The more you learn, the faster you can learn

Some of the examples listed when the author speaks about why they are such a good learner felt a bit forced to me. I understand that authority is being established here, but a good number of the early examples seem to be what I would expect from a successful college student who has done an internship or two (e.g. what is recursion, building reusable UI components for a large company).

I also clicked through to some of the projects to find that they were team efforts, not independent projects that the author miraculously completed due to their own precociousness alone. This felt a bit misrepresented to me, although I understand the intent was probably just to show the breadth of involvement.

All in all I was happy to read the author's advice about learning but something about the intro rubbed me the wrong way. The author clearly has had quite a good number of experiences and I'm glad they're publishing these thoughts on those experiences. I just wonder if the post could do without the early hints of (forgive me) vaingloriousness? It felt quite academic and intriguing past the intro for me.

As the author may see this: please don't take this as anything other than a single individual's thoughts. I mean in no way to discourage you.

I found that companies always pretend to be all about learning, but in practice I haven't learned a damn thing after leaving uni, except the idiosyncrasies of their code. Maybe it gets better in senior positions (I spent 7 years in uni and have only 2 years of working experience), but I don't expect so.

I feel like since I am working, I am just getting dumber. I miss the time in uni where I was learning new things every week. I'm thinking of taking a year off just to learn new things.

This describes me pretty well. I'm a dedicated learner, and I think it's what I do best. I don't master topics. Even the information about the thing can be a distraction. It's about synthesizing info into your working knowledge. Everything is reference.

CSS is a great example. Do I know everything about it, even after 10 years? Nope. But I know it well enough that a quick reference is all I need for any problem.

Programming in general, too. Took me a minute to grok fundamental things (data types, functions, etc). I don't care what language I use, it's all one, plus syntax. I want to use other languages, for fun and synthesis.

I couldn’t agree more about finding the best resources. As with many other things in life, there are power law effects in how intelligent and knowledgeable experts are in their fields, and more importantly, how skilled they are at communicating what they know. The very best are orders of magnitude better than the average expert, and you will learn exponentially faster and better if you can find these people. This means being very discriminating—if you don’t find yourself highly enthusiastic to read/watch/listen to more of someone, you are much better off moving on quickly than trudging through without being truly inspired. It’s better to search broadly at first, then zero in when you feel that ‘click’.

Unfortunately, most schools and universities take the exact opposite approach. While you can eventually get very deeply and thoroughly educated about a specific field via academia, it’s an incredibly inefficient way to learn.

>> , scaled a botnet of over 2,000 bots that made money from a popular trivia game,

Did this make anyone else flinch?

edit: I do want to comment on the Feynman Technique linked in the article. I've never actually written concepts down as explained, but it's very close to how I _actually_ learn (or at least, feel confident in my knowledge). If I can't explain something in plain language, there's a good chance I've gaps. The steps listed are pretty succinct - going to have to give it a try!

Relying on fast estimations is one of the most powerful aspects of the way our brains work. But applying the skill of finding and applying fast estimations exclusively to every topic--like reading SparkNotes over an original piece--is a good way to eventually know very little.

Suppose any rate of decay in the things you retain. If your starting point is already small, losing any of it comes at a high cost. At least when pursuing mastery of a subject, you are repeatedly faced with new ways of understanding the basics, to the point that they are innate and automatic. You might forget small specifics which you can later find in your known references, but without mastery you might instead forget the basics--and relying on a reference for those basics means it's much less clear when they are aptly applied.

I would hazard a guess that that's why people have always tended to master only one or a couple skills, but people congregate and work in complement with others who have mastery over other skills. The community is the entity with knowledge over many domains--not the individual who learns tons of surface material. And simultaneously, everyone does learn a little bit about a lot of topics from time to time. But that balance is important--so I wouldn't personally weight so heavily the cursory synthesis portion of it as OP did.

--

Also, a little advice to OP. Drop some of the grandiose introduction. 100% of the links I clicked in the first paragraph were more disappointing than their descriptions led me to anticipate.

Basically, Pranay needed to boast his CV to the world and wrote a clickbaity article where half the paragraphs are mentions of his accomplishments and the rest is common sense which can be described as "learn enough to ask good questions and practice."

