Definitely agree with the article, and would like to offer a useful supplement to "doing the real thing": "watch someone very skilled do the real thing".
Watching a pro can really accelerate skill acquisition because it will expose you to high quality ideas that would have been difficult to develop on your own.
Want to get better at Backgammon/Chess/Go? Play a lot of games (at various time controls). Yes. But also watch professional players and read their analyses of games.
Want to get better at programming? Write a lot of programs. Yes. But also read a lot of high quality code written by others.
Want to become a better mathematician? Spend your time mastering mathematical knowledge and techniques. Yes. But also spend some time trying to get in the heads of the masters - learning their patterns of thought at the mathematical and meta-mathematical levels.
The increased accessibility of this kind of content is one of the greatest achievements of the internet.
Just watching someone doing the real thing is one of the most prominent strategies to avoid doing the real thing.
It is not enough to watch someone very skilled do the real thing. You have to imitate them: Reading a lot of great novels will not make you a better writer. Instead write a story in the style of any writer you admire and you will learn a lot while still doing the real thing. The same is true for almost any art you want learn.
When asked about how to be a good writer, Terry Pratchett offered tips on boxing:
“A good diet is essential, of course, as is a daily regime of exercise. Pay attention to your footwork, it will often get you into trouble. Go down to the gym every day – every day of your life that finds you waking up capable of standing. Take every opportunity to watch a good professional fight. In fact watch as many bouts as you can, because you can even learn something from the fighters who get it wrong. Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do. And don’t forget the diet and the exercise and the roadwork.
Got it? Well, becoming a writer is basically exactly the same thing, except that it isn’t about boxing.”
I play a lot of hearthstone, and I’m quite good at it, but to remain good at it, I absolutely do have to spent a fair bit of time watching streamers and reading strategy articles. There’s a lot to know about the game and you absolutely cannot get everything you need to be a top player from only playing. Even the top professional players spend a lot of time in coaching sessions with their peers or just watching streams.
Mirror neuron mythos is ridiculous. They're just normal neurons, they just happen to fire in response to externally observed behaviour as well as personal behaviour.
They aren't magic, they can't actually mirror what's going on in another person's head or give you a high-resolution idea of how their brain works. They aren't even that good at mimicry unless you already have a pretty high-resolution understanding of what you're trying to improve. You can't learn to juggle by watching people juggle. You can't learn to play piano by watching people play piano. You might be able to improve those skills if you already have them and watch someone who's better, but it's limited and whether that's even osmotic mirror neuron activity is controversial.
JUST watching, yes. However, I really am inspired when watching my VERY competent co-worker. I pick up on little habits, and have a lot of 'Oh, cool!' moments. It's actually pretty cool because it's getting to the point where sometimes he will actually say 'Oh, cool!' about something he sees me do :-)
Very true. I don't mean this as a strategy for procrastination, but rather as a strategy for finding patterns/modes of thought that would otherwise have been difficult for you to discover on your own from first principles.
It is very important to test out first hand by "doing the real thing" the ideas you discover by watching skilled people.
Recent practical example: I had a lot of trouble picking which photographs out of 20-100 of a subject to use. Enough were sharp, well-composed, and properly exposed to make it near impossible to pick.
I've been watching James Popsys' videos[1] lately. He doesn't take the greatest photos in the world from a technical standpoint, but there's a theme that runs through most of his videos and pictures: tell a story.
It's a lot easier to pick the best photos out of a bunch of technically decent photos when "best" is well-defined. And it turns out fit in a story about the subject is a solid criteria for best.
"I'll be invisible if I stay perfectly still" is a great photograph. Actually, that picture (with the caption) stands by itself - it tells its own story.
Chess is an interesting example. If you want to get good at blitz, playing 1min games over and over is a terrible way to do it in my experience. Playing 3hr games and studying theory is painful and annoying yet way more useful for real improvement. I think the same concept applies to many things - learning an instrument is another example. Performing a piano piece at full speed over and over is fun, but focusing exclusively on the hard parts one hand at a time slowly is far more useful.
Actually chess is a pretty good counterexample, speaking as a guy who 'did the real thing' and just started playing chess.
I ended up with a ranking of about 1600, give or take a hundred points.
The thing was, that was my ceiling: I wasn't going to advance beyond that. Whatever I could've figured out on the fly was built into my ranking.
So, to advance, I would've needed to, flatly, learn: put down the pieces and pick up a book.
Eventually, I think you reach a point where you have to do that, if you want to get better. "Doing the thing" is great for getting you out of the 'rank amateur' stage, but it can be a hindrance further down the line.
This is excellent advice for everybody. Well said zoomlings.
