Get a personal teacher
sebastian.bearblog.dev
sebastian.bearblog.dev
My experience is exactly the opposite. Most teachers are about the same level as you'd get from a random blog post (since these are often the people writing those blog posts). But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water.
The only exceptions where a teacher is essential are areas where you learn by doing and being critiqued, not by reading/watching. E.g. instrument/voice lessons, team sports, dancing, acting, etc. Or when you're close to the top of your field and the remaining knowledge is only in top experts' heads because they haven't written it down yet.
My complaint in these cases is that yes, I can find it, but I would first have to know what I'm looking for and yet I have no way to recognize what the best book is.
If I wanted to learn about Sparta, I would have no way of knowing whether Paul Cartledge's book is better than Stephen Hodkinson's or Steven Pressfield's. And God help me if one of them has a loyal Twitter following spamming 5-star reviews everywhere...
So you absolutely do have a way of knowing. What you usually don't have a reliable way of knowing is how good of a teacher on Sparta a local history teacher happens to be. And the answer is usually, not good enough to write a book on it.
> So you absolutely do have a way of knowing.
As long as you already know enough about Sparta to be able to tell whether those blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews are legit or spam.
> What you usually don't have a reliable way of knowing is how good of a teacher on Sparta a local history teacher happens to be.
Are you saying you honestly can't think of a way to vet a local teacher? How about taking to their students?
> And the answer is usually, not good enough to write a book on it.
Which, coincidentally, can be said for most authors as well, but that doesn't stop them from writing a book and then flooding the internet with blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews about how good it is.
Nope, it's more of just a generalized credibility/bullshit detector. It has zero to do with the topic at hand. This is a major life skill that is important to develop.
> Are you saying you honestly can't think of a way to vet a local teacher? How about taking to their students?
You can figure out if they're good at teaching as a general skill (although contacting a bunch of students who are willing to take the time to talk to you is a lot of work). It's quite difficult to suss out their actual knowledgeability, however. For example, you can find a local moral philosophy professor who is well-liked, but who will teach everything through a lens of Kantianism and disparage consequentialism and never even mention virtue ethics. And you could spend 50 hours of private tutoring and never know you were receiving major bias and being left with huge gaps -- something unlikely to happen if you spent the same time carefully reading a couple of well-respected intro textbooks on the subject.
> ...and then flooding the internet...
See above about credibility/bullshit detection. Remember, don't look at average stars or anything like that, look for posts/reviews that go in-depth where you can tell the reviewer knows what they're talking about, and then look for consistent commonalities between posts.
I guess the same detector hasn't been developed well enough to apply to teachers promoting themselves. That's a shame, generalizing is an important life skill to develop.
And even when you do, you should still remember that almost anyone can find and have access to a world-class book, while you're quite unlikely to have a world-class expert locally to teach you.
I do not believe this is possible. Sure, you can tell if the reviewer thinks he knows what he is talking about, and that some internet people agree with him, but you cannot judge whether he is really correct unless you are already a subject matter expert.
Or, by Douglas Adams, knowing the question is pretty important.
Oh god. Why Sparta? Why this particular historiographical can of worms, where the history of the history is far more convoluted than the history of Lacedaemon itself?
No. Someone without a pretty solid knowledge of Ancient Greek history and historiography and the skills to be able to track the changes in the research literature is going to have a damn hard time finding the best book on Sparta.
I come from a really small town and made it further than anyone I know in that town in tech. (Not in terms of money, though)
Just Google: "best books on Sparta reddit". You will find 10 threads, and on those threads if you look at top-k, you will see some entries recurring. And two-three lines of explanation.
Read a non-trivial amount of sections to know whether it is what you are looking for. Library is a good place. You can also check Google Books or pirate before buying.
Not only about books but about MOOCs, YT playlists, and so on.
I have used this method since Junior year in High School, straight up to Master’s degree. I always got good grades, many times topped the class.
I’ve done a lot of mentoring, including through some formal programs.
One of my biggest challenges has been students/mentees who find a very convincing blog post or video from a confident, polished writer, then mistake that person’s confidence for absolute authority on a subject.
