Overall this seems like a really effective strategy for the subject matter. It's easy to intellectually understand the summary sentences, but all the stories in the chapters are illustrative, and the idea is that spending time with the book helps reinforce the mindset that leads to the attitudes it espouses.
So that was a long winded way of saying: Good point.
I will say that a lot of long form journalism pieces these days seem overly focused on their narratives, and often, feel like time wasting to me. But I'm usually in information gathering mode when I read them. I don't want personal stories, I want facts, and links to research when I'm in that mindset. Maybe it just feels to me like they are too often considering the story they're telling as proof enough of their point without doing enough to support it otherwise.
- expanding on repeating: Enumerate and solve/memorize every permutation of a problem/theorem/etc. (ex: in f = ma, what happens if m is high and a is low and the reverse). Each case becomes a subroutine (or a chunk) in your brain that quickly fires once memorized.
- explaining your understanding of a topic does not translate to the ability of applying that understanding to an actual application
The writing was superfluous and can be summed up in 2-3 points, although enjoyable to read as a story if you're up for that.
I'm a bit disappointed because the title is misleading. The author didn't really rewire her brain. She just spent more time learning and set a different goal (of trying out every permutation instead of simply doing well on tests) than her classmates.
I really enjoyed following it.
If you're going to start learning QFT, I suggest you try to understand time-dependent perturbation theory as much as possible. Also, be sure you have a handle on special relativity and scattering theory. QFT that most people use is really those things combined.
Unfortunately I hadn't learnt to do any of those things; result was scraping a minimum pass.
To me it was like trying to picture n-dimensional hyper-cubes.
This style of delivering information is called gonzo journalism and has taken over a large part of the media. What people forget is that gonzo journalism was initially a form of entertainment. The kind of prose that serves telling the readers about the Kentucky Derby is not same that serves the conveying of information in a large number of categories. This is one of them.
If I just read that, I'd file that away as "something someone once said on the internet," wouldn't give it much weight, and would forget about. I see dozens of competing one-liners like that every day.
The story made the message much stronger, made me believe it, and will make me remember it.
My grandma used to say "brain is a muscle".
And I used to see it as an over-simplification, because I was studying, etc...
With the time, I've come to a similar conclusion, a different muscle, and with a micro-services architecture, but at the end of the day, it inherits the attributes, methods and behavior, of the "muscle" class.
Really, it inherits from the general "biological system" class, of which "muscle" is the common subclass referenced, since it's the one most people have familiarity in utilizing.
The differentiation of "muscle" from other "biological system" classes is entirely unrelated to the "use-it-or-lose-it" feature, however, and your subclassing is inappropriate.
While this seems like being pedantic, I'd argue it's important to know when we're using a member to exemplify a class versus when we're talking about the definition of a class.
The same use-it-or-lose-it applies to everything from lung capacity to stomach size to hormone production by organs, and is a good principle to know about how biology works. The emphasis on "muscle" as the class (rather than an exemplifying member) hides this underlying truth about all biological systems -- that they dynamically adapt to efficiency.
They aren't trying to give you a single sentence summary of some result. They are trying to get you to care about some esoteric subject. This one just happens to gel with the ycombinator crowd.
This is the extension I use (it lets you rewind with k and pause with space -- helpful for getting more understanding out):
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spreed-speed-read-...
I set the words per minute to a very high rate, and I get my hacker news while exercising or doing chores around the house. I've completely stopped reading long articles, except when there are intersperced code samples.
I highly recommend.
We probably have decent research on this at this point. Anybody versed in it weighing it?
Not surprising as she didn't come up with the ideas herself. She stumbled on the underlying principles and did research like anyone else on the terminology scientific experts in learning use to talk about those principles.
Yet neither of these folks seem to be doing primary research in the particular area they are teaching the course in.
Oakley's peer-reviewed resume on this is quite scarce: http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html
Sejnowski is similarly light: http://www.salk.edu/scientist/terrence-sejnowski/publication...
Are we going to wind up with another "10,000 hours" debacle?
Journal articles are written to communicate information to those who couldn't perform the experiment/research themselves, either because they have their own research areas (overlapping or not) or because they simply aren't researchers.
No one person is going to have enough depth and breadth to satisfy your requirements. Not even textbook authors would meet them.
Scientists, as part of their training, learn to quickly dissect papers written by others and assimilate the information to the point where they can often make modifications and create experiments that improve on the original or answer a related question not addressed by the first. This is not dissimilar to the way that programmers can take a program written by another and modify/extend it.
You're weirdly focused on this "argument from ultimate authority" instead of simply evaluating the claims and the data that support them. Googling a few of the terms in the article that you're unfamiliar with would be a more useful way to spend your time.
Though first, if you're going to make an informed criticism of a scientist's publication record, you might do well to have enough experience with searching for publications to know that a world-class scientist doesn't always have all of his publications on his website. That was a highlight reel of decades of research [0].
...but teaching those classes pays the bills.
Sadly, that doesn't automatically mean anything from a correctness perspective.
Educational methodology, in particular, tends to be absolutely rife with fads more than fact and immediately sets off my alerts.
This is doubly problematic when someone touts how popular their course is instead of how effective it is.
If someone had replied "why yes, actually I just wrote a book on the topic, and I teach a huge course on it," would you have accepted that person as being "versed" in the topic?
Can we at least agree that the author is actually more qualified than you seem to give credit for in your original post?
"Memorize this." "Don't quit." "Keep trying."
Then I had to repeat verbatim whatever it was I was supposed to memorize, whether a reading selection, scales on an instrument, or multiplication tables. I didn't get to move forward till I got it. And I didn't get to choose what I studied.
Seems like we need more of this today.
I like the message, but not the messenger.
Articles like this, in my point of view, fail to delivery their messages in a better way because they are simply too long and with too much noise for my taste.
The point he is trying to get across could be explained in a simpler way without the necessity of explaining how he went to the army, what he did there and all his personal history.
All this information is completely irrelevant to the main goal of the article and turn it into a boring story instead of useful piece of practical advice.