I remember reading about forge work and thinking it would be fun. I remember playing on a forge and sweating pants and burning. I remember reading about advanced techniques and wasting a lot of iron and fuel. And I remember watching a master bend iron cleverly, and heat it minimally, achieving beautiful affect. Sometimes you don't need a hammer, you need practiced wit.
Some call these folk teachers, or professors, or craftmasters, or what have you. The best are better than artists, they're scientists. Alan Kay is a great example. So is Knuth. Check out John Baez. I was lucky enough to meet Des MacHale. He could tell a joke ambidextrously in chalk and you'd split your sides laughing while learning mathematical context. He were that good he were better.
Learning from others is faster than learning on one's own but we yield our sense of direction. Which is why innocent play is so important.
Now get back to studying Jacob Lurie and reformulate, reformulate, reformulate!
> Want to get better at programming? Write a lot of programs. Yes. But also read a lot of high quality code written by others.
Well, do this in moderation, as reading "high quality code" can lead to a premature focus on code-quality.
Most "high quality code" is the result of many iterations of ideas and use-cases. And trying to emulate that style can be counter-productive in many cases.
I find going back in the history of the code-base helps you see how simple the project used to be, which is helpful when learning to code.
> reading "high quality code" can lead to a premature focus on code-quality
I don't think so. There's a difference between a skilled software developer making tradeoffs under time pressure, and someone who doesn't know what good code even looks like.
If you aren't capable of writing good code, you aren't qualified to make the right tradeoff.
> "If you aren't capable of writing good code, you aren't qualified to make the right tradeoff."
So you should probably limit the amount of "good code" you read when you're learning something right?
Or else (as you say) you won't be able to understand why it's good and what trade-off's it will cause...
I guess my main point is, don't dive into the linux kernel if you're learning C, as you'll learn optimisation strategies that probably aren't useful in your context and will only slow you down...
> So you should probably limit the amount of "good code" you read when you're learning something right?
Why? If you're learning a dance, you try to copy the teacher, not other students. You don't need to study the mistakes of others, you are sure to make plenty of your own.
> don't dive into the linux kernel if you're learning C, as you'll learn optimisation strategies that probably aren't useful in your context
Unless you're learning C for the purpose of kernel programming, sure. That's not really the same question.
And if you're a beginner, what you think is high-quality code is probably just wrong. You don't have the experience to differentiate. Over-abstracted code that is extremely visually clean at each of its 8 levels of indirection and is so perfectly cohesive that any modification would destroy the entire artwork looks great to most beginners.
The difficulty of the article and of your example is active vs passive learning - watching and reading people with more experience is important, and I guess the spirit of the article is to do that actively without procrastinating - real learning - watch and make notes rather than just relax and passively watch/read.
However, the part not touched on is that things you do passively do build up knowledge too - and it's not an exertion like active learning is. Absentmindedly watching Chess streams when relaxing is good to call out as not an intentional active learning experience, but as long as you're treating it as relaxing it's the kind of thing that is fuel for shower thoughts and can refuel capacity for active learning. As the article says, the "real thing" is hard and tiring, and doing "fake things" can add depth to understanding as well as recuperate for the next struggle. Being mindful and aware of what you're doing and pushing yourself to be doing the real thing when possible is my takeaway from the article.
Truly watching others is the most natural way to learn. It applies to all aspects of life. I’ve often felt school, while important, was ill preparing people for actual jobs. Shadowing people is immensely helpful and something my school forced me to do and I was grateful for.
I also like Agadmator's YouTube channel - he analyzes famous games as well as games from current tournaments and such: https://www.youtube.com/user/AGADMATOR
Lichess is a superb website which combines online tournaments, game studies and tactics. It is all open source too. A great example of people coming together to create something great.
Possibly an over-simplification. Take this example: I want to sight-sing hymns. I know a bit of music theory but it's been cobbled together over the past year in an haphazard fashion. I pick up a hymnal to sing the first hymn and immediately need to look up the key signature (I never memorized them). Then I see the hymn is 12/8 time and realize I only superficially covered rhythm and time signatures. I go on YouTube to refresh my memory. This is before being able to sing a single note.
When I do attempt to sing, my mind's ear says I'm way off (even when I've never heard the hymn before). I'm not hitting the notes. So now I need to learn solfège and music intervals.
Doing the "real thing" requires having the tools and basic skillset first. I suggest the opposite of this article: break the goal down into manageable parts and work the periphery. Get some small wins. Then you can realistically take on the "real thing". There may be no other way.
I think this is actually a good thing, though... you have something real you are trying to do, which guides you to what you need to learn.
I find it is a lot easier to learn in the pursuit of something I actually want to accomplish rather than studying in a vacuum.
