Arun2009

> If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem.

This is simply not as emotive an issue for elections as banning cow-slaughter or defending India from the evil Muslims.

Not to mention that Indian political discourse is basically a shit-show of politicians trading 3rd grade level insults with one another, a bit like monkeys flinging excrement at each other.

Monsoons have been a dud so far. Our well nearly dried up, and we were planning to shift should water run out. The municipal water supply is useless. The irony: my state (Kerala) receives around 3000+ mm rainfall per year on average, and suffered from devastating floods last year.

I feel sad when Indians wank about military technology and "national security" issues due to Pakistan and China. The single greatest national security threat for India is Indians' abject incompetence in governing themselves. I fear that we will pay a very heavy price for this.

It turns out that Pakistanis are humans too, and they need water as well. Besides, there's the little problem of nukes.

> heavily accented English instead of The Indian language.

Over the years I have grown to think of English as an honorary Indian language, kind of like the Mother Theresa of Indian languages. Not a mother-tongue perhaps, but definitely, a beloved aunty-tongue at the very least.

> there's enough floor space in the urban core of Bangalore

There's vastly more to India than a few metro cities. A quick google search reveals that around 65+ % of Indian population lives in rural areas.

India is in for some very dark times if the climate situation gets worse. The positive lining in the cloud is that we have some measure of political stability for the next 5 years.

I too am a huge believer in breadth-first learning rather than depth-first, and my reasoning is the same: in my experience, ideas need to stay with you for a while before they take root in your mind and you get used to them.

The big ideas in any Mathematics subject are usually very few. They can be covered at a high-level in a few classes before going into them in detail. This also gives you a broader context for you to place the details as you come across them.

Maybe this is mentioned in the article, but my first thought was that the license is photoshopped.

I'd contest your claim that MOOCs "don't work".

It's true that only a fraction of those who participate in typical MOOCs complete them (8 - 10%), (https://imgur.com/a/HI4IXbt , from "HarvardX and MITx: Four Years of Open Online Courses", https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2889436), but a significant fraction (~15-20%) also explore these courses (i.e., they watch 50% or more of lectures). So this means that the MOOCs are reaching around 20-30% of the participants in some significant manner.

First of all, is the larger drop out rates really a problem? I'd argue that the option to drop out of a course if you feel that it doesn't serve your needs right now is itself valuable. This means that you're free to spend your time in ways that are more useful to you. Also, a large number of those taking the MOOCs are themselves teachers. This means that the high quality of pedagogy that MOOCs can deliver will have cascading effects through educators who use them to upgrade their own skills.

How to improve the effectiveness of MOOCs? There are plenty of things we can do, too many in fact to go into in one post. A few keys areas that I can see are (a) pedagogy (finding great teaching talent and professionally beefing up their performance), (b) affordability (an issue in developing countries primarily), (c) formal accreditation, and (d) a wider selection of courses that form a genuine alternative to the standard university programs. Models that I find incredibly exciting are that of India's IGNOU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indira_Gandhi_National_Open_Un...), NPTEL (https://nptel.ac.in/), and Swayam (https://swayam.gov.in/), all of which issue officially recognized certificates. But unfortunately, as with many things that the Government of India does, the intentions are noble but the execution is mediocre. There's clearly room for players who will "full-ass" what IGNOU set out to do.

Democratizing high quality education.

It used to be that the best teachers were available only to a few dozens of privileged students at a time. But now we have the technology to scale great pedagogy to reach millions of learners. I also think we ought to move from a push model of education to a pull model, i.e., learners get to pick and choose from a selection of good teachers and progress through various levels at their own pace (and get accredited for their learning). Classroom learning really ought to go or be reduced to very special cases. That we all have to be synchronized on when we are prepared to learn a topic is an outdated concept.

MOOCs are an excellent step in this direction, but we really should be doing more. In education, I think we're in a stage similar to where internet search was before google or smart phones were before iphone.

In my experience, it's vagueness of learning goals that actually kills my attempts at learning.

