Metacademy: How to learn on your own
metacademy.org
metacademy.org
Learning via school works primarily because of the fixed, predictable and regular schedule dedicated to learning.
Learning French on my own for just 5-10 minutes daily has taught me a few things.
The amount of time spent on a subject is less important than having a predictable schedule.
Here's why this is important. We all read, hear about people who have read tons of books, who spend 5 hours learning daily and want to do the same.
And this is really bad. A recipe for predictable failure. You won't expect to eat five plates of rice because some dude you respect does it would you?
In the past, I would procrastinate when I hit a mental block, or a difficult lesson.
Now, I simply repeat past exercises because sticking with the schedule is more important than learning something new.
To keep things brief, the most important factor to learning on my own is having a reminder because as an adult, my days vanish in a myriad of unpredictable activities.
Without this reminder, i'll hit my head in six months when I remember that I was trying to learn something.
Best is to find a study group or willing tutor but for books/youtube, MOOC,
- Cal Newport's books/blog
- Garrity "all the math you missed", math for physics books by Boaz and Arfken et al.
- "Passing exams for Dummies" yellow book
- Barbara Oakley's books and MOOC,
- Lara Alcock and Keith Devlin's "how to study" books
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429349
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13060398
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13068215
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/5gu1kr/selfstudy_math...
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/5xnhuj/how_do_you_rea...
I'm building a search engine for lectures (https://www.findlectures) and avoided this problem by focusing on standalone lectures (e.g. conference talks). Their way seems much better, for cases where you need to understand all the pieces of a big problem. Also, kudos for curating data by hand :)
I do still think that it lacks visualisation of knowledge and all the different disciplines and fields you can learn.
I try to visualise it as best that I can (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map).
A little bit tangential to this is the idea of being able to find information online. I wonder, are there any tools that help googling things around?
[0]https://metacademy.org/graphs/concepts/beta_process#focus=p1...
1. people overestimate how much they'll remember.
2. this is due in part because in the moment you've learned something, you can recall it easily.
3. switching between things, pushes them out of immediate memory, so you can practice retrieving what you learned from while its less active (and competing with other things you're learning).