The worst example I can think of is the world of JavaScript training influencers. These people produce courses and training material for sale, then heavily use social media to promote their material as the canonical source of truth in the field.
These influencers can be very persuasive, confident, and relentless in their advertising. They have an incentive to present their material as flawlessly correct and exaggerate or invent problems with other ways of doing things.
The result is juniors who have taken some overpriced online JavaScript course who are utterly convinced their knowledge is superior to that of the 10-plus years of experience of people around them. They’re off on some tangent trying to rewrite part of the codebase in some new framework/tool/language that their influencers said was the “best”. They won’t accept that there are multiple ways to solve problems or that some times the correct engineering solution is to use a simpler framework even if it’s not trending on Twitter.
It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources and assume that what they read is superior to the real-world experience of the engineers they work with.
As long as it’s kept in check I think it’s practically a necessary development stage for many. Everyone needs a starting point from where they evaluate and integrate other values and perspectives. Humility and pragmatism are learned through the process.
If I decided to learn Rust today, I'd be able to catch the sentences that go against my intuitions in programming and double check them. If I were to read an article about, say, superconductors, I don't have that same intuition as I do for coding. I'd have to fact-check every single sentence or just take it as truth.
Used to see the same thing with every junior developer who went to a conference or read a new book. I did it myself at that point in my career. All kinds of enthusiasm (which can be good) and ideas (which might not be good because the junior developer does not have the experience to be a good judge).
I heartily agreed the whole way through, until he revealed he had no idea who any of my teachers were. It's just that everyone feels that way.
The lesson is: blindly following a series of teachers like oracles is the way of the beginner. The path of the master is accepting that YOU are your own teacher, and everyone else is just providing tools.
To agree with you to some extent, the author fails to consider that you're often not looking for random unrelated things. Finding one really great answer online often provides you with a really great resource for other really great answers.
A private tutor, coach-like, can observe and correct, and fill in gaps. I think this applies to all fields of endeavour. It won't make you smarter, but gives you a foundation for the next level - where, maybe, some intuitive smarts of yours will shine.
Now, the only problem is simply finding a good tutor. You just need to know if they know what you don't know you don't know.
I don’t think this is an exception. Record yourself doing these things and critique yourself. It’s not as valuable as having multiple people critique you, but it’s not less valuable than having one other stranger critique you. Until you gain a certain level of competence you’ll know where and how you suck.
I’m currently learning bass guitar and recording myself has been incredibly valuable for seeing and hearing things I don’t notice when I’m playing. I think it’s also sort of closed the gap between what I think I sound like and how I actually sound when I play. (I’d recommend it even if you get a teacher.)
my only teachers have been online videos and web pages. I can’t see how a teacher can add value here. If I got one, I’d most likely be learning the teacher’s way. I’m finding a lot of value in hearing multiple POVs, trying it all out, finding what works for me and whose opinions I should value.
The article says teachers are faster, but I can evaluate online video sources much faster and more easily than I can evaluate teachers.
I might not learn faster but I certainly learn more and at a deeper level, because my mind is engaged in every part of the process.
As an aside, I think teachers often gloss over things that they think don’t matter right now. You’re getting a short cut, but you either miss out on something or later have to learn how that thing connects to what you know. Often, I find taking a moment to learn a little bit about that thing can aid you on your overall goal.
I've had both experiences, and I agree, in most cases a private teacher might not be worth it, but if you find the right person, it'll bring you way further than you ever could have gone on your own.
If they can’t do that last bit, they’ll certainly help get you up to speed quickly, but you’ll be missing out on larger contextual understanding.
That said, I’ve seen these types of teachers favor people who have shown themselves capable of learning and reasoning about what they’re doing. And finding these teachers often requires either luck, connections, or already having a certain level of knowledge.
So, I’d say grab a hold of such a teacher if you can, but in the context of the article, just finding a teacher isn’t necessarily a net benefit; you should do everything you can do to learn outside of a teacher. (And I’d say that’s true even if you get a teacher.)
Edit: I also meant to say, if you don’t know what you don’t know, finding a teacher isn’t necessarily easy. Getting started solo can really help you get an idea of what you don’t know and can aid in finding someone who knows those things.
