Re:How to Learn Stuff Quickly
by kragen on Monday July 19, 2021 @08:07PM
(#27888706)
So, there are two possible reasons it's hard to make a choice.
One is that you're lacking crucial information that will make it clear that one choice is much better than the other. For example, if you've never programmed before, and you want to make some interactive web pages, it might not be obvious whether Python, C++, or JavaScript is a better language to learn. Picking Python would be disastrous, but you don't know enough to understand why yet. In this situation, you have several possible courses of action:
1. Ask someone who knows about the problem. Better, two or three people. Follow their advice.
2. Snoop on conversations between people who are doing what you want to do. Imitate what they're doing until you know enough to have opinions of your own. Nowadays with the internet this is usually pretty easy, although the web forums where leading-edge hardware designers chat mostly require not only knowledge of Chinese but also actual mainland Chinese friends to vouch for you in case you start posting stuff about Tiananmen Square and the Uighurs. This is not a new problem; my aunt had to learn German to get her chemistry degree.
3. Try several courses of action briefly, then abandon the ones that were least fruitful.
The other possible reason is that, although you basically have most of the relevant information, the difference between the possible choices is very small, so it's hard to tell which one is really best. You have become Buridan's Ass; toss a coin before you starve to death in the midst of plenty.
One is that you're lacking crucial information that will make it clear that one choice is much better than the other. For example, if you've never programmed before, and you want to make some interactive web pages, it might not be obvious whether Python, C++, or JavaScript is a better language to learn. Picking Python would be disastrous, but you don't know enough to understand why yet. In this situation, you have several possible courses of action:
1. Ask someone who knows about the problem. Better, two or three people. Follow their advice.
2. Snoop on conversations between people who are doing what you want to do. Imitate what they're doing until you know enough to have opinions of your own. Nowadays with the internet this is usually pretty easy, although the web forums where leading-edge hardware designers chat mostly require not only knowledge of Chinese but also actual mainland Chinese friends to vouch for you in case you start posting stuff about Tiananmen Square and the Uighurs. This is not a new problem; my aunt had to learn German to get her chemistry degree.
3. Try several courses of action briefly, then abandon the ones that were least fruitful.
The other possible reason is that, although you basically have most of the relevant information, the difference between the possible choices is very small, so it's hard to tell which one is really best. You have become Buridan's Ass; toss a coin before you starve to death in the midst of plenty.