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The Japanese learned early on that practice is at the heart of expertise. What you cannot do reliably, you do not understand. Western culture has almost comple

The Japanese learned early on that practice is at the heart of expertise. What you cannot do reliably, you do not understand. Western culture has almost completely forgotten about practice, unless you're a musician.

robotresearcher 10y ago
And in reading. We teach reading by consistent, laborious repetition. Most parents are engaged in this almost every day. We don't do this for math as standard because most parents don't value math as much as reading. We know it works, we just don't care enough as a population.
- sonabinu 10y ago
  Most Asian parents focus on math mechanics but forget that math is essentially problem solving. As a child I had the concepts down solid, which helped me when I went back to University to do math classes but doing applied math had been a hard mountain to climb. Learn to build DE models etc. has been v challenging.
hackermailman 10y ago
Or a magician, a few years ago I watched an interview with a magician who just said his only key to success was daily practice, hard work, forcing himself to get up early every morning and just grind through it for years until he was good enough to invent his own tricks. This is what I use The Art of Computer Programming books for. I'll watch a lecture in basic computer science I'd forgotten long ago to get the intuition being explained of concepts like generating functions, then look up the subject in TAOCP series to read Knuth's explanation, and do all the exercises possible. Most universities I've found with open calendars or lectures have been locking down their assignments to prevent students from cheating and looking up answers like 15-251 at CMU. They have public lectures but no tests or exercises available so TAOCP complements these lectures for anybody self-learning by giving you hard problems to reason about so you remember the material. https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%22bcf8243e-cf18-481f-960f-3c5b26fbb69b%22&page=0 https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...

robotresearcher 10y ago

And in reading. We teach reading by consistent, laborious repetition. Most parents are engaged in this almost every day. We don't do this for math as standard because most parents don't value math as much as reading. We know it works, we just don't care enough as a population.

sonabinu 10y ago
Most Asian parents focus on math mechanics but forget that math is essentially problem solving. As a child I had the concepts down solid, which helped me when I went back to University to do math classes but doing applied math had been a hard mountain to climb. Learn to build DE models etc. has been v challenging.

hackermailman 10y ago

Or a magician, a few years ago I watched an interview with a magician who just said his only key to success was daily practice, hard work, forcing himself to get up early every morning and just grind through it for years until he was good enough to invent his own tricks. This is what I use The Art of Computer Programming books for. I'll watch a lecture in basic computer science I'd forgotten long ago to get the intuition being explained of concepts like generating functions, then look up the subject in TAOCP series to read Knuth's explanation, and do all the exercises possible. Most universities I've found with open calendars or lectures have been locking down their assignments to prevent students from cheating and looking up answers like 15-251 at CMU. They have public lectures but no tests or exercises available so TAOCP complements these lectures for anybody self-learning by giving you hard problems to reason about so you remember the material. https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%22bcf8243e-cf18-481f-960f-3c5b26fbb69b%22&page=0 https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...