Other topics require judgement, the weighing of alternatives. Sometimes there is no clear winner.
When you just need to know a fact, searching online or asking GPT is a good way to go.
I haven't had good luck learning higher level concepts this way. One example: how would you discover an idea like "don't repeat yourself" if you didn't know it? There's a school of thought that says you'll learn it when you need it, but I'm not so sure - I think you can make faster progress if someone guides you through several complex improvements at once.
Another example: say you're writing a networked game and you are communicating some basic information but you are also communicating inforation that is derived from the basic information (and hence is unnecessary to send). How do you learn this is inelegant, "repeating yourself", a waste of bandwidth? A critique from a mentor would clue you in right away.
A teacher obviously has to have some baseline level of intellect/subject knowledge but so much of teaching is everything else (eg pertinent examples, optimally sequencing lessons, illustrating how things fit together etc).
Anecdotal but similarly in sports it seems like many of the best coaches were career role players and given their lesser talent, have a much better understanding of the myriad techniques that aided their development. Whereas someone like lebron (not saying he’d be a bad coach) is so inherently talented he probably has less of a grasp on communication because it comes so naturally. The passing reads he was making as a junior in high school were more advanced than most of the NBA today lol.
And learning is exponential so I don’t think it’s a teacher job to lead you all the way there just far along enough so anyone with enough aptitude can figure out the rest themselves. I could just be trying to further validate my belief but I almost think it’s dangerous to inherit the entirely of someone else’s knowledge since every view we develop is influenced to some extent by our own life experiences. Also just for diversity of thought
As a child I was taught one on one when I had trouble. It really got me unstuck as needed. I still remember some of those lessons fondly.
I used to teach one on one for pay. I've taken the worst cs student in class and in a few weeks made them well above average. I've helped people pass math classes that they were completely failing at in just a few hours. This isn't anything special.
And now teaching my PhD students one on one I know each very well. I know what they know, what they tend to miss, and no amount of online videos or books will be better than a tailored explanation designed just for them where I recast a tricky problem into one that they already know.
You haven't experienced a good teacher one on one.
You can find the absolute best teacher in the whole world.
Now that I'm competent and experienced, I get it: I have no time to mentor people.
As a mentor, you have to be really selective about your mentees (unless it's part of your job of course).
Also, the mentor gets a competent colleague who can meaningfully contribute in return for their time.
* to contribute to my company/community * to make myself a multiplier (I can do work or I can help 5 junior engineers be a little better at their work) * to learn myself (a great way to learn is by teaching) * to grow my breadth of knowledge (I hear about what other people are doing) * to grow my network * to improve my leadership/managerial skills * because people have invested time and mentorship in me
I’m kind of surprised by how many of these responses regard reciprocity.
Isn’t it enough to help make another person better?
It's strange to see the obvious so heavily upvoted. Really? Nobody knew that a good mentor is worth his weight in gold?
I think in the future, the main value of going to college will be socializing, networking, and learning "life" skills through interactions with others, dorm mates, etc. The teaching part will be already taken care of by AI.
I find that prompting chatgpt with book excerpts keeps it grounded in reality.
If you just have one very specific question, it's often easier to ask ChatGPT and then fact-check its output.
It also seems to me that it's gotten a lot better about hallucinating. When I first started using it it would often be wildly wrong, but not it seems like it hallucinates about as much as the average person I talk to.
I don't know, maybe I'm just a old person yelling at clouds, but I just find it crazy to use AI for learning anything. Maybe one day.
I feel like I've learned a ton of new things from GPT 4 in terms of software development recently, while also feeling I've been stagnating in my job with nobody to learn from. It's just so easy to have it explore alternative approaches or have it structure things in ways you may not be comfortable with yet (and would thus otherwise avoid) but would be better in the long run. It has the breadth to show you all that's possible while reducing the entry effort for learning to near zero.
Human beings are incredibly incredibly expensive to "make" into any useful adult thing. I have spent more money just this week just on a single one of the humans who are dependent on me than it would cost me to buy a fully packaged GPU in a box at best buy (and I think that box would actually have multiple GPUs packaged together in it). And I'll do that week after week for many more years. And then it will still be like four more years after that before they're capable of being a teacher.
