https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
Edwards is an academic historian of science who write incredibly long and dense books drawing on hundreds of sources. If anyone knows how to read, its him, and his advice was truly useful for my own reading.
This person, however, seems worthy of consideration.
Indeed many a bookshelf is littered with such babble, but to group Nobel laureate, Danny Khaneman[1] into that group would be a gross overestimation.
Even though all real learning is at least 80% internal and must be owned-and-operated by the student... maybe there's a role for spoonfed knowledge. Certainly there's a role for teachers (disagreeing with "good students learn alone"), even if morale-management and goal-setting is a surprisingly large fraction of it. But even spoonfed knowledge is helpful. For example, as far as I can tell, most good mathematicians have a lot of spoonfed knowledge as part of their learning history (but they also have even more self-guided exploration, and even the spoonfed stuff you gotta chew on it and digest it).
Agreed, though, that a lot of articles like this are clickbaity and, like sugar, give you a sensation of learning rather than what you really need. This particular article, I think, contains a mish-mash of good advice and, uh, pureed pap. It's certainly not worst-of-breed.
I'm guilty of this myself. My interests and struggle become topic of suggestions to others even though it's half good ideas half fluff.
This is a wonderfully honest observation.
I suspect we all have this experience; I certainly do. Of course the suggestions come from an honest place, but often the verbalized outputs do not live up to the epistemic standards we would like to hold ourselves to.
I think perhaps I should less say "do this" and instead more say "here is my experience, and my current theory about that experience, and what I'm trying to do to improve". Or perhaps even "I wonder if...".
It turns out that I had to re-write this comment to follow my own advice, and I think in this case it was in fact helpful, at least for me. That's pleasing.
As someone who has many opportunities to give advice to people 20 years younger than me, I'm doing a lot of "well, I used to think X, and now I don't, so a similar evolution may happen to you". Maybe that's also relevant. Maybe it's just a bad old-man habit.
Indeed that's what I did for a few years. My ideas have shifted now, I stopped discussing much (life is short) instead you do stuff. And suddenly mediocre companies feel a lot more valuable because instead of talking theories they do stuff.
I guess I'm just rediscovering life... know how to gather a bunch of people and make something useful and enjoyable for many.
Looking at the more substantial link that you provided now, thanks for sharing!
The intersection of "great at X" and "great at explaining" is often very small. In practice, you end up having to make trade-offs like wading through poor exposition because the author is the real deal. Another common failure mode is what we see here: People that are so good at explaining, hustling, and branding, that they become popular despite likely having very little expertise at X.
His method may work for him but it doesn't mean he has a complete understanding of how to learn it general. He can learn, but he may not know how he does it or how others should do it.
basically go back and forth between trying to ELI5 the thing, and reading source material.
But he's a great demonstration of Matuschak's point. Luhmnam wrote dozens of books about a wide range of topics, enabled by Zettelkasten, and then wrote a couple of essays towards the end of his career about how he did it.
Did he? I though we have his archive and we know how he used it (from some interview, I think). Didn't thought he wrote about it directly in his system. Do you have source on that?
Almost by definition, truly top athletes are unlikely to be able to have coaches more accomplished than them, especially when you consider the overall trend-line in sports performance is upward. So clearly "more accomplished than you" is not a strict requirement. But it might still be the optimum for everyone else.
I think my personal model is this: First of all, the most-important asset for a coach is that they have a correct model of improvement in the field. That doesn't strictly require them to be any good at all. However, they're much more likely to develop a correct model if they put a bunch of time into trying to be good. And also, if they were never good, they're much more in danger of having a subtly-totally-wrong model of how improvement would work. So although it's not strictly necessary that they be any good at the activity itself, it markedly improves both upside risk and downside risk.
> But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields, whatever those may be. In fact, most such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity. These writers offer advice on note-taking to help scientists and executives with the challenges of their work, but the advice was developed in a context disconnected from those external realities.
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUMFE66dxeweppDvgbNAb5hukXzX...
Essentially, be wary of taking advice about reading, research, writing, or anything else from people whose primary contribution to the world is telling people how to read, research, and write. Instead, listen to people who have used these techniques to make a substantial contribution to a field of knowledge.
The problem is that those people are far more interested in doing research and writing than teaching other people how to do it.