The Unfashionable Art of Learning Things

“The irony is that in our rush to optimize everything, we’ve optimized away one of the most effective learning techniques humans have. Sometimes the old ways persist not because we’re stuck in the past, but because they actually work. Your brain doesn’t care about efficiency. It cares about understanding.“

This couldn’t be said any louder. Just finished my BA in Comp Sci as a 36 year old man. Each and every class filled with Laptops. Typing and chatGPT studying. I never brought a laptop to class, I had a good old pencil and paper, sitting down looking like a caveman from the Stone Age. Ask me what ACK is, or how to read opcodes in a line of assembly code and I got you covered. I wonder if the same could be said for my peers.

“The inefficiency isn’t a bug it’s a feature”.

As with physical training, fixating on the desired end state is a recipe for disaster. Instead, we must fixate on the boring, slow, consistently repeated actions that drive in our desired direction. Athletic prowess and six-pack abs don't feel how one might suppose: they feel like a couple hours per day slogging it out on the rowing machine or stationary bike and then hitting the weights and stretching for a bit; and they feel like eating sardines and vegetables within a limited daily window. (These are examples of many possibilities, of course.)

Engage with the struggle and trust the process.

> "...engineers often mistakenly optimize for speed of information consumption over depth of understanding, leading to superficial knowledge."

really. Learning should [never] be fun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42099596