6 ms·

TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. I like the message,

by tucaz 10y ago

TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. I like the message, but not the messenger. Articles like this, in my point of view, fail to delivery their messages in a better way because they are simply too long and with too much noise for my taste. The point he is trying to get across could be explained in a simpler way without the necessity of explaining how he went to the army, what he did there and all his personal history. All this information is completely irrelevant to the main goal of the article and turn it into a boring story instead of useful piece of practical advice.

lake99 10y ago
Some people extoll the virtues of long-form writing. But even a site like HN is far too information dense to spend so much time reading one article. It's a different matter when we're learning something of an academic nature, of course. That's why I love summaries such as yours.
- laxatives 10y ago
  There's something to said about attention spans in the digital age. Nautilus isn't a single serving news site; it provides long essays with sufficient background to digest a topic you probably don't really spend much time thinking about otherwise. They aren't trying to give you a single sentence summary of some result. They are trying to get you to care about some esoteric subject. This one just happens to gel with the ycombinator crowd.
- daveguy 10y ago
  I completely agree. I have found a speed reading extension to be quite valuable in getting a quick overview of an article. The speed reading time for this article was 5 minutes at 600 wpm (practiced up from 300 wpm). The speed read is good enough to get the TL;DR and a little more depth about the article. This is the extension I use (it lets you rewind with k and pause with space -- helpful for getting more understanding out): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spreed-speed-read-the-web/ipikiaejjblmdopojhpejjmbedhlibno https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spreed-speed-read-...
  - ivan_ah 10y ago
    Have you tried text-to-speech software? The built-in one for Mac OS X is quite good (Alex, the default voice is not annoying). I set the words per minute to a very high rate, and I get my hacker news while exercising or doing chores around the house. I've completely stopped reading long articles, except when there are intersperced code samples. I highly recommend.
rinchik1 10y ago
Not a big deal but was written by Barbara Oakley (woman) "As a young woman with a yen for learning language and no money or skills to speak of ..."
- ktRolster 10y ago
  She also wrote A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If  You Flunked Algebra) which is a good read.
- neves 10y ago
  Her on line course: "Learning how to learn" is the most successful MOOC of all time: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn I really enjoyed following it.
txutxu 10y ago
Thanks for the TL;DR the topic was interesting but I was tired for read more after all day. My grandma used to say "brain is a muscle". And I used to see it as an over-simplification, because I was studying, etc... With the time, I've come to a similar conclusion, a different muscle, and with a micro-services architecture, but at the end of the day, it inherits the attributes, methods and behavior, of the "muscle" class.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  > at the end of the day, it inherits the attributes, methods and behavior, of the "muscle" class Really, it inherits from the general "biological system" class, of which "muscle" is the common subclass referenced, since it's the one most people have familiarity in utilizing. The differentiation of "muscle" from other "biological system" classes is entirely unrelated to the "use-it-or-lose-it" feature, however, and your subclassing is inappropriate. While this seems like being pedantic, I'd argue it's important to know when we're using a member to exemplify a class versus when we're talking about the definition of a class. The same use-it-or-lose-it applies to everything from lung capacity to stomach size to hormone production by organs, and is a good principle to know about how biology works. The emphasis on "muscle" as the class (rather than an exemplifying member) hides this underlying truth about all biological systems -- that they dynamically adapt to efficiency.
  - hoke_t 10y ago
    Username checks out.
danso 10y ago
A lot of people connect with concepts via story-telling. Life lessons aren't always learned by just consuming a stream of facts. And facts themselves aren't inherently valuable. A good story helps some readers filter what applies to them and what does not.
- chairleader 10y ago
  Agreed. I filed this story away as a way to explain math-centric learning to the more literary minded.
- lolive 10y ago
  Especially in our modern time where our mind spends its time curating zillion of tiny messages to extract meaningful messages.
- r_smart 10y ago
  I recently picked up the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It's full of story telling, with very little fact, and the main thrusts of each chapter are summarized in a sentence. The bulk of the chapters is mostly just stories. Overall this seems like a really effective strategy for the subject matter. It's easy to intellectually understand the summary sentences, but all the stories in the chapters are illustrative, and the idea is that spending time with the book helps reinforce the mindset that leads to the attitudes it espouses. So that was a long winded way of saying: Good point. I will say that a lot of long form journalism pieces these days seem overly focused on their narratives, and often, feel like time wasting to me. But I'm usually in information gathering mode when I read them. I don't want personal stories, I want facts, and links to research when I'm in that mindset. Maybe it just feels to me like they are too often considering the story they're telling as proof enough of their point without doing enough to support it otherwise.
noobermin 10y ago
