- "A little learning is a dangerous thing" -- Alexander Pope
- Formulating knowledge impacts how you learn
- Assume that you'll use SRS
- Do not learn if you do not understand
- Don't be blind when you learn
- Learn before you memorize
- Understand the whole picture before memorizing
- Build upon the basics
- A simple initial picture is better; you can always improve as needed
- "Usually you spend 50% of your time repeating just 3-5% of the learned material"
- Stick to the minimum information principle
- Stick to simple, easily retained information
- Break complex items into more specific and smaller, easier to remember items
- Ask questions that are as specific as possible, so that the answers are also as short as possible
- Cloze deletion is easy and effective
- Cloze deletion: blank the part you want to learn from a sentence (e.g. X is the second president)
- Use imagery
- Remember to weight the costs and profits between a question/answer pair and a visual image
- Use mnemonic techniques
- Usually you only need to use these techniques for 1-5% of what you learn
- Graphic deletion is as good as cloze deletion
- Similar to cloze deletion, but remove parts of an image
- Avoid sets
- Retaining information in sets is very expensive
- Turn sets into enumerations (e.g. alphabetically sorted or etc)
- "You should always try to make sure your brain works in the exactly same way at each repetition"
- Memorizing a 5+ set is almost impossible (without other mnemonic techniques)
- Avoid enumerations
- If you have to memorize them, use cloze deletions (and overlapping ones; different blanks in the same material for different questions) to help
- Memorizing phrases and quotes is also an enumeration! (Learn to recognize them!)
- Combat interference
- Sometimes similar information will conflict (e.g. memorizing lots of similar numbers)
- You will get confused as to what is what
- Detect and eliminate
- Make learning items as unambiguous as possible
- Sometimes similar information will conflict (e.g. memorizing lots of similar numbers)
- Optimize wording
- Make items as short as possible (figure out which loses of information are acceptable and inconsequential to your goal, or test them in other questions)
- Refer to other memories
- Use prior memories or learnings to help provide more context
- Personalize and provide examples
- Add personal information to provide more context
- Rely on emotional states
- Illustrate examples with strong emotions to aid recall and avoid interference
- Context cues simplify wording
- Use categories and reference labels to more efficiently provide context than in the question
- Redundancy does not contradict minimum information principle
- Redundancy: more information than minimum necessary, or duplicate
- You may want different perspectives (e.g. reversed questions or differing views), deviations, or alternative answers to also be included
- Provide sources
- Can provide sources when challenged in real life
- Should accompany information, but don't make a point to learn them unless necessary
- Provide date stamping
- Useful for volatile information, to easier update items later
- In some cases the date stamp may be an important part of the learned knowledge (usually when looking to compare / trends)
- Prioritize
- Stages of prioritizing
- Prioritize sources
- Extracting knowledge
- Formulate items and learn via SRS
- Stages of prioritizing
- Nice long read on using knowledge with intuition (definition of wisdom?) to achieve creative genius
- Try to learn and apply abstract rules to life (the more abstract the rule, the more you'll be able to apply it)
- In most creative aspirations, quality is more important than speed
- "Creativity and cold meticulousness are often at odds"
- Sometimes speed, or sureness of implementation are more important than perfection of an idea
- "A typical characteristic of a creative mind: craving for creative opportunities away from the spotlight"
- Personality is key for genius: emotional control allows you to optimally channel creativity; personality is much larger influencer than pure specs of the brain
- Conditions of creativity:
- Suitable state of mind, suitable environment, time, motivation, curiosity, knowledge
- "Creative balance is the key! There is an optimum level of creativity for any given task."
- Creating genius: rage to master, self-discipline and will power
- Be able to handle delayed gratification
- Be domineering to a child (for pursuit of mastery) until that child develops his own views on life
- Study developmental psychology
- Using systems theory to represent reality (as a means of simplification) may be a useful perspective
- "It is better to get a poorly paid job that will let you grow than to enslave your mental potential in an environment that will pull you into the proverbial rate race."
