Learning to Learn

This is something I have personally struggled with, so I wish the author elaborated more. If you are a novice, how do you quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is? How do you know what makes you an expert and not an "expert beginner" as the author says to the extent that you can build a personal curriculum about it?

This is something that can be tricky for sure. Depending on the subject you might not need to start diving deep into every topic. Sometimes you'll have to first ask some high level questions like how do I get this data from this table and convert it to this format. Once you identify what problem you're trying to solve go and learn what's needed to solve it.

You won't always have an optimal solution but that's okay. The most important is to try and use the thing you're learning in some real way or with practice.

> The most important is to try and use the thing you're learning in some real way or with practice.

In my experience, that's a necessary first step to learning. I need to get my hands dirty, get a feel for what I'm working with. An experience is worth a thousand pictures, which are worth a thousand words - you can't gain that basic understanding and instinct by reading, only by having all the sensory inputs of doing it.

Then it's time to read. Now you must find an expert to guide you. First, you'll have too many blind spots - you can't possibly find all that's current, you can't find the best sources efficiently, and much won't be in books yet. And without expertise yourself, you can't distinguish the worn-out theories from the evergreen standards from the unproven innovations; the promising from the unlikely from the absurd; you won't know the consensus from the fringe; the guy advocating their personal theory - maybe even a credible one - from the balanced survey of established ideas. You won't recognize when you're reading just a side of a well-known debate.

I'm also wondering this. Two possibilities. One, find the first principles/root node/glue that holds many disparate concepts together in some causative way. Two, the specific procedure/step/concept that you keep reusing across multiple problems.

I tried to think about this and came to a personal realisation that perhaps there is no strict "foundational knowledge" for most topics.

Pick programming, is knowing binary operations foundational? Is knowing compilers? Is it knowing bubble sort? Or perhaps knowing data structures?

I believe that if you have been using/working in a field, whatever you touch for your own goals that's enough.

And perhaps the difference between being an expert beginner and an expert is whether you still care about such a distinction? If you can achieve your current and future goals and can eventually learn new concepts then you're good.

I'd say a beginner might be someone who wouldn't even know where to begin.

Let's pick chemistry for myself: sure, I could follow some video but without the video I wouldn't even conceive how to get started with anything.

While, say woodworking, I wouldn't call myself an expert but I would be able to imagine starting a random project from scratch and eventually figure out all the parts.

So, maybe: - beginner: can't complete a project without help/support - mid: can complete but is unsure whether that's the best way - expert: has completed it before somehow

I'm surprised the course by the name of this post isn't here.

The post covers a great mindset, but the math really is one thing, and learning how you learn and how you can learn is invaluable.

This is a great course to start learning about your learning.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

After/with this, there is a slew of adult learning knowledge that will likely make you feel better.

One key is learning to understand something, before learning to memorize it.

Another is creating your own mind map of how the concepts you are learning fits together.

Farnham street has some great books on mental models as well that was recommended to me as helping

An expert is someone who can often explain complex things in very simple ways. being an innocent beginner is one of the best mindsets to cultivate - you learn what you do and don't know pretty quick, and also a sense of known vs unknown, and size and number of unknowns.

I'd argue the principles Turing and Wolfram lay out in regards to universal computation and computational equivalence are the most foundational, and then various systems or architectures (flow vs stack, etc), etc, are important as there needs to be concrete examples implementing the fundamentals. If you really want to get esoteric, programming goes all the way back with society and religion. Just like how a machine can compute so too can a group of people through their actions, if they adhere as religiously to their tasks as the fablic of reality seems to adhere to its laws in governing the motions of matter. Programming is the building abstract structures which, when represented with matter in the right ways that can take advantage of the moment-by-moment Gets Things Done™ nature of the fabric of reality itself, produces useful transformations of its initial states. Very complex behavior arises from the simplest of mechanistic rulesets, and it's found universally in biology and in places all over reality. Computation is so foundationally fundamental to this place and your (dear reader) existence here, it is shameful it's not in standard middle/high schools' curricula right next to the fundamental theorems of arithmetic and algebra!

You don’t. That is what you will build as you learn a topic, it makes no sense to “identify” it first.

Do the thing you want to learn.

I checked these out but couldn't find the answer to the questions I am asking. It tells you how to maximize efficiency while learning, but doesn't tell you how to identify what you should be learning in the first place and what the sequence of your focus should be when you start.

It is an iterative process. One would move forward with a baseline foundation and pay attention to the difficulties and inefficiencies in the learning process to triangulate the additional foundation needed.

What do you specifically want to learn? What you need to learn will generally make itself known, if you have some general goal? Just starting at all is the best way to start.

Say I want to learn web scraping. Now if I try to start, I see there are several layers of fundamentals and several potential paths, all of which seem equally important. Where do I start? What platform should I use? Should I start from the DOM and HTML parsing and go ahead from there, or should I start from learning Python libraries built for it as so many books and tutorials advise? Going one layer deeper, do I need to learn data structures before anything else? JavaScript and APIs? The fundamentals of TCP networking? Regex?

It's all too overwhelming at times.

Yeah, start from any point A. A suggestion is where you can progress in some way. Don’t make too many decisions. There’s so many viable ways to learn that, just start where it is natural for you. You don’t have to figure everything out or have answers to everything.

I learnt data analytics and SQL for MIS/BI purposes on-the-job as a sales manager. Got pretty good at it too, built several dashboards and long-standing capabilities for my team.

Now, if I say I want to get into this scene for good, I am immediately daunted with a mountain of diverging learning paths to take. Should I take to Python and its massive library ecosystem, or should focus on database fundamentals? In every choice taken there are seemingly infinite branches, and it is rather hard to focus if you aren't even sure you're on the right track.

Last time I sat in an analytics/consulting interview they grilled me on highly specific technical questions on data pipelines and warehousing and testing and other topics that I've never had to worry about before at work. In another assessment, I was grilled on some AWS/Redshift-specific things. In yet another I was expected to know deep learning. It is all too hard for someone not originally with an engineering (or adjacent) background.

Yeah learning to actually use in practice is different from preparing for interviews. I would say continue where you already built some knowledge and branch out when you realize you have to, and then work on learning one branch as you go.

For interviews you may need to lookup what type of questions to expect and memorize details on that, unfortunately. That is not useful in practice but can be necessary for interviews.

>If you are a novice, how do you quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is?

You probably can't. You need to rely on knowledge of others to identify good resources. And then lean that against how you learn in order to pick the best resource for you.Same for verifying being an "expert beginner". Never be the smartest person in the room if your goal is to grow.

In a crude way: google it. You'll probably get a generic (maybe even horrible AI slop) on top. But you're not looking for a perfect guide on first Google (not unless you have a very popular topic). Look for terms used and start googling those to narrow down to a more specific place. Maybe a forum post full of (hopefully) competent+ people answering your question. Maybe you find a quality guide to follow. Maybe you find you're on a completely wrong rabbit hole and figure out better terms to Google.

That's basically half my learning while on the job. Usually works pretty well in my personal time too.