I remember first learning Quantum Field Theory. One week, my head would ache from what I was reading but by the next week, that bit would be incorporated into new parts, so the "confusing stuff" become foundation for the next week's confusing stuff. Eventually, it became intuitive.
- sevenless 10y ago
  How do you learn quantum field theory? I took a tiny amount of QM in school - basically, solving the Schrodinger equation for a few simple systems. What's the next step?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - noobermin 10y ago
    I read Shrednicki[0]'s book, a pre-print is freely available online (or was 4 or so years ago). A class in Grad school solidified it for me, specifically because they related it back to physics, like the standard model. If you're going to start learning QFT, I suggest you try to understand time-dependent perturbation theory as much as possible. Also, be sure you have a handle on special relativity and scattering theory. QFT that most people use is really those things combined. [0] http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/ms-qft-DRAFT.pdf http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/ms-qft-DRAFT.pdf
    - JadeNB 10y ago
      For what it's worth, that PDF says "Please DO NOT DISTRIBUTE this document. Instead, link to http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/∼mark/qft.html http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/∼mark/qft.html " (which has a link to the PDF).
      - noobermin 10y ago
        Fair enough. Unfortunately, I can't edit the comment now.
FT_intern 10y ago
A few extra points to add: - expanding on repeating: Enumerate and solve/memorize every permutation of a problem/theorem/etc. (ex: in f = ma, what happens if m is high and a is low and the reverse). Each case becomes a subroutine (or a chunk) in your brain that quickly fires once memorized. - explaining your understanding of a topic does not translate to the ability of applying that understanding to an actual application The writing was superfluous and can be summed up in 2-3 points, although enjoyable to read as a story if you're up for that. I'm a bit disappointed because the title is misleading. The author didn't really rewire her brain. She just spent more time learning and set a different goal (of trying out every permutation instead of simply doing well on tests) than her classmates.
- happy-go-lucky 10y ago
  Yes, the title is misleading and the author is verbose, but the gist of the story is corroborated :)
bsder 10y ago
While I tend to agree with the thesis, personal anecdote does not make a valid conclusion. We probably have decent research on this at this point. Anybody versed in it weighing it?
- sn9 10y ago
  The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Not surprising as she didn't come up with the ideas herself. She stumbled on the underlying principles and did research like anyone else on the terminology scientific experts in learning use to talk about those principles.
  - bsder 10y ago
    > The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Yet neither of these folks seem to be doing primary research in the particular area they are teaching the course in. Oakley's peer-reviewed resume on this is quite scarce: http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html Sejnowski is similarly light: http://www.salk.edu/scientist/terrence-sejnowski/publications/ http://www.salk.edu/scientist/terrence-sejnowski/publication... Are we going to wind up with another "10,000 hours" debacle?
    - kaitai 10y ago
      I don't think this is the right metric for weighing these claims. As a mathematician, I do not do primary research in calculus or linear algebra... ...but teaching those classes pays the bills.
      - bsder 10y ago
        But you do not claim to be an expert on teaching or to have "The BEST Way To Learn Linear Algebra".
    - sn9 10y ago
sverige 10y ago
Yeah, advice I heard from parents and teachers countless times growing up. "Memorize this." "Don't quit." "Keep trying." Then I had to repeat verbatim whatever it was I was supposed to memorize, whether a reading selection, scales on an instrument, or multiplication tables. I didn't get to move forward till I got it. And I didn't get to choose what I studied. Seems like we need more of this today.
nickledave 10y ago
+1 for storytelling. This article is pretty much my life story, and I constantly tell that story to other people, because my own painful personal experience suggests our educational system does not do a good job of delivering the same message. Maybe tucaz doesn't need to hear it. But there are a lot, a lot, of people that do. How many times have you heard someone say "I'm just not good at math" or "I'll never be able to draw" or "I have two left feet, I can't dance"? It's just because they never learned how to learn.
- danmendes 10y ago
  I suggest that author's personal experience does not give any insight into large phenomena affecting many more lives than the author's own that could not otherwise and more succinctly come forward without the addition of the overly personal voice into the prose. This style of delivering information is called gonzo journalism and has taken over a large part of the media. What people forget is that gonzo journalism was initially a form of entertainment. The kind of prose that serves telling the readers about the Kentucky Derby is not same that serves the conveying of information in a large number of categories. This is one of them.
  - nickledave 10y ago
    So you don't know any people that are mathphobes? You are right that it would be nice to have some hard science to back up the author's claims. Maybe we should read her book. I'm sure it's basically "Fear and Loathing in Calculus".
SamBam 10y ago
> TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. If I just read that, I'd file that away as "something someone once said on the internet," wouldn't give it much weight, and would forget about. I see dozens of competing one-liners like that every day. The story made the message much stronger, made me believe it, and will make me remember it.