So your approach, for example, is better than if you had just picked up a book on key and time signatures and started reading. You first tried to do something, ran into something you didn't know, so started to learn that thing.
True. I wouldn't have known I don't have the competency to sight-sing if I didn't try it first. That said, doing the "real thing" is out of my reach until I level up in other areas.
I’m curious if you have heard about Gnu Solfege. I just read about it here recently via the recent “Ask HN: I'd like to learn vocals, any suggestion on how I can do this?”
Whatever you described (looking up key signature etc. in youtube) is the real thing. You are trying to do sight-singing and you are working on it. And if you keep at it and get to sing the whole piece,then you have truly achieved your goal. But if you languish on watching more and more youtube videos, say watch how someone else plays a piano piece or go into something inconsequential to the original problem in hand, then in your mind you started with something and you have not done enough to help that.
I am not exactly telling that sidetracking is the problem here, but you moving farther away and away from the original set aside goal is what I am saying.
I agree that there are some over-simplifications here: I'd propose that there's a distinction he didn't make between "the real thing" and "the whole real thing". Taking a job speaking French when you speak NO French is too big a leap. But thinking that you're making real progress learning a language by memorizing verb-conjugation rules is mistaken thinking, you need opportunities to hear real French spoken, and opportunities to speak it. Expecting that you can sight-sing anything when you've never done anything close before is also too much. (Modulo massive natural gifts). Solfège (I had to look it up) I would argue, is pretty much at the core of the 'real' thing you're trying to learn: sight singing. It's just not the 'whole' thing you're trying to learn. But reading about solfège (or discussing it on HN), isn't the real thing. DOING it is the real thing. Hey, I could use a little solfège myself, how is it that I've never heard of it in 50 years of making music?? dammit :)
The basic idea is to make it much easier to sight-read songs in different keys. With shape notes, the "Do" in solfege is always the same symbol, regardless of the key signature. So it'd be a "C" in C Major, but the same shape appears for an "F" in F Major. Once you can recognize the 7 shapes, you can suddenly do two things very easily:
- Find "Do" and feel your way around the song using it as an anchor, without any risk of losing it
- Re-pitch the song so that the melody is in a more comfortable range
The first point helps out a lot with interval training, as it short-cuts the key signature translation steps. You no longer have to remember that a C -> an E (or was it an Eb in this key?) is a major third, you just look at the "Do" shape and the "Mi" shape following it, and hear what you should do.
The second point was especially useful as a song leader in my youth. Some of the composers had an optimistic idea of how high our tenors could comfortably sing, so over time I learned to nudge the key up or down a few steps to keep the voices comfortable. (This was a congregation of worshipers, not a trained choir.) Shape notes made that easy to do, since everybody in the audience could still follow the music and often without realizing that I'd changed the reference key on the fly.
I don't think the author is suggesting that we jump into the metaphorical deep end without taking swimming lessons first. He seems to be addressing the scenario where we use instructional videos on swimming and practicing on land as a means of avoiding getting into the water.
I think the author is mostly suggesting you buy his book entitled ULTRALEARNING (all caps), and reading anything more into his content-driven marketing strategy is a waste of time.
I don't think I have. I think that the vagaries of SEO and the goal of promoting the author's brand/book is definitely the reason this article is several screens instead of a 3 word aphorism that we all just shrug at and move along.
How is this conclusion different than saying that, say, reading anything in any magazine is a waste of time because the magazine sells advertising space?
> How is this conclusion different than saying that, say, reading anything in any magazine is a waste of time because the magazine sells advertising space?
It is different because the business model of the magazine is to create some content that people enjoy, so that they will tolerate the ads that come with it.
Here, the content itself is an ad in disguise. That is the business model of SEO, "content marketing" etc, and this is why it keeps flooding the web with mediocrity.
Among the musical skills that can be acquired, "sight reading" is somewhat specialized, but definitely real. I'm a part time musician, and a fair amount of my performance work over the past decades has involved sight-reading. In addition to its usefulness for performance, it's an efficient way to digest a lengthy or complex work.
It really depends. If you want to make music you don't need to be able to sight-read, but if you want to be a functioning member of a Jazz/Events (i.e. you play what they want) band you need to be good at sight-reading.
As with all good advice, this reads well and makes sense but the devil is in the details.
> Eric Barone, who went on to sell millions of copies of his game, overcame his struggles at creating art by making and remaking the art assets for his game dozens of times.
To someone else, frigging around with their art assets and remaking then over and over again could be the very definition of not doing "the real thing".
I think you missed the entire point of the article. The "real" thing is subjective and varies from person to person depending on their experience with the subject.
If someone else had no trouble creating art then this situation simply doesn't apply to them. That person might have a different part of the process that gives them trouble that they SHOULD be practicing.
