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The Value of Learning "Useless" Things | Scott H Young
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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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Speed and transfer
Consider at what speed you should try to do things in order to improve performance.
We can often learn something quickly, but without attaining a master level (like getting good at esti...
Failing to Reach an Ideal
There are two problems you can encounter when you're trying to learn something.
- You have a clear understanding of what you'd like to do and how you're going to do it, but you're unable to implement the approach you've chosen. Slow things down so you can pay more attention to every aspect of the problem.
- Speed learning is effective when you're not sure what the ideal should be and need more information to work it out. A good example of speed leading to move closer to quality is in entrepreneurial fields. Many fail because they picked the wrong problem to solve and wasted too much time trying to solve it.
Going faster vs doing it right
The balance between going faster and doing it right depends on what you're trying to achieve.
- Faster feedback means more information to find out your key challenges and possible solutions.
- Slower helps you focus on a strategy you've chosen, allowing you to execute it correctly.
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Key Ideas
There are 2 broad approaches to self-education 📖
- Learn-as-needed approach. You have a problem that needs solving, so you go and learn the things that will solve your problem.
- Learn-everything-you-can approach. Pi...
Skills and knowledge transfer far less than we would expect them to. So “broad-based” education is mostly a myth. What we learn is usually specific and often stuck to the contexts where it w...
Skills and knowledge transfer far less than we would expect them to. So “broad-based” education is mostly a myth. What we learn is usually specific and often stuck to the contexts where it was learned.
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Key Ideas
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, pi...
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.
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.