In an effort to overcome this, I now try to commit to a formal learning program with examinations and tests for things I want to learn. This gives me a definite body of knowledge to master and a criteria to judge my progress. I have used this successfully with learning the rudiments of Sanskrit. I enrolled in a correspondence course program and had online sessions with a Sanskrit tutor for some time.

Where such a program doesn't exist or isn't feasible, it still helps to stick to a definite text. For example, if you want to learn classical mechanics, it helps to stick to just one book rather than refer to books and videos from here and there and losing track of your learning program in the process.

The key takeaways for me from the 80000 hours test (https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/):

> Papers that report boring or common-sense results seem to be true very often. Cognitive psychology (e.g. memory and perception) mostly held up.

> ...it turns out for most people "if the claim of the paper doesn't make intuitive sense, the paper is wrong" is a good shortcut that works about 70% of the time.

Generally, the closer to the "metal" (e.g., memory, perception, learning) and the more pedestrian the psychological finding is, the likelier it is to hold good.

I might be giving in to a bit of hindsight bias here, but I have come across this in the psychology of learning myself. It has been a bit underwhelming I must admit. "Good sleep, retrieval practice, elaboration, paying attention, meaningfulness and organization, and spaced repetition result in better learning; massed-practice is not very useful for long-term retention". Well, no kidding!

If you haven't heard of it yet, I suggest that you look at Albert Ellis's Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), and start training yourself to aggressively fight any demons that might be haunting you. I highly recommend Ellis's book, "A Guide to Rational Living", which will train you in challenging your own self-defeating thoughts. Note that I don't mean this as a cure-all, but merely as one of the tools you (or anyone else!) should have in their life's toolbox.

The fundamental premise of REBT is that it's not the events in our lives themselves, but our beliefs about the events that upset our emotional state. Hence to change our negative emotions, we must attack through reason the beliefs that promote negative emotional states. Here's is a useful summary of the REBT approach: https://rebtnetwork.org/whatis.html .

What I love most about REBT is that it trains us to be our own therapist. That is quite empowering and liberating!

> "To this day," Bjork says, "most people think about forgetting as decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that gradually fade away. But that has been disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone because you can't recall it, but we can prove that it's still there. For instance, you can still recognize a 'forgotten' item in a group. Yes, without continued use, things become inaccessible. But they are not gone."

This was quite eye opening to me when I first heard of it. Apparently, our long term memory is virtually limitless. You never truly lose something you once had learned well.

Another fact about memory that I found equally interesting: memory is not a "thing" but a process. When you recall something, you are actually reconstructing the memory from various factors associated with it, pretty much like how a paleontologist might reconstruct the image of a dinosaur from fossil remains.

In a previous life, I used to tutor students who had to cover high-school mathematics for their university courses.

What I found was that going through a proper high-school textbook was the best way to cover all the topics systematically and in a focused manner. If you can get your hands on some such books (such as a text for the International Baccalaureate Higher Mathematics or the UK Advanced Levels), that would be the ideal solution.

You can also look at Schaum's series at this level (search them on Amazon). Some useful books are Schaum's Basic Mathematics, Intermediate Algebra, Precalculus, and Calculus. These have the advantage that many problems are solved and the text is completely waffle-free. I myself enjoyed working through Schaum's Calculus whenever I had to brush-up my calculus skills in the university.

Yet another option is to go through the texts by "Art of Problem Solving" (https://artofproblemsolving.com/). From what I have seen so far, these are beautiful texts that stress on improving your problem solving skills along with acquiring technical knowledge. However, I haven't taught from these, so I can't vouch for how the learning experience with them will be like.

In my admittedly amateurish opinion, having a vivid picture of the horrors of nuclear weapons can be very effective in curbing nationalistic and pro-war tendencies among both citizens and leaders of nuclear-armed states. MAD is effective only if all parties are keenly aware of the "Destruction" part of the deal.

I have seen this work first hand myself when India and Pakistan mobilized their militaries on a large scale a couple of times after the 1998 nuclear tests by both nations. A few articles that came out during that time about the effects of nuclear weapons decidedly served to cool off the fervor of several uber-patriotic people I knew.

If by "great" you mean influential, then definitely India's epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata would fit the bill IMO.