For Eric, practicing the thing he had trouble with over and over was the best way for him to get over his struggles. Now he can move onto the next thing he needs to work on and continue to make progress.
Agreed. Following the article’s own advice of “ask someone who knows how your industry works” would certainly lead to “pay an artist” rather than “churn on your programmer art” if your goal is shipping a successful game.
You gotta do both. Research, analyze, digest, and then execute. With time, you can reduce the duration of the cycle. Taking the first step often requires a lot of research and thinking, and then a lot of execution to go from zero to one. Then, iterate, with shorter cycles. Failing to think is as much a problem as failing to execute, you have to balance it.
> Taking the first step often requires a lot of research and thinking
I generally agree with your comment, but strongly disagree with this part. You will have much more success if you take this first step as soon as possible. No research, no thinking. And a “real thing” first step. You want to start running? Put on some shoes and go for a run. Don’t sign up for a race, don’t look up running tips, don’t buy nice shoes. Just go run for a bit.
Coding? Pop open repl.it. Scuba? Get your head under water. Even for things that might be out of reach like flying an airplane, read up on something specific like how to land.
With your very first step out of the way, you can then start thinking a bit more.
>You will have much more success if you take this first step as soon as possible. No research, no thinking.
I'd be careful with this advice. Almost every time I climb outside I see groups who clearly have very little idea of what they're doing, because all the small but deadly details are wrong - no stopper knots, not backing up rappels, building weird anchors, having 1 point of failure, etc.
From their perspective, they're just getting out there and taking those first steps - but with an inadequate understanding of how much risk they've taken on. They don't even realize they're doing anything wrong. It's really bad and regularly leads to serious accidents. To actually climb outside they need mentorship or a bunch of research and practice, both of which take a while to acquire. They should definitely not start by doing the thing.
I’d say they weren’t doing what I suggested (that could still mean my advice is bad).
Before they actually started climbing the rock, they had to do a bunch of other stuff. They at least got their hands on some gear, probably drove and hiked. And this is partly what gets them into trouble.
Fooling yourself into doing something unsafe generally requires a bit of work. I think there’s a safety in doing what’s immediately around you. For most people, it would be really hard to kill themselves rock climbing in the next 15 minutes, but very easy to do it next weekend.
My hope for someone doing what I suggest would be something like “I’m gonna go hang from that pull-up bar / low beam / jungle gym on and off for 5 minutes.” Then they research how to actually start rock climbing safely.
Gonna learn to lift? Read starting strength. Set yourself up for success by structuring an environment for habit formation. Take the steps to ensure you are getting good nutrition before you start. Don’t just run to the local gym and staring trying to mess around in the squat rack.
Going to build a new app? Get up to date on tech stack choices so you don’t make a dumb decision. Look at prior art and understand the work that has come before you can learn from.
Trying to learn a new skill? Do some research to find out what the best, most high quality resources there are first. Determine what level of mastery you’ll be happy with before diving in unprepared to know how to assess opportunity costs, which can
This doesn’t mean get stuck in analysis paralysis. I feel pretty strongly those who give advice like the advice you mention do not think it’s possible to avoid this obvious trap. It is if you are disciplined and have enough self awareness to know when you have hit the point of diminishing returns. Literally one day of focused thinking can outflank a week or more of pointless execution, even at the beginning. Thinking is underrated, execution without preparation is overrated. The most effective people know how to prepare the mind for execution and not get bogged down doing so. Taking an immediate first step can lead to a bad first impression: a bad lift, a mess of a prototype, or a garbage online course. That can be hard to unwind, since it forms busted initial mental models - and can undermine long term success. There is no hard rule, but aversion to pre-emptive research and analysis is an anti pattern unless you know yourself to be unable to do so.
There are people on both sides and they need opposite advice. The overanalyzers may be overrepresented on HN, and maybe the mindless doers are more in the general population.
Still, just as in startups the minimum viable product is important, you should get to the point of a simple but complete thing.
Think of it as breadth first, not depth first. You want to go through all main stages, see a simplified full experience. Then you can tweak each part. Instead of reading and never finishimg Starting strength and researching the best squat shoes and the other details, just go to the gym, do something lightweight and something you understand, then go home, feel some of the burn. You just had a full gym experience, a simple one, but full.
I recently made a website I've been endlessly procrastinating on. I was paralyzed by choice of static site generator, template style, hosting provider etc etc. Then I decided to go ahead and make a simple version. A single HTML file and a single CSS file, like in the old days, no framework. It is a complete website. It's alive on Github pages. I can now tweak it in many ways. If it becomes tedious, I can switch to a site generator. The main thing is, I've written the bulk of the content now.
