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In my experience the parts of a (study) book where you feel dumb and frustrated while reading are generally the best parts. That's where you get the most worth

In my experience the parts of a (study) book where you feel dumb and frustrated while reading are generally the best parts. That's where you get the most worth out of it, it means you finally hit the spot where you are learning new stuff and concepts, rather than re-hashing what you already knew or thought about, just from a slightly different perspective (which is also useful, but not as much).

rjh29 5y ago
The same applies to learning new technologies. If you're feeling stupid or unconfident it's probably a good sign that you're learning something useful.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I think challenging is where you want to be at, not overwhelming. If you are feeling stupid, you're probably missing something along the way. This is still useful information, though. It tells you that you should go looking for the missing pieces. Your next task after learning 100 basic words in English should probably not be Shakespeare.
  - rjh29 5y ago
    Maybe it's a difference in mental state. For me I feel overwhelmed and feel stupid when I start something new, because I'm starting from scratch. I have to push past that to get started. Other people may have more of a growth mindset and see the lack of understanding as a propellant to learn more.
andi999 5y ago
Sometimes. I read as a student a highly recommended physics book. It looked all like gibberish. I reread it after mastering the material (from other sources), and it just was gibberish. So sometimes it is the book. (this happened because it went through like 23 editions and edition 20 was a 'modern rewrite' which killed it. The reputation and praise was gained from the older editions).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
christophilus 5y ago
The Huberman lab podcast put a number to it: you want a 15% failure rate for optimal learning. It’s a good podcast. He’s a neuroscientist at Stanford, so it’s not mushy pop-sci.
hutrdvnj 5y ago
I think the sweet spot is 80% familiar content mixed with 20% new. If you are confronted with chapters that are 100% alien to you, then it's very hard to understand anything from it and you might just lose the reader.
- ivansavz 5y ago
  That is very interesting, I would have never thought of using a "duty cycle" as low as 20% in a math/science textbooks. I agree that every chapter should start by connecting the material to past knowledge, and briefly reviewing some of the prerequisites, but then surely the author should get to the new stuff after that? Perhaps your estimate of 20% doesn't include the repetition and worked examples? In general when a new concept X, I try to explain it at least three times, once informally, with terminology and definitions, with formulas, and with extra explanations. In my mind all these repetitions count as "new stuff," since they cover the material at different depth and bring new dimension to the concept. Perhaps you could give some examples of the 20% new max sweet spot? I'd much appreciate.
  - hutrdvnj 5y ago
    Recently, I stumbled upon a book "Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory" where the authors decided to design the difficulty of the chapters like this: https://i.ibb.co/349JLsf/difficulty.jpg https://i.ibb.co/349JLsf/difficulty.jpg (image from the book) I like this approach better, because most math books have some easy introductionary chapters and then it gets harder and harder, because the authors assume that they laid out the basics in the first chapters. The authors might be right technically, but it's very hard for the readers to go through a chapter that is 100% new material. In "Seven Sketches in Compositionality" they try to somewhat reset the difficulty for each chapter by starting again with introduction and motivation for each chapter separately. This makes it much easier for me to get into the material of each chapter and to read the whole book.
    - ivansavz 5y ago
      Thx. That helps a lot. I agree re-contextualizing and smooth-starting each section in a textbook seems like a very good idea. This will probably make the textbook more amenable to "random access" learning too.
trwhite 5y ago
I remember having this feeling very early on in my career trying to learn about curl and finding it terribly frustrating. Then later when I next needed to work on it, things just seemed to click. It's a feeling I don't have as often these days but still incredibly satisfying.
siva7 5y ago
I don’t think so. Frustration usually leads to demotivation in context of studying a subject.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Frustration is very much a mindset-problem though. In part, it's misaligned expectations, but also a learned behavior of giving up whenever something doesn't immediately give away. People have spent decades trying to solve difficult problems in mathematics and science. A big reason they didn't get frustrated and give up after 4 minutes was largely because they didn't expect it to be a 2 minute problem.
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    > Frustration is very much a mindset-problem though. In part, it's misaligned expectations... ...Like the kind you might get from a misleading Who This Book Is For section?
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      I honestly don't think that is the problem. Maybe it's school, kids are used to knowledge being drip-fed in a pedagogical fashion, which I guess is fine, but it's also far away from how learning happens outside of school. In the real world, it's normal to encounter problems that aren't trivial.
      - jhanschoo 5y ago
        If I learned stuff exclusively from my own real-world experience rather than from crystallized wisdom from books I'd be much less capable than I am today.
l0gin 5y ago
> In my experience the parts of a (study) book where you feel dumb and frustrated while reading are generally the best parts. True, but not always. Just as often, such parts are terribly written for one or the reason. It's possible that particular section of text is the least favorite of the author so they rush through it. Another possibility is that the author gets tired by the time that section rolls around and just goes thru the motions. Or that the author plain doesn't think a certain section is important enough to expound on it carefully. Yet another possibility is that the author is not universally well-versed in the subject they are writing about: they know some parts better than others.