It was harder to make the first GPU than to make one marginal unit of human teacher, but it's vastly easier to make a marginal unit of GPU.
I'm honestly curious what your mental model is, where you seem to think human labor is cheaper than computer hardware...
19-20=You receive the enlightenment you were asking for, more or less instantly.
3-18=You get what amounts to a Socratic conversation with Wikipedia. Which, unless you're fortunate enough to have access to expert personal mentorship, is better than what you had before.
1-2=You get a load of highly-plausible bullshit. You end up worse off intellectually, possibly much worse.
All in all, I'm OK with these odds, especially at this early stage of the LLM game.
And just as I switched to a teaching career. FML... :-D
I haven’t tested this, but I would imagine the type of information you’re requesting dictates the quality of response you’ll get. In my case I use it mainly as interactive documentation for different tooling. Asking it to explain the process for synthesizing new hypothetical polymers likely will not yield useful results.
It’s worth noting that my experiences are with GPT 4.
Based on a recent experience, I agree.
I'm not a professional software engineer or architect, but I have a web app used by a few thousand people a month and recently decided to rewrite it using modern web technologies — Vue 3, Vite, Pinia, TypeScript, and serverless functions. I was familiar with these, but hadn't used them for a real project. During the rewrite, I leaned hard on GPT-4/Phind/Copilot as teachers/pair programmers. It's hard to overstate how helpful these tools were.
For the questions I had, search engines were hit-or-miss. Within a few days it became clear that the pre-2023 "search engine" is dead, and that post-2023 search engines will look like these new LLM-powered tools. The future of topic-specific search engines is well represented by Phind, which leverages GPT-4 but is also trained with current technical documentation and includes references in answers.
This is really something that has to be experienced to be understood. I have a friend who's a professional software engineer, and he had to watch me for a couple hours before it really clicked. I recommend trying this if you haven't already.
If someone is already building something like this, I'd love to hear about it :)
Finding the good teacher is, of course, a quest in and of itself. My experience is that becoming an assistant to an expert in the field is a great fast track to mastery, once you're good enough. Ideally a paid one, unpaid internships are super easy to abuse.
I thought it was 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. You seem to be talking about something closer to formative assessment. (I think both are useful.)
> The good teacher will look at what you're doing and what you're struggling with and point you to exactly the right tool in the complicated toolset you're trying to pick up, and show you how much easier it makes your task.
I disagree with this.
If you haven't already, I'd highly recommend you read 'How to solve it' by George Pólya. It's focused on teaching and learning math, but the same applies to many other subjects.
One of the main points in the book is that you can help a student who is stuck or on a wrong path by suggesting a question to them: a question that they might ask themselves.
If your teacher always tells you which tool to use, how will you ever learn to pick your own tools in future?
Struggling to do something, seeing the expert who is teaching/mentoring you do it in a fraction of the time, then doing it yourself in a fraction of the time as you try the tool/technique they just demonstrated is a powerful experience that I have had multiple times in my life.
I swear by coaches/instructors in other areas of my life, but haven’t had much luck with language teachers. I’ve had private teachers with middling success (great at correction, bad at longer term planning), and found I had more improvement by self-studying.
In the interim year since, I've continued the 1:1 lessons and obviously improved a lot naturally as well. I've had multiple people ask me if I was half-Japanese (I'm not) and other people tell me "it would be rude to say you're good at Japanese; it's more apt to say you can just speak it normally." Other people don't mention it at all and just treat me as they would any other Japanese person. (Which sometimes backfires because they use high diction or very arcane expressions and idioms.)
For me, the key was finding a 1:1 teacher that I could meet 2-3 times a week (we met remotely over Skype), and I mixed basic conversational practice in along with targeted grammar study. iTalki is where I first started down this path of 1:1 tutoring, (where I found my first few teachers), and it's worked out great for me.
I can recommend Yuri T on iTalki.
I mean, imagine I'm learning how to make an angel food cake and it comes out tough. The teacher's didn't. Are they prepared to help me debug my process? If they can list possible causes instantly, they're definitely helpful. If not, :shrug:.