Take the time to reflect and research every once in a while, experiment with different setups and ways of doing things, sure. But going ahead and doing an imperfect but functional first version is hugely important. Writers say you should write a draft in a totally non-judgmental way. Consciously accept it will be bad. But often there just isn't a way around it. The road to good involves passing through the not so good, so you see the feedback of reality, you can update your mental model of how this whole thing works so that the next thing you read already has a place to go in your mind. You don't know what you don't know. You know what you need to look up once you have a bit of experience. The thing gets demystified.
I agree with every activity you recommend, even down to suggesting Starting Strength.
> Literally one day of focused thinking can outflank a week or more of pointless execution, even at the beginning.
This (and the many other replies) make me think I did a poor job of expressing myself. I absolutely, 100%, do not think people should screw around for a week before figuring out the right way to do things.
I am a huge fan of thinking. I write out long, detailed syllabuses for my students and myself. I am constantly trying to improve both my skills and my process. And I think most people would be well served to do more of that.
I only see one real difference between your comment and what I suggested. I think when someone wants to start weightlifting, they shouldn’t reach for a book first. Do a tiny workout first. Maybe what you remember from PE, maybe life that heavy box in the garage 5 times. Then, with one shitty workout under your belt, open the book and do better next time.
It sounds like we are in more agreement than it seemed - for a full throated defense of thinking over execution, I like Rich Hickey’s talk “Hammock Driven Development” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
I tend to agree with this line of thinking... reminds me of Mike Tyson’s admonition “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” You want to take that first punch as soon as possible.
> You want to start running? Put on some shoes and go for a run.
I did that, went for a run every day, overexerted my ankle, couldn't walk normally for a week and couldn't run for weeks after that, and got out of the habit of running again for a very long time.
Your advice might work in specific cases for specific people, but for others it might be harmful. It is, in my opinion, not advice fit for "broadcast": you need to know the recipient and their situation to know whether the advice will not be harmful for them.
Sounds like you didn't respond to your bodies natural negative feedback mechanism. You are bashing the method when in this case you were completely responsible for the failure.
He never says in the article to keep doing something even if it is painful. If you went for a run and experienced pain, I think it would be safe to start trying to stretch or figure out why this happens.
This is still compatible with the method he recommends here.
Sure, I agree it was stupid and don't mean to reject responsibility for my actions, but I do think this sort of behavior could be encouraged by the OP's advice. For one, it's quite hard for someone who is not doing sports, to judge what kind of pain you should push through and what kind of pain you shouldn't. If you don't do proper research it's easy to get reached first by memes like "no pain, no gain" etc.
And your refinement of the advice only coincidentally happens to work because my injury was non-acute. There's plenty of sports where you can seriously hurt yourself if you don't know what you're doing, without any prior warning.
And the advice also only works under the assumption that you get multiple chances, that you will not catastrophically fail on your first go. All of the following sound absurd:
- if you want to fly an airplane, just fly an airplane
- if you want to build bridges, just build a bridge (not a toy one, that's not "the real thing", one that people will actually use)
- if you want to skydive, just knit a parachute and jump out of a plane
Of course, you'll say that that's not what you or the OP mean with "doing the real thing" and they're obviously insane. But they're just edge cases to prove a point, you don't need to fail this catastrophically to cause serious harm. OP writes about someone rejecting a job that requires fluency in French, without posting any details about that job, then judges the person for rejecting that job out of hand. That is just crazily irresponsible, it may very well have been a job where she has to communicate in French with French-speaking clients, and where a miscommunication might cost her company a large contract, cost her or her colleagues their jobs, or just sink the company altogether.
I think if your advice has this many edge cases where it is harmful, you should think carefully about who you are delivering it to. I'm not saying it is bad advice in all circumstances, it might be exactly what some people need to hear. But it is bad advice to broadcast unqualified.
Go for a run. One. Then you start doing the thinking cycle the comment I replied to was talking about.
It shouldn’t even be a long one. I said “go run for a bit”. If it hurts at all, stop. Don’t do things that you think are dangerous. If you can’t run or aren’t sure if you should, then just walk. Maybe I should refine my advice to “do whatever is closest to the ultimate thing, that you can safely do right now”.
The problem is, for many people (and now leaving the specific example) this sort of info is what they would and should look up at first.
In hindsight you may think you overthought something and should have just started earlier but maybe you really weren't ready.
Again, don't overdo it. Do something real, look up a simple beginner way to do it, research it for 1 hour or 1 day, then stick to that simple beginner way for some time. The point is to do that thing and not get bogged down by details and researching the tiny things that only matter to the elite expert.
Also, you have to accept some risks. You'll never be fully prepared. You may hurt your ankle by running too much, but it most likely won't be permanent and you learned a lesson.