Interesting post! It's almost exactly what I've found that has worked well for me. Putting in the three or four hours at the beginning of the process of learning something to find the best resources is essential.

That being said, I do think the importance of mastering one or two things should not be overstated, and was kind of ignored in your post. Let me elaborate: for me my deepest skill has been 3D modeling and rendering: it's been about six years of pretty consistent practice, doing motion graphics, general modeling, animation, color theory, and really just trying to absorb all the knowledge I can about this specific passion. This process has been super useful for a couple reasons, and kind of worked to snap me out of the "generalist" learning mindset. For example, I've found the learning curve over time for 3D modeling is pretty generalizable to other skills I learn: because I've sunk so much time into it, and have had to push through plateaus, and grind over hills, and realize when I'm just coasting, whenever I am learning other things, I recognize the emotion swing and know roughly where in the learning process I am. Similarly, the fluency I have with my 3D modeling tools (pretty much all the hotkeys burned into muscle memory) gives me something to strive for when learning other tools and skills. I know what fluency feels like now, and I know when I'm lacking in it.

For me though, the most important thing about pursuing mastery of one or two things instead of full generalization, is that it teaches you patience. Genuine patience. Something I feel is becoming a lost art in our modern time. Seeing how far you've come after six years of working at something, and then looking at your inspirations and seeing how far you still have to go, is a feeling that can either break you, and make you give up, (if you are impatient), or can help you, as you have the choice to just keep grinding away and choosing to be patient. 3D modeling and animation is a ten year (minimum) goal for me, and it's served as a wonderful learning experience for me in many, unforseeable ways.

To tie it back to your post, I take this "ten years" mentality to almost everything I choose to learn nowadays: I try to stay away from the fancy new frameworks and toys, and try to learn fundamental things that I can spend ten years learning and still have space to grow.

Of course, some of these steps (like finding the best learning resource), can only be done once you're already an expert who knows what all of the resources are! There are also a lot of situational things, for example although you may have a preference between videos, documentation and example code, the best to learn from is usually whatever medium the best teacher decided to use.

“I left an important part out of the process above - how do you actually find the best resource. I don’t know.

That said, I’ve gotten “lucky” enough times that I think I know how to optimize for finding it.”

Pro tip: No, you don’t.

I’m game to explain it over coffee to the author, who seems to be in the Bay Area, but this writing reads a lot like someone who just started to scratch the surface on abstract learning and metacognition while thinking that it’s a wildly new discovery.

It’s hard to hear/read the reenforcing recitations of new-to-the-(speaker/author) concepts and not see it as a slow-motion replay of a common thought process, akin to sitting in Dolores park listening to musings on democracy and governance in the age of automation... thirty minutes after a batch of pot truffles has sold out...

As a generalist/multi-whatever, let me say this: expert engineers hate the knows-enough-to-be-dangerous guy who thinks he’s god’s gift to learning that can just walk in and be conversant after reading one book. That guy is a pain in the ass know-it-all that spoils conversations, derails projects, and digs bottomless pits of technical debt.

How do I know? I was that guy when I was younger, and I’m sure I drove people nuts.

No doubt there are times when I’m still that guy, but I try to hold my tongue more now until I’m confident in what I know and openly disclose where I think I fall short.

If you can’t take that mechanism for learning and flex it down to the bottom of the rabbit hole, or if you always fall back onto the crutch of relating a complex topic to a comfortable imperfect analogue, you’re aiming to be the engineer that gets handed non-critical work or the manager that nobody wants in a meeting... Or maybe a successful founder of some kick-ass mega unicorn... sigh... whatever.

In the big companies (and Silicon Valley) I hear/see this type of thinking and self-congratulation all the time among engineers with 1-4 years of professional experience. On occasion, those engineers have the horsepower to back it up, but it’s rare. Some of that write-up resonates with how I’ve learned/worked over time, but I’d never write something so stridently confident.

Me 20 years ago?

It's a clear flywheel. Desire/Curiosity -> Risk-taking -> Delayed Gratification -> Self-Confidence -> "Give me more".

This post could be expanded with what learning resources you found really awesome and why.

I use HN to find the best programming and math resources by using their search function, looking at the most upvoted learning resources or by scouring the comments and finding a consensus in a more qualitative manner.

