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How to Quickly Extract the Best Insights from a Huge Topic | Scott H Young
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There are Two Strategies for Learning Something
- Depth-first. This is where we pick one area and drill down.
- Breadth-first works by first exploring your surroundings. If that doesn't work, pick one direction and fan out again.
If the area you're exploring is bounded or set out, like a syllabus, both strategies will work. If learning is without bounds, going in-depth first may lead you on a long detour. Choose poorly, and you can get stuck on an unwanted path.
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How to Explore a New Topic Efficiently
When learning any new topic efficiently, we need to learn the most useful, basic and broadly applicable ideas first.
After that, we can move onto the obscure, advanced or specialized.
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Academic Research: Follow the Citations
The learning space for an academic subject is composed of papers, books, and courses, linked via citations.
- Start with a course or textbook. It will provide an easy entry-point.
- For more specific topics, use literature reviews and meta-analyses, as they combine different studies.
- Follow citation trails, focusing on papers that surface repeatedly.
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Language Learning: Usage and Frequency
- Master a few basic phrases using any source to give you something to play around with.
- Use the language in the setting you care about, or substitute real conversations with mock discussions using a dictionary.
- Pay attention to any words that come up. Make flashcards to memorize words that you will use in a real situation.
- Supplement with frequency lists - lists that contain small grammatical words as well as knowing the translation to the most common 1000 English words will enable you to hold engaging conversations.
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Practical Skills: Projects Help Prioritize
A project can help guide you if you're learning to do or make something.
- Pick something you'd like to make.
- Learn anything you need to build it. This will help you with a rough understanding and is not intended for mastery.
- Put topics that come up on a "To-Learn" list.
- Learn your list. Pick an item, and set aside a specified time to dig deeper.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
The best routine for studying
It is often unhelpful to hear that the perfect routine is the one you can stick to to help you reach your goals. As everyone is different in personality, constraints, and preferences, the ideal met...
The ingredient of the perfect studying routine
- Instructions can be in the form of lessons, books, or tutoring. They are useful to avoid wasting time with trial-and-error.
- Retrieval involves deliberately remembering the knowledge, not just passively reviewing it.
- Spacing is repeated reviews, spread out over time. It forms part of a regular routine where you cover old knowledge along with new.
- Understanding. The goal of learning is for ideas to make sense. Explain the concept to yourself. When you get stuck, find a textbook or teacher to help you.
- Feedback. You don't have to get feedback from other people. When you can get accurate feedback that doesn't need another person, go there first.
Fixing your current studying routine
To perfect your studying routine, look at your current routine, and see what's missing. For example:
- An amateur painter will grow faster if they add instruction to their existing knowledge.
- Learning history by reading a lot: Why not write an essay or converse with other history buffs?
- You work correctly through a course, but don't space your learning: A ten-minute pop-quiz on previous topics can help you remember and save hours later.
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Key Ideas
Learning comes from doing
Most people have a faulty idea about when they have actually learned something.
Learning doesn't come from reading or listening. Reading creates ideas and opportunities. You only le...
Personal development books
Reading personal development books and articles is extremely valuable. The only problem is when you confuse this with real learning.
Reading a book on exercise doesn't make you fit. Reading an article on time management doesn't make you productive.
Turning Ideas into Learning
We can increase our learning when we understand that reading is like a seed - the ideas you read about have the power to create incredible learning and understanding, but only if you act on it.
Pick a few ideas that you think have the potential to benefit your life most. Then allocate time, energy and resources to practice those ideas.
The first views on motivation
- At first, psychologist William James thought that only the initial act was conscious, thereafter behaviour was a spontaneous cascade of habits. He suggested we struggle with motivation when ...
Mathematics of motivation
When Ivan Pavlov and his dogs led to the discovery of learned behaviour through repeated exposure, and Edward Thorndike discovered the Law of Effect that stated that rewarded behaviours tended to increase, many psychologists were impelled to separate psychology from armchair introspection and formulated their theories as mathematical formulas.
- The Drive x Habit Theory. Clark Hull's formula was sEr = D x sHr, which states that excitatory tendency (E) is the result of the drive (D) combined with the habit (H). The drive is nonspecific, such as hunger or thirst. The habit, however, depends on the stimulus (s) and response (r). But the theory turned out to be wrong and even opposite in many cases.
- Expectation x Value Theory. Drawing on ideas in economics and game theory, Edward Tolman and Kurt Lewis formulated an alternative account by evaluating motivation based on expectations. Tolman expressed the ideas as the mathematical formula: Subjective Expected Utility = Probability1 * Utility1 + P2U2 + P3U3 + … where subjective expected utility of an action equalled the motivation to act. But, if you expect a reward, why act and not simply passively wait for the expected reward?
Motivation as change
Donald Hebb realised that existing theories were too focused on reacting to the immediate environment. Thoughts, ideas and goals could be just as strong for triggering action as sights and sounds.
Together with John Atkinson, they noted that the study of motivation had undergone a "paradigm shift", where motivation couldn't be seen as how actions get started, but how the organism decides to change its behaviour from one thing to another.