Wikipedia has this to say about Mahabharata:

> The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever written".[7][8] Its longest version consists of over 100,000 śloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa.[9][10] W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahābhārata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the Quran.[11] Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the Fifth Veda.

I just went on incognito mode and googled the title of the article. From google search results, I followed the WSJ link that showed up.

> And this causes your spaceship to rise, and defy the Earth's gravity.

Won't it cause the surrounding atmosphere to cave in to the negative-gravity source as well?

But isn't that the way it's supposed to be?

I have always thought of reputation on SO as a measure of the total usefulness of your answers. When people find your reply useful, they upvote you. It's thus only natural that long-standing useful answers will keep gathering points, because people will continue to find those answers useful. When your answers are no longer useful (say due to technology change), your points too will stop growing.

From the perspective of a non-native speaker of the language, it seems to me that the United States is English's killer product. A great deal of the credit for the English language's dominance must go to the US and the culture and technology it exports relentlessly all over the world. Far from killing the English language as the author complains, the US might just have made it prevail over similar contenders like Spanish or Mandarin.

I hear you, but I also fear that these sort of intangible benefits that we think ought to exist might not exist after all. When I read a book I definitely feel that I have accomplished something. I even take notes. I certainly acquire bragging rights! But when I actually try to pin down exactly what I have learned from the book after a few months, I am mostly lost except for a grand overview of the subject.

I think I might retain only around 10% (if that) of a good book that I read. I wonder if I might have been better off reading just the 10% in the first place (provided I can get the right 10% somehow). You could cover 10 times the number of books at that pace with nothing lost!

I find that the true challenge is not reading, but internalizing what I have read. I often find that books that I read eventually get summarized to a few pithy statements in my memory (if I am lucky). Most of the body is gone after a few months. I sometimes wonder if there is any point in reading books (particularly non-fiction) if you will eventually lose most of it.

I have tried using Anki to capture my knowledge, but it's not easy to stick to it regularly, and it may even be an overkill. Two of the reading projects that I wish to complete are Campbell's "Biology" and Myers' "Psychology". These are not difficult books, but tax the memory quite heavily. I have covered significant chunks of both books earlier, only to give up in the middle and move on to the next shiny thing. Next year I wish to resume at least one of them and cover them systematically with the help of Anki until I have truly mastered the content. I don't think you can undertake reading 100 books like these if your intention is to truly imbibe the content and make it available to you in an active form.

Also, some books contain not just information, but skills. Mathematics and programming are more like swimming or riding a bicycle rather than studying History - you are learning to do stuff, not just absorb data. Readings like these where there is significant amount of doing in addition to the reading itself will also be slower than what the post mentions.

I read a few good books this year, all of them non-fiction. Some that come to mind are:

"Worldviews - An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science" by Richard DeWitt. Instead of doing a history-only or philosophy-only take on the topic, I really enjoyed how DeWitt meshed these two viewpoints and examined how they inter-played with each other. It overthrew forever my image of the ancients as a group of irrational, superstitious people who believed in such funny notions as the Sun and the planets orbiting the Earth. DeWitt nicely explains how given the data that they had, their conclusions were very much rational. For example, it's very difficult to imagine from our everyday experience that earth could be orbiting the Sun at a speed of some 30 km/sec.

"A History of the World" by Andrew Marr. I find history a simultaneously fascinating and frustrating subject. Fascinating, because a good knowledge of history makes the present day world seem a lot more meaningful and un-arbitrary. Frustrating, because it's difficult to find a history book that's not just a list of facts and dates. Marr's work walks us through history via vivid portrayals of interesting personalities and events. I found the accompanying documentary series equally interesting as well.

"The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy" by Donald Robertson. This book examines the common grounds between stoic (and to far lesser extent, Buddhist) philosophies and modern cognitive behavioral therapy. It also lists some of the tools in the stoic's tool-chest to tackle common anxieties and worries about life. The nice thing about this book is that it teaches you to treat philosophy as a method of self-therapy, which immediately opens up an ancient fund of literature to tackle day to day problems.

I have struggled, and continue to struggle, with a lack of focus in my learning projects. My focus tends to cycle between some 6-7 subjects. In an effort to tame this, I have come to believe in the power of (a) concrete milestones and accomplishments, and (b) external accountability.

