mastering living in the woods by themselves, nor will they be thrilled to see you if you do find them :)

> Reading new books on unfamiliar subjects, practicing intensely for months to develop a new skill, talking with an expert and absorbing decades of wisdom as they share a lifetime of experience.

Honestly, these are wildly different forms of "learning" and you're unlikely to find a community engaged in all three.

Tons of book clubs exist if you just want to talk about the latest Malcom Gladwell book. Or discuss whatever pop-sci flavor of the month shows up on TED recently. Over time I've become a bit disillusioned with this form as learning because authors tend to both simplify reality, and overstate the reliability of research findings. Sometimes its not exactly their fault when science is retracted but it suggests that focusing on "new" is less useful. When I realize I've forgotten most of what I've read, it makes me feel slightly less anxious about how wrong much of it was.

For skill acquisition, affinity communities on the skill: juggling, knitting, cycling, language, art, chess, sports all have clubs and similar. These tend to focus on continual honing of expertise in the area, instead of acquiring a skill and moving on to another.

For learning from experts, well, conferences and symposiums abound. And again, they cluster around topic instead of mode of learning. Conferences are usually about publishing new findings and pushing the frontier of the unknown forward but its a much harder, slower and difficult task than learning settled science from a textbook. You can learn about astrophysics without knowing what a z-score is but its definitely something to be aware of when attempting to convince the expert community of a new fact.

MasterClasses are often kind of an interview format you may enjoy, and if you seek in person formats, sometimes colleges and museums hold public seminars, and some day soon may resume.

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