My core criticism is that the notion of "doing the real thing" is very poorly defined and can be easily misinterpreted. That makes this article potentially harmful advice to broadcast. Mind you, it might be good advice for specific people, where you know their circumstances very well and can clarify all the undefinedness, but it is too poorly defined to just send to unknown recipients who mentally fill in the blanks of the article in many, unknown ways.
As someone who digs inversion as a way to get started on things and avoid the big blockers: at least look up basics of how to avoid and recognize injuries while running. Injuries will stop you more firmly than analysis paralysis.
You'll mostly discover the right things by doing, but the wrong things can hold you back, and they're often well-documented. Example: guitar players who discover music theory by plucking and poking until things sound good, but mess up their hands with bad form.
> You want to start running? Put on some shoes and go for a run.
I agree, but not for things like this which require significant physical exertion. Many physical things have components that, if done incorrectly, are injurious. And they're not always obvious.
Guitar, for example, has barre chords. And EVERYBODY always teaches them to beginners at the first fret so you can do an F chord.
This is LUDICROUS. That is the maximum tension point on the guitar with respect to barre chords, and it's a good way to injure new players if they're on a steel string acoustic. New players do not have the strength or the flexibility to do that chord.
Good guitar teachers teach that up much higher on the neck, and they generally only barre a couple strings. Once the student gets stronger, then they start moving it down and using more strings.
Good teachers of any physical exertion activity always have some pitfall like this that they instruct you to avoid.
I mostly disagree. Too many people (including myself) get sidetracked with tasks that are not actually “doing the real thing” as the article says. For low risk activities, making mistakes is important. Semi-relevant: one term for wantrepreneurs is “making house” where they give the appearances of building a business without actually doing so.
For some riskier tasks, there are obvious “real“ steps to perform before doing the real thing e.g. doing a SCUBA course before using an aqualung. Or getting advice when buying your first home.
For many tasks, just doing it is far more successful e.g. learning a language by speaking it with people that have that language as their first tongue. Listen to people who have learned English as a second language, and so many mistakes are due to learning from reading rather than just speaking (babies learn languages naturally, and adults can too, but most adults follow the standard crap techniques which screws their language learning, especially trying to learn to speak by following rules and reading written material).
While doing anything, it is important to mix in introspection, videos, books, and training. Repetitive practicing without feedback ingrains mistaken habits into our minds: habits which are extremely difficult to correct later e.g. I have skied a lot but I still make habitual errors learnt as a child. If you are using learning techniques while applying them, the material sticks in your mind and you can take what is relevant.
Recently, (or maybe it's just me) I have seen a surge of articles providing advice on $Thing. Most of these articles seem to me an expansion of aphorisms which people have been saying since time immemorial. This reminds of the saying,
"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."
Such articles can be compressed into a common adage that most people are aware of.
I'll take it a step further and ask, do adages actually contain any signal at all? If you have a saying "try try again" and another saying "don't bust your head against a brick wall" which one wins? When?
Getting fluent in French is probably best done without a plan, but just practicing a bunch. But I'm sure you can think of several activities where "just try it" is godawful advice. Who says writing is in the former camp? Prove it.
>I'll take it a step further and ask, do adages actually contain any signal at all? If you have a saying "try try again" and another saying "don't bust your head against a brick wall" which one wins? When?
Yes, they do and there are certain factors you need to consider before saying they don't contain any signal.
Some factors are:
1. What is it really trying to say?
In your example, try and try again does NOT mean try and try the SAME thing again. It just tells you WHAT to do and not how to do it. I don't remember a single invention being invented on the first attempt egs the light bulb.
On the other hand, don't break your head against a brick wall is usually used in the context of trying to change someone else. This adage is a derivative of the observation that human beings don't change unless they want to, which is the absolute truth. This adage is a corollary or a derivative based on that absolute truth.
2. Has it stood the test of time?
I cannot find a source for this particular adage but it would be safe to say that it has stood the test of time.
3. Who said it and in what context?
This ties in well with the second example of my first point.
I could come up with a pithy saying which could be true in a very specific context. This does not make it false it just makes it irrelevant to your context.
So yes, they do contain signals you just need to know how to apply them.
>Who says writing is in the former camp? Prove it.
As far as writing goes, you can certainly improve leaps and bounds by writing more. You write some, get feedback on your work, improvise, rinse and repeat. This is certainly true. Why you may ask? Just consider the number of authors[1] whose first language is not English but they write in English. They certainly did not start off by being great English writers, Ayn Rand being the most prolific of them which HN crowd would be familiar with.
>> In your example, try and try again does NOT mean try and try the SAME thing again.