> I am unsure how to approach someone with such a request, it feels like such an imposition to them
Just surround yourself with competent people and you will have friends to share knowledge with both ways.
* Around senior, principal, director, fellow levels in their discipline. C-suite seems different, hard to develop friendships based on expertise with many of them.
Posted a job description – initially setup by asking gpt4 to help write it down, then grammarly to make it solid; setup interviews with a bunch of people; got on a call with a handful; chose one whit whom I'm working with once or twice a week.
Did it because YT tutorials were not helping, because there are a lot of them(hot topic), from many different people, with quickly outdated material, and un-interesting or annoying people(too many memes, jokes, or segways).
Now I have someone I pay to get on a call a few times per week, we go over the assignments, I ask questions, they tell me what to look out for and how to do it better.
I have accepted to pay per hour a bit above what I make on my fulltime job.
Curious how the online material compares
I don't see this on YT as much and there are subjects, mainly front end JS frameworks, that are frequently changing. So much so that I often run into backwards breaking changes and have to resort to the comments section for corrections.
I sense that youtube is happy with users wasting away looking for the right video tutorial.
I always wanted to paint portraits - I can draw people relatively well, but they never look like the people I'm actually portraying. And my drawings are very 2-dimensional, which is a conscious style choice that nonetheless doesn't lend itself well to real-life portraits.
I started following Bob Ross and, while I did get some okay paintings out of it, the end result was never what I intended. My brush simply didn't move the way his does and as a result my trees didn't look very happy. I next signed up for a popular online platform that's primarily focused on art lessons, but again, my exercises kept going out of control because I couldn't get the paint to behave in the same way as in the videos. And I found myself yelling at the screen several times because, say, the artist in the video would add violet to a person's skin, the end result would look very good, but at no point was there an explanation for why would you even think about adding violet to paint skin.
How did a random teacher help? Because they give me real-time feedback on what I'm doing, they warn me about mistakes before I build everything on top of them, they answer my infinite "but why?" questions, and provide useful background about how to reason my way into whatever I'm trying to achieve. No Udacity course will look at your code and say "this is fine, but this algorithm will not scale beyond 10k records and also your comments need to be more informative".
I found my current teacher looking online for well-rated teachers near me, but this has also been my experience with teachers whose online rating I truly don't know.
Look at some masters of caricature and cartooning, find photos of some of their favorite subjects, think about how these drawings exaggerate what's there in the shapes of the subject's face/body/motion. This is how you make a drawing that is simultaneously a stylized 2D rendering and one that "looks like" its subject.
Like, get some coffee table books of Hirschfeld or Sorel or someone else who did a lot of caricatures of celebrities and study the heck out of them. Copy some of their drawings with photos of the subjects close to hand. Look at a person and ask yourself what they'd do here, and draw that.
Hopefully this is something your teacher has already gotten you doing! But if they haven't, then give it a try, and see what they have to say about your attempts.
But the things is that all else is not equal. Even putting cost aside, the main challenge is how you find a good teacher if you know nothing on the subject. If you are on your third teachers, suddenly the shitty blog post might not be that shitty any more. There is also logistics challenge (scheduling etc.) that reduces the effectiveness of getting a teacher.
I think people already knew that having a teacher is good. The question of how to get one is that hard part.
Most teachers don't want to be stuck for months teaching someone the basics readily available on the internet, in literature, and recently, even GPT. But there are bootcamps and paid teachers in many disciplines for the very entry-level folks.
It's easy to get a teacher when you're above intermediate in most topics. You also provide value to the teacher by bringing new ideas. That is more of an informal process of developing mutually beneficial friendships. You don't call your expert friends teachers, though you do teach each other a lot. And those friendships can definitely be seen as teaching.
Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about many people "showing him the way" in expert circles in his biography miniseries on Netflix. That is effective knowledge sharing.