For example, I have wanted to learn Sanskrit for some time. Rather than pick up a book and work through it yet again, I enrolled in two correspondence courses that gives out certifications. I also have classes roughly once a week with an online tutor.

Similarly for Mathematics and Physics, I am preparing for and plan to write a nation-wide exam meant for MSc/BSc students in India as a minimum validation of my knowledge. I am also doing a correspondence course in BSc Physics/Maths from an accredited (in India) distance learning institution. Their assignments and exams, while easy, provide a basic timeline for my progress.

For Machine Learning and AI, I have completed several courses on Coursera and edX, but I found that even though I earned high grades in many of these courses, my grasp of topics - especially the theoretical side - wasn't satisfactory. I am re-doing some of those courses again, and intend to work through a standard text or two for the ideas to truly take root, but we'll see.

I am also interested in philosophy - both Indian and Western - and have read some material on it over the years, but I don't know what milestones are suited for it. I have considered writing up reviews of fields (such as ethics or epistemology) as a summary of my own understanding, but right now I don't have the bandwidth for this.

This was in addition to several other learning projects, such as Karnatic music and functional programming. For Karnatic music, I had a weekly session with a music tutor, and for functional programming, I forced myself for a while to commit programming exercises to github. I later quit both these projects to make room for the other learning projects.

I think the first thing we should do is to understand how superlative human intellectual performance as it exists today even works, and try to make it commodity knowledge taught in everyday classrooms.

In a typical physics, mathematics or engineering curriculum, we learn a lot of fields, such as mechanics, electrodynamics, calculus, signal processing, control theory, and so on. But we don't learn about the human cognitive processes that went into the discovery of those fields. At best we get a caricatured view of the subject's history. Thus, you might learn that Galois came up with the idea of groups. But what was he thinking when he did that? What were the challenges that he was up against that inspired his idea? In short, how did he think, and how might we emulate him for our problems? Ditto for Maxwell, Riemann, etc.

In all the courses that I took, there was none that explicitly taught me how the mind solves challenging problems or comes up with creative solutions. This knowledge is supposed to be somehow imbibed indirectly by learning the fields themselves, which I think is very inefficient. We need to make dissemination of this wisdom more systematic.

A parallel is the field of strength training, in which specific exercises, equipment, and nutritional methods were discovered over a brief period of time. The professional body builders of today are giants compared to their peers over a century ago. Something similar needs to happen for cognitive skills as well.

As an Indian, India's performance in the PISA test is simultaneously both humiliating and horrifying. India ended up near the bottom of the test when it first took it. Cause for concern? Sure! What did the government of India do? They pulled out of the test citing that it was "unfair" to the Indian students. Around 70 odd nations apparently didn't have this problem.

I have come to think that the country barely has a government at all. We're somehow coping amidst the chaos.

That may be a fallacy of composition - what's true of a part or a component needn't be true of the whole. For example, your cells divide, they are part of you, but you do not divide.

Here is the original article if anyone wants to take a look: Acoustic Enhancement of Sleep Slow Oscillations and Concomitant Memory Improvement in Older Adults: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314295073_Acoustic_...

Looking back, I can't claim that my university experience had anything much to do with it. It was a realization that I came to by myself: if you want to learn anything, the only person you can really depend on is yourself. Once the will to uplift yourself is there, especially in this age, you will find the materials and the resources along the way.

Poor educational system is something that India suffers from too. I think the best antidote to it is to evangelize the idea of self-learning even well after you have left the formal educational system.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, has a greater interest in and responsibility for your education than yourself.

In today's world, the only people most of us can blame for our poor education is ourselves. Most of what I learned, I learned after leaving the university system. If anything, what my formal education did was to provide me with the skills to acquire knowledge on my own and also instill in me the desire and confidence to do so. The present day world which provides us with MOOCs, Wikipedia, freely available books from every corner of the world and from every era, ability to hold discussions with like-minded learners from every part of the world, etc., are all extremely conducive to self-education. It's a terrible shame to let this golden opportunity go to waste.