Who says? For surfing, "If at first you don't succeed, try try again" may seem to apply. And maybe you get on the board again and nail it. Or maybe you get on the board and get a concussion.
Because aphorisms are just very reductive phrases they contain almost no data. I contrast this with a sentence that has a ton of signal "The average human pregnancy lasts 9 months."
>> don't break your head against a brick wall is usually used in the context of trying to change someone else
I'm not aware of it being specific to the context of people. I think you added, that, which actually makes it closer to what I'm saying, because it's more specific. For a heuristic to be good, it needs to have a clear domain of when it applies and when it doesn't. Otherwise you've just got a box of fortune-cookies and no idea which ones apply.
Adages aren’t really meant to be informational; they’re memory triggers. The phrase “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again” invites comparison between your present situation and prior experiences when you struggled to learn a skill.
Other adages work similarly: they connect disparate memories together based on some abstract similarity and provide a hook that can be used to recall them.
> For a heuristic to be good, it needs to have a clear domain of when it applies and when it doesn't.
I see your point. I believe both of us are saying the same thing albeit using different words. In this case, the domain would be the context in which the aphorism is used, which is exactly what the 3rd point in my parent comment says. As with everything, the context is equally important. When you take anything out of context, there is a high probability that it won't hold. Simply stating an aphorism, without understanding the context is only half knowledge and not actionable which inadvertently reduces the signal.
There is no such thing as universal advice. All advice is useful in some context, but no advice is useful in all contexts. Coaches and mentors can be so effective because they consistently deliver the right advice in the right context. Advice from the internet, on the other hand, is almost always mismatched to the context of the reader.
>> There is no such thing as universal advice. All advice is useful in some context, but no advice is useful in all contexts.
The interesting thing is some advice is pretty good for almost all-contexts (e.g. "If you feel like killing yourself, don't.")
Some advice is very good for its specific context "When playing chess, a knight is worth about 3 pawns."
Some advice sounds good, but is completely impractical or even bad "Never give up, never surrender." "Dance like nobody is watching"
I find, usually the best tidbits of information (e.g. /r/lifeprotips) don't try to be too brief or cutesy. They are fine being specific "It can be rude to joke about when a married couple is going to have kids. They may already be trying"
True, if you interpret “advice” as we do in cryptography to mean “any arbitrary string that could provide an advantage in solving the problem at hand”.
> People trying to get in shape who buy fancy workout gear instead of exercising.
Translating this idea to learning a programming language, the best way to learn a language is to apply it to something real, almost immediately. Following tutorials has a use, but you'll get a lot more out of it after having flailed around trying to make the most ridiculously minimal version of something you really want to build.
This is one of the main problems with science education. In most cases, there's nothing like the "flail around" stage while you try to do something applied but which you are desperately underqualified to do.
Yeah I think that’s something Mr. Young glosses over in his book—it’s hard to muster the courage to suffer through this kind of direct approach when you’re anything less than absolutely committed. I think it takes a certain personality to be able to just pick some random skill and convince yourself that it’s do or die.
After tens of thousands of photos, hundreds of songs, and millions of words, I can confirm that doing the thing is more effective than aimless research and analysis. The doing guides the learning.
I'm glad there's this internet website that can make me feel like I know what the best way to do something (without the inconvenience of actually like DOING it).
I’m in the middle of listening to Scott Young’s book Ultralearning, and honestly this article captures the most important idea. 90% of becoming an “ultra learner” is having the courage to tackle the real thing immediately; the rest is just tactics.
C25K does not start with a marathon. Skiing lessons do not start on a black diamond. Intro CS does not start by writing an OS. Skill development is an incrementalist game for patient people. I've made much more progress by finding a sustainable pace and chipping away over time, than by trying to conquer something in a weekend.
Natural language acquisition is kind of a special case here, in that you are actually wired to do this one from scratch.
"The real thing" does not mean the absolute hardest iteration of whatever you're trying to do.
C25K doesn't start with a marathon, but it does involve actually getting your ass out the door and running. It does not involve shoe shopping, reading about stretching techniques or tinkering with your training schedule in Excel. Running is the real thing.
For a contrary view, see "This is It".[1] (The one from the US Navy, not the one from the dead singer.) It's the story of four pilots who didn't take their training seriously enough.
My takeaway from this is to always try for the thing that is just out of reach.
Doing what's comfortable isn't going to lead to growth. At the same time, as others in this thread say, doing things that are radically out of reach is too likely to fail without a good foundation.
Learning is in the struggle, so find something that is a little harder than you think you can handle.
