Learning to Learn

A big hole in this article is that you need to find the very best learning resource there is. This is a must.

Eg: For RL it would be Barto&Sutton book.

Sometimes the best source is not intuitive. Eg: The best way to become a safe driver is to go to performance drivign school - its a bit expensive but they tell you how to sit and stay alert in a car which I have never seen outside of these schools.

One of my most common things nowadays is to ask ChatGPT is to ask to build a curriculum. Creating and understanding what a great curriculum looks like is 20% of the work of understanding a field.

You can LEARN ANYTHING now if you have the time and inclination and elbow grease. Truly nothing is beyond your grasp - NOTHING. Its a magical time.

I'm actually building a tool that will do all this for you and get you started down the learning path faster than what we have now.

And for the curious - the best way to learn medicine is not a textbook. There are solutions out there like Skethcy which work much better for anatomy.

My own learning project - learn Medicine "on the side". It seems ludcirous that we give up the keys to our health to doctors just so we don't have to learn 2 years of courses. Am going to fix that!

Would love to hear more about your thoughts on learning medicine! Why would you recommend an online program over textbooks?

> One of my most common things nowadays is to ask ChatGPT is to ask to build a curriculum.

I've been trying to do this for some rabbit hole I decided to go through. It's great for generating a list of topics but good luck getting actual existing books or papers. In some instances it would generate a paper title and link it to some other paper that might be slightly relevant.

When I’ve gotten deep into a topic I’ve actually almost ALWAYS learned that textbooks are the best way to learn things.

The internet is full of information. Sometimes it’s too much, unstructured or tangential to the goal at hand. Textbooks, in my experience, are truly written by the experts. It’s been vetted, rigorously reviewed and fact checked. It’s not inspired by influencers or clickbait.

Obviously YMMV, but when you find a top recommended textbook, it’s usually miles beyond a YouTube video or medium blog for deeper level content. It usually flows better and makes more sense as you study consistently.

It's not foolproof, but some universities publish their course textbook lists online (and in some cases recommended readings too). As a bonus, textbooks often have recommendations for further readings.

>you need to find the very best learning resource there is. This is a must.

I think there's a line around "good enough", unless your goal of course is to be on the road to "become the very best". I think the better metric is making sure you have a accurate resource over a quality one. The 15-20 hour "sprint hard" methodology isn't stopping after that first sprint, just slowing down.

So if you find/can now access a better resource later, just start the sprint again on that. I know from experience (in real time, unfortunately) how easily "find the best resource" can end up becoming "spend weeks collecting resources but not consuming them".

The other problem is: How do you recognize what is "good enough" if you lack the skills/competence required to be able to say "this is good enough"?

For example, I'm a frontend developer who wants to learn backend. And let's say that I chose C# and .NET for this. I can either do tutorials in Microsoft docs and then reach out to Reddit or some other community for resources, to receive the commonsense advice "just build something", and we're back to zero because now the goal is to build something for learning's sake therefore what is "good enough project" to build to maximize gains?

^ This is exactly it. It's Dunning-Kruger.

I understand the struggle but may not be able to offer an exact solution. People usually expect you to just throw something together without structure, but if you don't have preliminary experience with doing anything similar at all, you are stuck with a blank piece of paper and no ideas, and it feels absolutely terrible.

I don't know what works for you, but what worked for me was finding open-source projects in a domain I'm looking to write an application or a library in and using them as a reference. With time, you become able to determine which ones are of high quality and are a good example, and which ones are not. You could also ask Claude/ChatGPT for references to starting point.

On C# specifically, I can recommend looking at https://github.com/bitwarden/server which is more "traditional" style but does not have much nonsense/bloat you would usually see in an enterprise codebase. That's what I always reference as a style and project layout guide for newcomers that don't already know how they want the project to look. And then as you go through the code, you can always dump the snippets into a chatbot and then cross-reference the replies with documentation if needed. Chatbots also great at quickly sketching up project structure - it can be a terrible one but it's easier to do "hey, I don't like this, let's change it to X" than trying to come up with everything from the scratch.

If you already have experience with writing TS-based applications with e.g. React components, base router, etc., you can more or less translate this onto structuring an ASP.NET Core application with controller/api handlers, model classes, services, ORM layer and similar. There really is no true right or wrong singular way of doing it, and people who claim there is are dogmatics from a cargo cult.

In general, a lot of C# code out there that you will encounter will take more steps to solve its task than strictly necessary, as the generational trauma of ungodly horrors of 666-layer "Clean" architecture DDD-done-badly monoliths still haunts many, manifesting in a milder form of "write a small three file microservice as a 40-file three-project solution". It is highly useful to approach new patterns and anything that seems ceremoneous with "is this abstraction strictly required or can this piece be removed and done in a few lines of code or maybe a method?".