I started learning to sing 3 years ago. I've had two different teachers and I'm confident in saying I would have never learnt even a tenth of what I know without them. Teachers and coaches really come into their own when it comes to realtime skills. You just don't have the mental space to perform the learning task and assess your performance at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
> Bloom's paper analyzed the results of University of Chicago PhD students Joanne Anania and Joseph Arthur Burke who, through their dissertations' research, found that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment with one teacher to 30 students, with or without mastery learning. As quoted by Bloom: "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class".[1]: 4 Additionally, the variation of the students' achievement changed: "about 90% of the tutored students ... attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20%" of the control class.[1]:
I learn in a very specific way; when studying languages, I was not able to find a language partner who was both consistently available and could adapt to my learning methodology. So I went with someone who was consistently available and supplied the teaching framework myself.
On personal & spiritual development it's very useful.
Often the process of formulating the question by writing it down or talking about leads me to understand the problem and either know where to find the answer or often know the answer. On theoretical matters I hardly ever had a question that wasn't answered properly by someone online or in a book.
It feels like the difference between watching TV and playing a video game. In one case the content is the same for everyone, and you're passively consuming it at the pace set by the broadcaster/teacher. The other case is considerably more interactive and engaging. The pace, difficulty, and even storyline can be adjusted according to the player's abilities and choices.
There’s nothing wrong with blogging about something that works well for you, in case a reader can use [some part of] it in their own lives.
See also satisficer vs. maximizer: https://healthymindstherapy.blog/2021/06/12/are-you-a-maximi...
Taking a formal structured course with graded assignments (or demanding workouts etc.), under the supervision of a paid teacher is mostly useful for when you're lacking in self-discipline (which most of us are to some degree, so it is a good idea particularly to develop necessary skills in areas you aren't all that excited about).
I read Stroustrup, Meyers, plus the Core Guidelines, and I do my best. But it would have been great to show someone what I had done along the way, and have them critique and provide expert alternatives.
I feel like books can get you to a point of competence, but it's very difficult to reach a point of mastery or even excellence without someone there to show you what you're doing wrong in your specific case, and how to improve the way you work, or think about a problem.
I’m on the market for a PT to finally iron out that belly and look good in my swimming trunks.
Any tips and good practices on how to choose a good one? (not online, in a actual IRL gym)
Highly recommend consistent resistance training with some cardio. 3-4x a week for about an hour is OK.
Resistance training is actually better for consistently losing weight in the medium/long term vs straight cardio.
From my point of view their skill is irrelevant. Almost all know how to make a good enough schedule and diet plan. It's pretty basic info. Or you can ask Chat GPT to make one. Or buy one online for 20 dollars. They are all similar.
The reason you want a PT is to keep you motivated & accountable. So most important is if you trust the PT, like him or her and will take it seriously if they hold you accountable (and the way they do it).
And in some cases if you want to start doing complex & heavy lifting it's important to have one showing you the correct movements.
Regarding heavy lifting it's not necessary, and would not get into super heavy lifting since it's very injury prone. On this level I strongly disagree with a lot of Pt's. They end up having most people do deadlifts. Which is just not worth the risk vs reward, let alone things like snatches. Medium-heavy squats & bench is enough for most people.
I personally just bought a bench, barbells, put some rings in the ceiling, got a pare of dumbbels, and a kettlebell. Enough for training and saves me hours a week not having to go to a gym.
Have a tool that can drag /drop most native apps together. Focused on fitness & yoga atm.
It's pretty flexible but wouldn't call it bespoke.
Main market is trainers with a larger online following. Smaller an off the shelf app is also fine.
I agree, being self taught is kind of a misnomer. I've hired PHD students to teach me maths concepts I forgot that I know I'd have no idea how to teach myself. PHD + open courseware or online stanford courses has done wonders since I'm getting properly back into ML / AI stuff.
If you're in the US and what you're learning is something that can be done online, then things are extremely in your favor. I've hired a Spanish tutor in Colombia and a math teacher in Serbia to great effect.
I also recommend Udemy as they have some great courses there.
Has anyone found a teacher for something non-traditional or particularly interesting?
If you have a maker space nearby, they are a fantastic resource for learning. Some places even offer classes for non-members, which may be worth considering if you're not sure if you want to use the space for things besides classes.
Just make sure you pay them for their time.
This is a major red flag. Arbitrarily selecting the number seven is an attempt to mislead the superstitious numerologist types. It’s almost always the cue for well meaning opinionated bullshit