On the top of my head: it led me to places such as Gilbert Strang for linear algebra or Eloquent JavaScript for a good introductory textbook and JavaScript The Good Parts for a more advanced textbook. 3Blue1Brown was a good channel for mathematics. And it is also thanks to HN that I discovered vimtutor. There are also a lot of references made her to Coursera course Learning how to Learn.

I wrote about something similar in the past: https://blog.oxplot.com/transient-ideas-and-learning/

There comes a point in the learning process for any subject where you get so excited about the fact that you understand something new that you feel you need to tell everyone about it. This feels like one of those posts—the author has very limited experience, but he has formalized a coherent (albeit unoriginal) idea and because of that exciting feeling he now wants to shout it to the world. It’s good to write as an exercise to help you grow or solidify your ideas, and a post like this, with all its self-congratulatory language, probably would have ended up better if it were written for OP himself rather than for the world. Instead, by publishing it, the author has the need to establish (and, it feels, compensate for) “why I’m qualified to talk about this”. It’s premature to have shared this underdeveloped idea, just as it’s premature for the author to be boasting his achievements.

I made a hobby out of exploring how learning works. The author is spot on. However, there are some tweaks worth considering:

1) The author proposes learning _everything_ under the sun, so that one has enough dependencies to learn new topics. This is like downloading most of the packages in aptitude to speed up builds.

However, I prefer to go about it in a different way. I focus on patience and normalizing myself to long and deep build chains. Learning a light topic in a new domain can take hours, if not days, to understand it deep enough to successfully use it to learn other concepts.

When there is something I need or want to know, but when I pull up Wikipedia and see a bunch of foreign vocabulary, I will create a dependency list of vocabulary, and learn everything I need to know to read that article and flawlessly understand it. If it is a new topic it can sometimes take a week of slow learning to quickly learn. It seems painfully slow, but it's learning a large chunk of a new domain in a week. This could be something a college class takes months to go over, so the rate is quite accelerated even if at the time it doesn't seem like it. Slow and steady really does win the race.

2) >I keep trying while following a breadth-first-search approach to domains and resources as described above.

and

>Stop. This is counter-intuitive, but unless you want to become a master at something (besides learning), you really just want to know everything at an intermediate level.

When recursively learning prerequisite concepts, usually understanding 100% of every prerequisite concept is necessary. There are no short cuts. In this scenario a depth first search is ideal, finding the root and starting there.

Likewise, a dependency chain of concepts is a chain of abstraction. When learning a prerequisite concept, no matter how abstract it is, it must be thought of as concrete. It must be understood as if it is concrete. This is the minimum bar to using a concept to build up other concepts. This is can be thought of as an intermediate level of understanding, but I suspect for most people this means mastery. Don't stop short.

3) What is learned will be forgotten within a couple of weeks, unless it a) has been pondered about a minimum of 6 seconds, usually by making up a story to describe it to yourself. The 6 second rule is a neurological limitation that is required to move the memory from short term to long term storage. And b) It is strongly beneficial for what is learned to leave the mind and come back into it on one way or another. This can happen by doing something with your hands, talking out loud about it to someone else, or note taking. This is important and without it details will be lost. I write in a condensed mind-map list like format for this reason. Likewise if I forget something or remember something wrong, I can go back with a ctrl+f and figure out what I did wrong.

4) Etymology is massively important when it comes to learning. The history of why the concept is called what it is called, as well as understanding why it was invented or how it was discovered. I try to visualize what the world was like before the thing I am learning existed and how things used to be done. This teaches me of it's power and when and why to use it. When etymology is done right, the mind will record the concept into spacial awareness which is the strongest and longest lasting kind of memory we have.

There is a lot I could say, but by understanding where people are coming from, you can apply what technique is ideal for that specific task. Learning is no different. One can master it, and from that the gains are innumerable.

Hi OP I am wondering if you ever did the corsera course "Learning how to learn" and what your thoughts were on it and if the you consciously or unconsciously employed the methods described to help you learn new topics.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.

Instead of reading 'Learn You a Haskell', I would say go 'Haskell Programming From First Principle.

I agree with the BFS strategy but I’ve never gotten good enough at anything to gain the respect of an SME.

Work's firewall is coming up saying this site is malware :S