by tucaz 10y ago

lake99 10y ago

Some people extoll the virtues of long-form writing. But even a site like HN is far too information dense to spend so much time reading one article. It's a different matter when we're learning something of an academic nature, of course. That's why I love summaries such as yours.

laxatives 10y ago
There's something to said about attention spans in the digital age. Nautilus isn't a single serving news site; it provides long essays with sufficient background to digest a topic you probably don't really spend much time thinking about otherwise. They aren't trying to give you a single sentence summary of some result. They are trying to get you to care about some esoteric subject. This one just happens to gel with the ycombinator crowd.
daveguy 10y ago
I completely agree. I have found a speed reading extension to be quite valuable in getting a quick overview of an article. The speed reading time for this article was 5 minutes at 600 wpm (practiced up from 300 wpm). The speed read is good enough to get the TL;DR and a little more depth about the article. This is the extension I use (it lets you rewind with k and pause with space -- helpful for getting more understanding out): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spreed-speed-read-the-web/ipikiaejjblmdopojhpejjmbedhlibno https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spreed-speed-read-...
- ivan_ah 10y ago
  Have you tried text-to-speech software? The built-in one for Mac OS X is quite good (Alex, the default voice is not annoying). I set the words per minute to a very high rate, and I get my hacker news while exercising or doing chores around the house. I've completely stopped reading long articles, except when there are intersperced code samples. I highly recommend.

rinchik1 10y ago

Not a big deal but was written by Barbara Oakley (woman) "As a young woman with a yen for learning language and no money or skills to speak of ..."

ktRolster 10y ago
She also wrote A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If  You Flunked Algebra) which is a good read.
neves 10y ago
Her on line course: "Learning how to learn" is the most successful MOOC of all time: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn I really enjoyed following it.

txutxu 10y ago

Thanks for the TL;DR the topic was interesting but I was tired for read more after all day. My grandma used to say "brain is a muscle". And I used to see it as an over-simplification, because I was studying, etc... With the time, I've come to a similar conclusion, a different muscle, and with a micro-services architecture, but at the end of the day, it inherits the attributes, methods and behavior, of the "muscle" class.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
> at the end of the day, it inherits the attributes, methods and behavior, of the "muscle" class Really, it inherits from the general "biological system" class, of which "muscle" is the common subclass referenced, since it's the one most people have familiarity in utilizing. The differentiation of "muscle" from other "biological system" classes is entirely unrelated to the "use-it-or-lose-it" feature, however, and your subclassing is inappropriate. While this seems like being pedantic, I'd argue it's important to know when we're using a member to exemplify a class versus when we're talking about the definition of a class. The same use-it-or-lose-it applies to everything from lung capacity to stomach size to hormone production by organs, and is a good principle to know about how biology works. The emphasis on "muscle" as the class (rather than an exemplifying member) hides this underlying truth about all biological systems -- that they dynamically adapt to efficiency.
- hoke_t 10y ago
  Username checks out.

danso 10y ago

A lot of people connect with concepts via story-telling. Life lessons aren't always learned by just consuming a stream of facts. And facts themselves aren't inherently valuable. A good story helps some readers filter what applies to them and what does not.

chairleader 10y ago
Agreed. I filed this story away as a way to explain math-centric learning to the more literary minded.
lolive 10y ago
Especially in our modern time where our mind spends its time curating zillion of tiny messages to extract meaningful messages.
r_smart 10y ago
I recently picked up the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It's full of story telling, with very little fact, and the main thrusts of each chapter are summarized in a sentence. The bulk of the chapters is mostly just stories. Overall this seems like a really effective strategy for the subject matter. It's easy to intellectually understand the summary sentences, but all the stories in the chapters are illustrative, and the idea is that spending time with the book helps reinforce the mindset that leads to the attitudes it espouses. So that was a long winded way of saying: Good point. I will say that a lot of long form journalism pieces these days seem overly focused on their narratives, and often, feel like time wasting to me. But I'm usually in information gathering mode when I read them. I don't want personal stories, I want facts, and links to research when I'm in that mindset. Maybe it just feels to me like they are too often considering the story they're telling as proof enough of their point without doing enough to support it otherwise.

noobermin 10y ago

I remember first learning Quantum Field Theory. One week, my head would ache from what I was reading but by the next week, that bit would be incorporated into new parts, so the "confusing stuff" become foundation for the next week's confusing stuff. Eventually, it became intuitive.