On tooling - can strongly recommend using .NET CLI which will be very familiar after using NPM and co.:

Create new projects/solutions with 'dotnet new {template name}' (e.g. console, classlib, sln, gitignore).

Add/remove projects to/from a solution with dotnet sln add/remove

Add dependencies with 'dotnet add package PackageName' or 'dotnet add reference path/to/project' if you want to combine multiple projects.

Run projects with 'dotnet run' (-C release). Hot-reload for most scenarios is possible with 'dotnet watch'. Publish into a final complete application with 'dotnet publish -o {path}'. There are many ways to do the last one, but for simple back-ends doing the default output and then copying it to a "runtime" image in a dockerfile will suffice.

I'm giving a C# class at a university-like institute (for the first time in my life) and I'm glad I had the time to learn the language while it evolved over the last 15 years. Learning nowadays is daunting because of the size of the language and the N ways to do even simple things. You also need to understand the programming landscape before C# (mostly C and Java) to understand some decisions made by language designers.

As much as I like learning by myself, sometimes I have to admit that taking (and paying) for a class is the good solution. The way I organize notions for my students would take them months/years to understand by themselves, if at all.

>then reach out to Reddit or some other community for resources, to receive the commonsense advice "just build something"

An expert giving bad advice isn't going to help with your curriculum. To give a charitable interpretaion, forums like Reddit are very used to getting mostly Novices coming to ask questions. To the point where even if an advanced novice is asking about how to reach "Competent" level they will still give novice advice. And the best way to climb from novice to advance beginner is to "just build stuff".

There's definitely an open secret that there's plenty of novice material, and plenty of expert material. But the road to competent and proficient is basically a dead man's land for many subjects. I argue the curve to competent is harder than Proficient and Expert[0]. Such a hard point that you often won't find "best resources" without either education, consulting an expert, or simply work a job in that topic.

I don't have much better advice if you are seeking resources. But the next step up if you get stumped is to put more effort into finding other experts who will help out. try to email those potentially open to give advice on what to find or what's good/bad. Join communities similar to what domains you want to explore and form relationships. If you are getting to that point, offer to help contribute to projects others are working on.

[0]: Expert is steeper, but by that point you have a good sense of judgement to figure out what is a good or bad resource to study from. So it's "easier" to learn how to learn by this point.

> My own learning project - learn Medicine "on the side". It seems ludcirous that we give up the keys to our health to doctors just so we don't have to learn 2 years of courses. Am going to fix that!

While I admire the drive to become knowledgeable in the field of medicine outside of a professional curriculum in the disciplines, I’m not aware of any curriculum that proposes competency as a medical doctor in two years. Though I haven’t practiced medicine in many years, I do have a degree in medicine and went through internship, residency and fellowship. Trust me, it was far more than two years. Further, I don’t see how you would be able to (legally) gain experience in any of a range of procedures without following the consensus training path.

Can you tell me why doctors are totally useless in diagnosing extremely common issues like acid reflux. Why do GI specialists have no freaking clue what is causing acid reflux. Why do they not know what how exactly my a1c is relevant to heart disease instead of just prescribing me a statin.

I personally know couple of doctors who themselves are clueless in fixing their own chronic conditions. Let alone helping someone else.

Sure go to the doctor if you broke your arm but they are totally out of their depths if you have any chronic conditions. Not sure what exactly they study for like a decade if they don't have answers to almost anything.

I ran into this issue when diving into the world of Rust. What ended up getting me to move forward was asking Claude/4o to design a curriculum that would teach me the basics in a way would lead to completion of a project I had in mind.

I ended up dropping 4o and going exclusively with Claude. Claude is amazing at teaching.

As a medical student, perhaps I can give some recommendations on the best free resources to learn medicine. If you like YouTube videos, Ninja Nerd has a great channel for learning the foundations. If you like textbooks, I used Guyton for physiology and Harrison's is probably the standard for clinical medicine. If you just want to look up how to treat a specific condition, look up "<condition> clinical guidelines". You'll always be missing the additional knowledge that comes from years of experience, but there's no harm in increasing your knowledge as long as you maintain the humility to remember that your knowledge is incomplete.

It's similar to how I learned software development as a hobbyist, so I understand a little about headlines like OpenAI switching from Next to Remix, but at a deeper level, I don't really understand what it's like running Next.js at the scale of MAUs. But it's still worth learning so that I have a little more understanding about the world around me.

Asking a doctor to diagnose and treat a chronic condition from a list of symptoms is like asking a detective to solve a crime from a list of evidence.

