Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago I used to be very proactive about my learning. I read tons of books, did MOOCs, tutorials, learnt new tools and frameworks...

What I found with time is that I forgot most of those. Except for the very basic and foundational concepts, anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone. I can't even remember most of the courses or books I've read.

Even worse, in some cases I ended up actually using that cool tool that I learnt 3 years ago. Guess what, now it is 2 major versions ahead and most of what I knew is useless anyway.

I love the reference to JIT learning in the article. This has been my primary way of learning for the past few years: wait until I'm facing a problem, and then put the effort to learn enough to solve it.

I still do some background explorative learning, but JIT is much more efficient and effective.

> Anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone.

I think that's true of any method of learning. I once took a class on a proprietary audio visual language, and a year of so later my manager asked me to write some control software using that language, and I basically had to start from scratch.

On the other hand, I took Stanford's first MOOC Swift Class, and have been using Swift as my primary language ever since.

I find the learning something again for the second (or nth) time is at least easier than it was the first time.

Very much this. I'll take MOOCS read an article and then feel like I forgot everything only to have a much easier time "learning" it the second time when it becomes practical.

> anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone. I can't even remember most of the courses or books I've read.

I don’t think this is unique to MOOCs. I think this is a fact of life.

scary to get treated by a doctor who forgot most of the stuff they learnt in med school.

That's why it's important to find specialists when you need actual treatment, because they are treating the same thing all over all the time.

Even scarier when you realize most of the stuff they do they didn't even learn in med school.

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