The Value of Learning "Useless" Things | Scott H Young - Deepstash
The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci

Learn more about problemsolving with this collection

Leonardo da Vinci's creative process

How to approach problem-solving like da Vinci

The importance of curiosity and observation

The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci

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Directness in learning

If you have a concrete objective (speaking a language, passing an exam), how you practice should match the intended use.

An extension of this idea is that learning broadly is a bad idea - that you won't remember "useless" knowledge. But this is false. Having an extensive knowledge base makes learning easier.

179

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Direct learning works for a particular goal

We tend to think of skills reasonably broadly, but our skills are very specific.

Direct learning minimizes the chance that we will focus on learning information unrelated to our actual goal.

147

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Many goals in learning require transfer

The magical "intuition" for hard subjects we notice in people like Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman is owed to their extensive knowledge base they could draw from.

The broader and more varied the situations you need to perform in, the broader your knowledge base should be to help you think better.

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753 reads

Broader skills benefit more from theory

Direct practice is not the opposite of deep understanding.

A naive approach to mastering, for example, physics problems, is to continue practising exam questions. But practising limited exam questions is not the same as the range of problems you will find in the real world. To solve real problems, you need a deep structure for understanding the problems, not just memorised solution patterns that you cannot apply.

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699 reads

Foundations you should build

In improving your knowledge base, you're not optimising for a specific goal, but all future learning goals.

  • Read more textbooks and less popular books.
  • Take more online classes on fundamental topics.
  • When you can't build higher, go deeper. You may be hitting the ceiling with your improvement in a specific area. The only way to get better is to do more foundational work.

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