There is A LOT of additional legwork and investigation required to get to the truth even if you're brilliant Sherlock Holmes (and most won't be).

The best they can practically do in the 10 minutes they spend on your case, is try to treat symptoms.

Studied long time ago / studied once and then forgotten / no interest in getting updated / no proper channels for getting updated / ...

Any of those could be a reason.

Because there are 12 different "causes" that are all very subtle and are highly influenced by your diet and behavior etc.

Doctors also never want to admit they dont know the answer to something

Yikes. No. If you have doctors who aren’t honest with you or honest about when they need to do more research to understand more, get the hell away and find someone else. I know not everyone has that choice, but if you do… please find a doctor who will level with you and you can trust. You do not want to get Dr. Deathed.

Thanks for the reply.

Yep I'm ware of Guyton and Nnja.

The marginal information that a doctor has from real life is useful but with so many medical errors, for 80% of people they aren't relevant.

I've caught surgeons literally mentioning the wrong type of incisions right before the surgery.

The first two years are the scientific part of a medical course.

The next two are more about interacting with a live patient in a variety of settings. Obviously this si useful.

But most of the harm created by the medical system and skewed doctor incentives (only 15 minutes to see you) can be averted by those 2 years. For example: knowing to e able to read a examination report means abiliy to ask questions immediately.

By the very fact that the resource is "good enough" implies that it won't have the holistic and beginner-tolerance required of a good instruction set.

A great text will get you upto beinngin in 2 weeks - month. A "good enough" will mean a year if it isn't your primary focus.

Try learning RL from any other text than Barto-Sutton.

Yep ... UCSF does this.

Weidly its the only good one I Found.

U=I bought more or less every book on this.

https://meded.ucsf.edu/sites/meded.ucsf.edu/files/inline-fil...

Start with Anatomy.

Start with a problem you HAve personally. And understand the anatomy and physiology. Use that to learn every abstraction you bump into. Example you'll definitely need to learn about the skin for example

Also go to uptodate.com for your condition. Thats basically what a doc uses anyways.

For inspiration go to r/medicalschool .

Constantly use

And this is why you need to study Medicine!

https://meded.ucsf.edu/sites/meded.ucsf.edu/files/inline-fil...

Since this struck a note - you can find UCSFs list of textbooks here: https://meded.ucsf.edu/sites/meded.ucsf.edu/files/inline-fil...

Start with Anatomy. And the basic anatomical form.

Start with a problem you personally have. (Go to a doc if its serious!)

Figure out your concentric anaotmy of hte issue, the pathology. Everytime you read a textbook it will push you to a new subject.

Do this for at least 5 hours and you'll be able to relate to your doctor much better.

If you want to know what a dcotor looks at for decision support - you can go to uptodate.com - I think they have a free trial for 3 days or something.

The most essential idea is that a doctor is someone whose model of hte human body is much more realistic than yours.

Thus as you learn medicine keep improving the model you have of your own body and how someone elses would be different from yours - for all major body systems - lymph, respiratory, nervous, endocrine , muscular, digestive, integumentary, urinay, excretory, circulatory etc.

Realize I didn't answer your qeustion.

Online courses aren't really holistic enough and not fundamental enough. They are usually dertivatives which are a translation of sorts from source documents.

For medicine you want the source documents which you can really trust.

Meidicine isn't static - it'll keep changing but its important to know source mateiral and tracking how outlooks and fixes for diseases change from there.

UptoDate.com has the best deciison science -newest knowlege. Thye are about 18 months old from cutting edge research. (Which is a good thing).

Get in front of an expert and ask them what they should have read first.

In most fields the best will know. And the process of getting inf ront of the best will also teach you about the field.

> There is A LOT of additional legwork and investigation required to get to the truth even if you're brilliant Sherlock Holmes (and most won't be).

I got all the additonal tests though. I got upper endoscopy, a appointment with ent who put some sort of scope down my throat, bloodwork, esophagram, barium swallow test. He said he got nothing else and i am on my own and admitted that almost 90% of time they don't find anything.

Mind you this is one of most common conditions not some rare disease that needs sherlock holmes .

Well yeah. Time and budget can be limited. The "best" way to learn a language is to travel to a country native to it and immerse yourself, constantly attempting to speak to others. But that may not be accessible in time nor costs to travel and live. The "best way" to learn many topics is to immerse in a community that's a mix of learners or experts. ie. A classroom setting. A place to constantly iterate and quickly correct mistakes. But education is only getting more expensive, and not all communities are equal.

If there's a great beginner textbook out there, that can definitely help. But not every field has its Bart-Sutton easily accessible. But the time it takes doesn't necessarily matter as much as the mastery itself.