Learning to Learn

Posts like this that talk about learning "efficiency" always come off as soulless and dystopian to me. I think learning should be fun and that fun learning is the most effective---that's the only thing I optimize for and I certainly don't think about efficiency percentages. What a drag that would be.

I so much agree with you. I understand and remember the things I learn more when I am having fun or it piqued my curiosity. But I guess shortness of time needs us to focus on the efficiency aspect of it too.

I somewhat disagree. Although having fun is important, I also want to make the most of my time. further, I think some aspects of learning can be a real slog, but when you get through it you find it rewarding.

I studied mathematics and I think this subject illustrates my feelings on this perfectly. Coding, just as well.

When it comes to learning maths, or a new programming language, there's all this tedious boilerplate you need to know. The rules, or syntax, the names of everything, how it all fits together.

There's ways to make learning this stuff more fun, but ultimately, not that much more fun. And anyway, the learning part is not the good part, it's the things you can do once you reach a certain knowledge level that are incredible, beautiful, even sublime.

On the other hand, take something like learning to paint, or taking dancing lessons. Unless you're hoping to become a member of an international ballet company, learning to dance is the fun part.

As another point, if you're a knowledge worker and you're likely to have situations in your life where someone basically says to you "right mate, you've got the job, here's a huge body of deep technical knowledge to learn, get up to speed, see you Monday" then a certain amount of skill in knowing how to absorb that quickly is a good thing.

I would say "fun" is overrated. We have become so focused on everything being fun that everything including fun itself has become tepid and mediocre. It is important to slog through the hard parts to cross the barrier of expert beginner. We are over downplaying the value of hard work and grit.

The steps here are fairly generic and can fit into whatever regimen you have. It simply comes down to "find your learning path and grind hard in the beginning. Then you can slow down and relax after that first burst".

Seems like decent enough advice if you ever have trouble getting started. It's actually not unlike cramming for a test, except you keep study afterwards and don't dump that knowledge the day after. "fun learning" or not, just make sure to really dive in in the beginning.

In many ways I agree with your opening sentence---maybe I shouldn't have written "fun". I think I was trying to get at something more like that the experience of learning itself is itself a good thing (even if it's not fun, even if it's suffering, even if it's hard) and I think mechanical and stoic recipes to optimize the process fail to adequately appreciate that fact.

The best part of learning piano isn't getting good at piano---it's learning piano. And sure there are some things we have to learn that we aren't that interested in learning, but I think even those things have the capacity to be worthwhile experiences if properly framed.

I think applying the word "efficient" to this area is suggestive of urgency and greater purpose---I don't buy into either.

I think 'fun' is a prerequisite for optimal learning, you can definitely have both.

And I think greater purpose is definitely a thing if you subscribe to a utilitarian moral framework

If I'm not having fun learning something I can't stick with it. Efficiency without tenacity/grit is useless. It's kind of a tautology that "more efficient is better", but I agree it's pointless without fun. Being less "efficient" but having fun will yield better results imo

This is exactly why drills exist: to make reasoning mechanic. The same as in the military... You can only decide (know) if you have the basics memorized to the core, and this requires... boredom in most of us.

I graduated in mathematics. Proving that Projective Space is a noetherian scheme is not exactly a thrilling challenge. But you have to go through the motions if you want to be able to "think" about algebraic varieties.

Same in any other field of "knowledge".

> Posts like this that talk about learning "efficiency" always come off as soulless and dystopian to me. I think learning should be fun and that fun learning is the most effective

I don't disagree, but maybe the author is making do with what they have. Maybe they only have 30 minutes ~ 1 hour of free time per day (which is dystopian on its own), and need to think about efficiency if they want to achieve a certain degree of proficiency in whatever they're learning.

Another interpretation is that they are only trying to optimize their learning process if it's work related, because they need to. Or maybe they have an engineer mindset, and make the process more efficient is a fun thing to do by itself.

> We are over downplaying the value of hard work and grit.

Who is doing that?

Yeah, I agree. Also, I don't think there is an ideal way to learn something. Different people absorb lessons best in different ways.

The people I've thought were most successful were not grinding their way through learning but enjoying it, letting new questions arise and pursuing them. Is that efficient? It might not seem so. But the learning tends to be more transformative; they grok the lessons more deeply.

A work colleague once told me that it's like reading textbooks in graduate school -- you read it once just to get a general sense of the vocabulary. They you start over, concentrating on the meaning. New ideas take a lot of study to learn well. "Efficient" learning strikes me as a compromise where you get a superficial understanding for the sake of speed.

There is a big difference between learning something to become a skilled professional versus just a hobby. A lot of things I learned are for myself. I want them to be fun. There is no end goal. I don't want to compete with anyone, I don't want to prove anyone I am very good at this. I am learning new skills for fun and I intend to get enjoyment from practicing them. Throwing at a hobbyist "now repeat this 1000 times to get it perfect" is how you kill motivation.

> Unless you're hoping to become a member of an international ballet company, learning to dance is the fun part.

I think this really depends on the dance.

With most relatively technical partner dances, such as argentine tango and west coast swing, being a beginner sucks and it's especially rough if you're a lead.

There's this fairly long period when you're not going to be very fun to dance with, and you're not going to have fun dancing because too much of it is still in your head and not in your body. At the same time you need to dance with lots of people in order to improve, and people will throw you a bone once in a while for the sake of letting you practice, but at the same time they're not really having fun.

It's only if you stick with it for a year or two and get through this rough patch, it becomes very fun and rewarding.

I think 'joy' would be a fitting term, perhaps? Here (https://www.1517.org/articles/cs-lewis-on-joy) C.S.Lewis defines it well, and distinguishes it from 'pleasure' and 'happiness'.