- "Human emotion is often rationalized, i.e. it may lay at the root of an endeavor that is otherwise covered up with rational excuses"
- "Learn to capitalize on positive emotions and circumvent negative emotions"
- "Look for people who will have positive influence on you... positive emotions beget positive emotions"
- "Instead of living to be happy, you should rather happily live up to your highest ideals"
- "Pick something you love and make it your life's work. Do what is important and not what is easy" -- Dean Kamen
- Goal setting: "Instead of optimizing for your goal, maximize the results of your day using the criteria determined by the goal"
- Most satisfying factors: self-esteem, relatedness, autonomy, and competence
- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" -- Thomas Edison
- Don't tunnel vision towards something; e.g. education: some things are better memorized (or absolutely required) whereas others may be learned more easily by doing or by reasoning
- "There is no limit to what a man can accomplish if he does not mind who gets the credit" -- Robert Woodruff
- Have self-confidence and an unshakeable belief that problems are solvable
- Remember, flash cards are for what you learned; make new ones as you go (rather than just taking someone else's and sticking with it)
- Making cards (for programming):
- Turn prose into (short tidbits of) code
- Try to trick your future self (highlight gotchas)
- Save cool tricks
- Require more than one answer (if there's alternative ways that are just as good, or better in other situations)
- Turn broad concepts into succinct examples
- Problems with learning:
- We forget too quickly
- We give up too quickly
- We learn out of context (lack mental context to apply learnings to practical problems you face)
- We think we can learn without doing
- We make more mistakes than we need to --> Turn real life mistakes (in all aspects: technology, people, etc) into reviewable material
- We do not reflect on the big picture --> Reflect and create abstract rules you can apply later
- We let our knowledge representations grow messy
- We do not reference primary sources
- Rules:
- “Every time you learn something new create a question and answer flashcard and add this card to Anki.”
- “You must use Anki every single day - including weekends and holidays - and commit to doing so indefinitely.”
- “Learn in context. Pick a project, and learn only what you need to get it done.”
- “Only add a card to your deck after having tried to use the item of knowledge therein.”
- “Every time you make a mistake carry out a post-mortem and try to figure out the lessons in the experience. Think about what you would need to know to prevent that mistake from occurring again, and turn this insight into new flashcards.”
- “At the end of every project ask yourself what lessons you learned and what you would do differently if you were to repeat the project with the benefit of hindsight.”
- “Delete or modify any incorrect, outdated, difficult to remember, incomplete or unnecessary cards. Update existing cards as improved understanding dawns.”
- “Read code regularly. If you come across something interesting – be that an algorithm, a hack, or an architectural decision - create a card detailing the technique and showing the code.”
- "Skill in a technical field is the product of your intelligence and your knowledge."
- Keep adding increasingly abstract rules and concepts
- Only add cards if:
- It's a general concept applicable to many areas
- It relates to a major technology you'll likely keep using for a long time
- It's something I use everyday and likely will be for a while
- Tips:
- Cards with screenshots may be useful
- Don't try to make concepts too detailed if they can be generalized across an area (e.g. programming languages); it's more important to understand the concept than detailed usage
- Ordered information is difficult (see 20 rules above)
- Suspend cards on topics you may not need to use anymore
- Lower the intensity if it's too burdensome (better to commit to practicing than be too scared to)
- After repeated review failures, try out / do what the card asks (e.g. a commands)
- Fail a card if you haven't used it recently (and could have) rather than if you "know" it / have memorized it
- Add explanations as to how to get an answer in quiz cards
- Have a fresh thought / challenge every time you review a card (e.g. create a new example)
- Challenge yourself early on potential confusions
- Resolve inconsistencies: research descrepancies and either eliminate, generalize, or learn exceptions
- Assign names, mental images, or locations to ideas and techniques (i.e. mnemonics)
- Useful guide for learning strategies, including malgorithms, note taking, social reinforcement, etc
- Probe experts about their intuition and what they were thinking while doing something
- "Where prepackaged knowledge runs out, observation and analysis begins."
- To obtain skills, ask yourself "How can I do that?"
- Practice doing work that mirrors your end-goal output
- "Mindless practice can lift you to a local maximum, only experimentation can take you to a global maximum"
- Maximize mistakes made per minute
- "Knowledge, even if sound, can become degraded through transmission; it’s your responsibility to ensure the signal reaches its destination intact."
- "If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong."
- Doing what you love depends on the timespan; think about the long term (rather than this instant)
- "Just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself."
- If the task didn't suck, it wouldn't be prestigious
- If two things are equally admirable, but one has more prestige, pick the other --> similar to going against dogma; one side is usually clouded by emotional attachment rather than real value
- Notice when connected parties share the risk, but not the rewards (e.g. parents: share the risk of their child doing risky things, but not the inherent fun)
- Test for work you love: always produce
- "You should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were"
- "You can get in way more trouble with a good idea than a bad idea, because you forget that the good idea has limits." -- Benjamin Graham
- Add more models to see the limits
- "It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself." -- Charles Darwin
- "We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is." -- Arnold Bennett
- Don't mindlessly spend your time; invest it in things that will be useful into the future