sevenless 10y ago
How do you learn quantum field theory? I took a tiny amount of QM in school - basically, solving the Schrodinger equation for a few simple systems. What's the next step?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- noobermin 10y ago
  I read Shrednicki[0]'s book, a pre-print is freely available online (or was 4 or so years ago). A class in Grad school solidified it for me, specifically because they related it back to physics, like the standard model. If you're going to start learning QFT, I suggest you try to understand time-dependent perturbation theory as much as possible. Also, be sure you have a handle on special relativity and scattering theory. QFT that most people use is really those things combined. [0] http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/ms-qft-DRAFT.pdf http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/ms-qft-DRAFT.pdf
  - JadeNB 10y ago
    For what it's worth, that PDF says "Please DO NOT DISTRIBUTE this document. Instead, link to http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/∼mark/qft.html http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/∼mark/qft.html " (which has a link to the PDF).
    - noobermin 10y ago
      Fair enough. Unfortunately, I can't edit the comment now.

FT_intern 10y ago

A few extra points to add: - expanding on repeating: Enumerate and solve/memorize every permutation of a problem/theorem/etc. (ex: in f = ma, what happens if m is high and a is low and the reverse). Each case becomes a subroutine (or a chunk) in your brain that quickly fires once memorized. - explaining your understanding of a topic does not translate to the ability of applying that understanding to an actual application The writing was superfluous and can be summed up in 2-3 points, although enjoyable to read as a story if you're up for that. I'm a bit disappointed because the title is misleading. The author didn't really rewire her brain. She just spent more time learning and set a different goal (of trying out every permutation instead of simply doing well on tests) than her classmates.

happy-go-lucky 10y ago
Yes, the title is misleading and the author is verbose, but the gist of the story is corroborated :)

bsder 10y ago

While I tend to agree with the thesis, personal anecdote does not make a valid conclusion. We probably have decent research on this at this point. Anybody versed in it weighing it?

sn9 10y ago
The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Not surprising as she didn't come up with the ideas herself. She stumbled on the underlying principles and did research like anyone else on the terminology scientific experts in learning use to talk about those principles.
- bsder 10y ago
  > The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her. Yet neither of these folks seem to be doing primary research in the particular area they are teaching the course in. Oakley's peer-reviewed resume on this is quite scarce: http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html Sejnowski is similarly light: http://www.salk.edu/scientist/terrence-sejnowski/publications/ http://www.salk.edu/scientist/terrence-sejnowski/publication... Are we going to wind up with another "10,000 hours" debacle?
  - kaitai 10y ago
    I don't think this is the right metric for weighing these claims. As a mathematician, I do not do primary research in calculus or linear algebra... ...but teaching those classes pays the bills.
    - bsder 10y ago
      But you do not claim to be an expert on teaching or to have "The BEST Way To Learn Linear Algebra".
  - sn9 10y ago

sverige 10y ago

Yeah, advice I heard from parents and teachers countless times growing up. "Memorize this." "Don't quit." "Keep trying." Then I had to repeat verbatim whatever it was I was supposed to memorize, whether a reading selection, scales on an instrument, or multiplication tables. I didn't get to move forward till I got it. And I didn't get to choose what I studied. Seems like we need more of this today.

nickledave 10y ago

+1 for storytelling. This article is pretty much my life story, and I constantly tell that story to other people, because my own painful personal experience suggests our educational system does not do a good job of delivering the same message. Maybe tucaz doesn't need to hear it. But there are a lot, a lot, of people that do. How many times have you heard someone say "I'm just not good at math" or "I'll never be able to draw" or "I have two left feet, I can't dance"? It's just because they never learned how to learn.

danmendes 10y ago
I suggest that author's personal experience does not give any insight into large phenomena affecting many more lives than the author's own that could not otherwise and more succinctly come forward without the addition of the overly personal voice into the prose. This style of delivering information is called gonzo journalism and has taken over a large part of the media. What people forget is that gonzo journalism was initially a form of entertainment. The kind of prose that serves telling the readers about the Kentucky Derby is not same that serves the conveying of information in a large number of categories. This is one of them.
- nickledave 10y ago
  So you don't know any people that are mathphobes? You are right that it would be nice to have some hard science to back up the author's claims. Maybe we should read her book. I'm sure it's basically "Fear and Loathing in Calculus".

SamBam 10y ago

> TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. If I just read that, I'd file that away as "something someone once said on the internet," wouldn't give it much weight, and would forget about. I see dozens of competing one-liners like that every day. The story made the message much stronger, made me believe it, and will make me remember it.