This is the kind of advice that, for one person, might be exactly what they need, and for another it might be the exact opposite of what they need. For example, Christopher McCandless dove head-first into the real thing (that is, surviving without help in the Alaskan wilderness), without proper preparation and training, and died. He didn't have to, he could have built up to it gradually by training various survival skills (aka "faking" it).
Also, the author claims that the difference between "doing the real thing" and faking it is what success largely boils down to. That is a completely wild claim, with of course not a shred of evidence to back it up. Does the author really believe that this is a necessary and largely sufficient condition for success?
> For example, Christopher McCandless dove head-first into the real thing (that is, surviving without help in the Alaskan wilderness), without proper preparation and training, and died.
He didn't go straight from normal life to Alaskan wilderness though. He spent a good bit of time traveling and being homeless. If anything, he was in the uncanny valley of being skilled at most aspects of living in the wildnerness, but unaware of the specifics of being in Alaska and how the environment would change between seasons.
* It's really self-important. Not only is it selling you on a particular strategy for attaining success, it also tries to sell success in things like public speaking and doing architectural work as an absolutely important part of one's life, and that implicitly a person's existence is invalidated if they aren't constantly trying to achieve this kind of success. It doesn't do it explicitly but the very notion of "real" and "fake" and other words like "wasted" complete with the trite diagrams showing that "hey, all your efforts are going into this small circle" give a very strong implicit value-judgement of the reader.
* There's no proof. I don't know if I'm on the mark with this one, but I think that the act of omitting any sort of data about measuring the outcome of success when taking different approaches seems to imply to the reader that the argument should just "make sense" i.e. it's a truth that the reader already knows, they should just find it within their own observations in order to understand it. Here, have a handful of anecdotes to top it all off in case you weren't convinced. Overall this just feels like it's made to make the reader feel a certain way (motivated) rather than actually teach them any solid information.
* What even is real and fake? The readers are given a bunch of examples and then we're left on our own to figure out what falls into which category. Someone commented on the article saying that if someone wanted to watch and understand anime in Japanese, they could just do that and that'd be the real thing, with the fake thing being taking the time to learn Japanese. This is obviously not going to be successful, so at this point the author's prescription has failed as a framework for achieving success.
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This kind of fiery motivational content could be harmful as much as it is useful. It'd be fine if an article, devoid of substance as it may be, was only meant to make readers feel motivated, but the problem is that this kind of fiery motivational content does different things for different readers. A person in a bad, self-loathing emotional state could be rendered feeling even worse, thinking that everything that they're doing at present is fake while everything that their peers are doing are more real, even when that's blatantly untrue. The devil's in the details and personally, I'm not going to let myself get affected by this personal philosophy if the case for it is this weak.
I think for your first point, you're definitely reading into it too much...
As for you second point, what kind of proof do you need? Do you want scientific studies that dive way too deep into specifics and are not applicable to real life? This article is targeted towards learning, which varies heavily from person to person and can be very subjective. Think about it from your perspective and see if the ideas apply to what you do. Simple as that.
For your third point, yeah sure real and fake are pretty subjective. In the end it's obviously up to you to decide or come to a decision about what is and what isn't. Our gut instinct usually fails here thought...
However, to address the point about learning Japanese, I would argue that taking the time to learn before doing so is the "fake" way. How do children learn a language if they can't use a computer or phone to get on Duolingo or go to a community college to take a course? They literally just are exposed to it and pick it up over time.
People may not know his background but he is a prominent figure when it comes to language learning and his strategies are to replicate natural learning methods and ignore the canned courses like Duolingo that don't do you any good...
I think the response to the first and third point is the same -- it's up to YOU to decide what's an important part of your life, it's up to YOU to decide what's real and fake.
Or rather, actually -- first, you decide what's an absolutely important part of your life. Then you do THAT real thing -- not any fake thing peripheral to the real thing that you decided was important.
I think that trying to draw value judgments out of the article is a serious mistake. The author is not suggesting any values. The author is trying to suggest the best way to pursue your own values. The idea is not that success in public speaking or architecture is important. The idea is that success in your own goals is important. The idea is not that time not spent toward the goals the author endorses is wasted. The idea is that time not spent on the goals that you endorse is wasted.
Watching a pro can really accelerate skill acquisition because it will expose you to high quality ideas that would have been difficult to develop on your own.
Want to get better at Backgammon/Chess/Go? Play a lot of games (at various time controls). Yes. But also watch professional players and read their analyses of games.
Want to get better at programming? Write a lot of programs. Yes. But also read a lot of high quality code written by others.
Want to become a better mathematician? Spend your time mastering mathematical knowledge and techniques. Yes. But also spend some time trying to get in the heads of the masters - learning their patterns of thought at the mathematical and meta-mathematical levels.
The increased accessibility of this kind of content is one of the greatest achievements of the internet.