rjh29 5y ago

The same applies to learning new technologies. If you're feeling stupid or unconfident it's probably a good sign that you're learning something useful.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
I think challenging is where you want to be at, not overwhelming. If you are feeling stupid, you're probably missing something along the way. This is still useful information, though. It tells you that you should go looking for the missing pieces. Your next task after learning 100 basic words in English should probably not be Shakespeare.
- rjh29 5y ago
  Maybe it's a difference in mental state. For me I feel overwhelmed and feel stupid when I start something new, because I'm starting from scratch. I have to push past that to get started. Other people may have more of a growth mindset and see the lack of understanding as a propellant to learn more.

andi999 5y ago

Sometimes. I read as a student a highly recommended physics book. It looked all like gibberish. I reread it after mastering the material (from other sources), and it just was gibberish. So sometimes it is the book. (this happened because it went through like 23 editions and edition 20 was a 'modern rewrite' which killed it. The reputation and praise was gained from the older editions).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

christophilus 5y ago

The Huberman lab podcast put a number to it: you want a 15% failure rate for optimal learning. It’s a good podcast. He’s a neuroscientist at Stanford, so it’s not mushy pop-sci.

hutrdvnj 5y ago

I think the sweet spot is 80% familiar content mixed with 20% new. If you are confronted with chapters that are 100% alien to you, then it's very hard to understand anything from it and you might just lose the reader.

ivansavz 5y ago
That is very interesting, I would have never thought of using a "duty cycle" as low as 20% in a math/science textbooks. I agree that every chapter should start by connecting the material to past knowledge, and briefly reviewing some of the prerequisites, but then surely the author should get to the new stuff after that? Perhaps your estimate of 20% doesn't include the repetition and worked examples? In general when a new concept X, I try to explain it at least three times, once informally, with terminology and definitions, with formulas, and with extra explanations. In my mind all these repetitions count as "new stuff," since they cover the material at different depth and bring new dimension to the concept. Perhaps you could give some examples of the 20% new max sweet spot? I'd much appreciate.
- hutrdvnj 5y ago
  Recently, I stumbled upon a book "Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory" where the authors decided to design the difficulty of the chapters like this: https://i.ibb.co/349JLsf/difficulty.jpg https://i.ibb.co/349JLsf/difficulty.jpg (image from the book) I like this approach better, because most math books have some easy introductionary chapters and then it gets harder and harder, because the authors assume that they laid out the basics in the first chapters. The authors might be right technically, but it's very hard for the readers to go through a chapter that is 100% new material. In "Seven Sketches in Compositionality" they try to somewhat reset the difficulty for each chapter by starting again with introduction and motivation for each chapter separately. This makes it much easier for me to get into the material of each chapter and to read the whole book.
  - ivansavz 5y ago
    Thx. That helps a lot. I agree re-contextualizing and smooth-starting each section in a textbook seems like a very good idea. This will probably make the textbook more amenable to "random access" learning too.

trwhite 5y ago

I remember having this feeling very early on in my career trying to learn about curl and finding it terribly frustrating. Then later when I next needed to work on it, things just seemed to click. It's a feeling I don't have as often these days but still incredibly satisfying.

siva7 5y ago

I don’t think so. Frustration usually leads to demotivation in context of studying a subject.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Frustration is very much a mindset-problem though. In part, it's misaligned expectations, but also a learned behavior of giving up whenever something doesn't immediately give away. People have spent decades trying to solve difficult problems in mathematics and science. A big reason they didn't get frustrated and give up after 4 minutes was largely because they didn't expect it to be a 2 minute problem.
- torstenvl 5y ago
  > Frustration is very much a mindset-problem though. In part, it's misaligned expectations... ...Like the kind you might get from a misleading Who This Book Is For section?
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I honestly don't think that is the problem. Maybe it's school, kids are used to knowledge being drip-fed in a pedagogical fashion, which I guess is fine, but it's also far away from how learning happens outside of school. In the real world, it's normal to encounter problems that aren't trivial.
    - jhanschoo 5y ago
      If I learned stuff exclusively from my own real-world experience rather than from crystallized wisdom from books I'd be much less capable than I am today.

l0gin 5y ago

> In my experience the parts of a (study) book where you feel dumb and frustrated while reading are generally the best parts. True, but not always. Just as often, such parts are terribly written for one or the reason. It's possible that particular section of text is the least favorite of the author so they rush through it. Another possibility is that the author gets tired by the time that section rolls around and just goes thru the motions. Or that the author plain doesn't think a certain section is important enough to expound on it carefully. Yet another possibility is that the author is not universally well-versed in the subject they are writing about: they know some parts better than others.