10 ms·

> the students forgot what they learned as soon as they finished a course A lot of times this is enough to dissuade me from learning about anything I have only

> the students forgot what they learned as soon as they finished a course A lot of times this is enough to dissuade me from learning about anything I have only a passing interest in. One time I blocked out an entire two months out of free time after school in an attempt to learn electronics, by assembling a commonly produced headphone amp. A month passed after classes ramped up and I forgot almost all of it, and moreover no longer cared. I still just don't care about electronics since then, honestly, and don't know why. So in my book that was just two months I spent doing nothing that would ultimately contribute to my future knowledge. I mean, it was an attempt, but only an attempt. I never got the circuit to work in the end either. If I had known that was the result ahead of time I would have just worked on a programming project instead because I was better at programming and I wanted to finish it, and also was competent enough to actually finish it. Unsurprisingly the majority of my college education turned out exactly like this also, but at least I got the paper in the end. Nowadays it feels like all I care about are the things I care too much about to ever forget, like the skills necessary for my job. As in, not knowing what the point of learning all this is if I don't care enough to remember it after a month. I feel this is a horribly limiting mindset for me to have, but I don't see any way around the "not caring" part. If I know I don't care, nothing I do to sweeten the deal like gamification or dreaming of the finished project will ever work, because I know I'm only doing that because I don't care, so my mind will defeat itself. I especially don't like it because all these people around me are learning about machine learning and all these bleeding edge technologies that are having a material impact on the world, and I just sit there unable to care, as if I'm somehow allergic to learning. It becomes a "so you're just going to deny the existence of the entire field of X because you don't care and sit around playing video games instead" kind of irrational thing. I don't know how to resolve this, or if I even should. One thing I will never forget is me talking to someone I knew for a long time and asking what they were doing, and they said "learning about nuclear fusion." For some reason I never felt brave enough to talk to them again since then.

itronitron 6y ago
I agree with a lot of your points, and it's one of the reasons I haven't focused on learning Angular, React, Vue, or any of the Javascript 'build' systems. I don't have a pressing need to use any of them and they will be replaced by something else in a few years. Regarding machine learning, that field has been hijacked by the hype train and over half of what people post online about various ML techniques is just wrong. 'Allergic to learning' may actually mean that you are immune to bullshit. In that case the best approach for learning a topic you care about is to go to the seminal work / first papers and focus on understanding it and reproducing it, then evaluate for yourself whether the reality lives up to the hype.
seer 6y ago
You're totally right that "motivation" is probably the key to learning anything. We're taught that kids have aptitude for different stuff from birth, but I think the curiosity and intrinsic motivation parts are the most important. If something is fun enough you spend the time to become good, and then people say "oh how talented you are", but in reality you've just spent a lot more time working at it. One way I've seen I can "hack" it myself is if I stumble on things that are actually fun and it becomes a "wedge" into an area I was too shy to try out. For example "Kerbal Space Program" taught me way more about rocket science than I've thought possible, but more than that, once I understood the core concepts and could play around with them in my mind it actually did become fun. I still remember how I was doing some hochman transfer calculations to figure out when should I do a lunch to get to Duna (KSP's Mars) with the limited tech I had unlocked in the game, and a sudden realisation hit me, I'm actually doing rocket science math for a game ... This got me into reading about rocket engines and I ended up reading through the whole of the "biblical" Ignition book just for fun. Now I'm a web dev and as far away from Aerospace as you can probably get and still be somewhat of an engineer, but it opened a would of interesting news, data, discussions and theories at the bleeding edge of science, for which I'll be eternally grateful. I guess what I mean is it's possible to start caring for something that's outside of your domain expertise, you just need to find somethings that's fun enough to keep you there.
tartoran 6y ago
You would probably care if you found the utility of the knowledge you’re about to acquire in order to acomplish a goal. Or at least that’s how I operate. I don’t care either about machine learning because I don’t have any personal project or anything that I am itching to acomplish with it.

itronitron 6y ago

I agree with a lot of your points, and it's one of the reasons I haven't focused on learning Angular, React, Vue, or any of the Javascript 'build' systems. I don't have a pressing need to use any of them and they will be replaced by something else in a few years. Regarding machine learning, that field has been hijacked by the hype train and over half of what people post online about various ML techniques is just wrong. 'Allergic to learning' may actually mean that you are immune to bullshit. In that case the best approach for learning a topic you care about is to go to the seminal work / first papers and focus on understanding it and reproducing it, then evaluate for yourself whether the reality lives up to the hype.

seer 6y ago

You're totally right that "motivation" is probably the key to learning anything. We're taught that kids have aptitude for different stuff from birth, but I think the curiosity and intrinsic motivation parts are the most important. If something is fun enough you spend the time to become good, and then people say "oh how talented you are", but in reality you've just spent a lot more time working at it. One way I've seen I can "hack" it myself is if I stumble on things that are actually fun and it becomes a "wedge" into an area I was too shy to try out. For example "Kerbal Space Program" taught me way more about rocket science than I've thought possible, but more than that, once I understood the core concepts and could play around with them in my mind it actually did become fun. I still remember how I was doing some hochman transfer calculations to figure out when should I do a lunch to get to Duna (KSP's Mars) with the limited tech I had unlocked in the game, and a sudden realisation hit me, I'm actually doing rocket science math for a game ... This got me into reading about rocket engines and I ended up reading through the whole of the "biblical" Ignition book just for fun. Now I'm a web dev and as far away from Aerospace as you can probably get and still be somewhat of an engineer, but it opened a would of interesting news, data, discussions and theories at the bleeding edge of science, for which I'll be eternally grateful. I guess what I mean is it's possible to start caring for something that's outside of your domain expertise, you just need to find somethings that's fun enough to keep you there.

tartoran 6y ago

You would probably care if you found the utility of the knowledge you’re about to acquire in order to acomplish a goal. Or at least that’s how I operate. I don’t care either about machine learning because I don’t have any personal project or anything that I am itching to acomplish with it.