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> Find someone smarter than you and learn from them. The corollary is if you're the smartest person in your area, you're more likely to stop learning. Maybe. I
by e12e 10y ago
> Find someone smarter than you and learn from them. The corollary is if you're the smartest person in your area, you're more likely to stop learning.
Maybe. I think the other side is find someone smarter than you, but less experienced, and teach them.
You learn much more from teaching than being taught.
If you're at loss of finding smart adults, find some children ; they're probably all smarter than you, in the sense of finding good questions (which is much more interesting than finding good answers; finding answers is just work, finding great questions require inspiration. A perfectly good example of a good question is: "why is the sky blue?").
- kzisme 10y ago> Find someone smarter than you and learn from them. The corollary is if you're the smartest person in your area, you're more likely to stop learning. The issue I have with this is finding that person.
- andai 9y agoThere have been some posts on HN about hiring more experienced developers for one-on-one tutoring / pair coding over Skype (on freelance websites etc). A guy wrote a blog post about it (can't remember name), he hired a couple people for a half hour each until he found one he liked. Alternatively see if there are any meetups in your area (meetup.com is great for that).
- falcolas 10y agoIf you can't find someone to teach you, then yeah, this would be a good alternative. And so long as you're willing to put significant effort into correctly answering their questions, it should be a good substitute. That said, teaching will not typically help you learn something new, though it will help refine the knowledge you already have. For example, answering "Why is the sky blue" will give the chance to refine your own understanding of refraction and how that interacts with air, but it's unlikely to guide you into learning about quantum mechanics.
- vikiomega9 9y ago> unlikely to guide you into learning about quantum mechanics True, but that depends on assuming the person teaching is really only interested/aware of an answer that deals with refraction, and that the median mental model most people have isn't close to understanding the mechanics of refraction. I've noticed that the levels of abstractions we employ are all affected by these sorts of questions, perhaps the same question a year later would afford one the chance to unravel a particular layer assuming the layers above it are sufficiently saturated in understanding :D