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!

>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?