May 27, 2009
- Erik Drexler on How To Learn About Everything -
I recommend that intellectually ambitious students invest considerable time in a mode of study may set off subconscious alarm signals that conflicts with almost instinctive impulses imparted by classroom experience:
- Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. . Include Science and Nature.
- Seldom stop to study a single subject with a student’s intensity, as if you had to pass a test on it.
- Don’t drop a subject because you know you’d fail a test — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to accumulate vocabulary, perspective, and context.
- Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic, and note which topics provide keys to many others.
- Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.
You learned your native language by immersion, not by swallowing and regurgitating spoonfuls of grammar and vocabulary. With comprehension of words and the unstructured curriculum of life came what we call “common sense”.
The aim of what I’ve described is to learn an expanded language and to develop what amounts to common sense, but about an uncommonly broad slice of the world. Immersion and gradual comprehension work, and I don’t know of any other way.
From here. Again, something I’d normally put on the The Links, but its too good not to share here. This is the only way I’ve ever felt like I actually learned anything: as close to full immersion as possible.
(Oh, and the TA article is still in the works. I’ve come down with a bit of a cold, or at least am trying to avoid doing so completely, and as such have been sleeping a lot more than usual…)
Hmm….That’s exactly what I’ve done all my life. I must be smart!
Comment by Ted — May 27, 2009 @ 2:01 pm
Wait! I want to lear! This is about learning? I guess I am not so smart after all! too bad….
Comment by Ted — May 28, 2009 @ 6:22 pm
Yeah, this is cool, nice to see it written down and admitted somewhere.
There’s a balance. When you’re first introduced to a subject, this is the thing to do. It’s also something the Net is quite good at (shock! horror!), finding things around a topic. It’s what new postgraduate students are encouraged to do (or were, back when I was in that world) – though undergraduates tend to be steered away from this kind of enquiry. Part of the reason for that is that the Net is /so/ easy to dredge that most modern students enter University with the notion that reading Net-dredge is the ONLY form of learning. Many even leave with this idea. (A lot of them get a passing grade, which is a national disgrace.) Another reason is that you get a LOT of sludge in the Net, through which it takes a certain amount of experience to sift for the buried treasure.
The aim of this sort of work is a state of mind where holes in the knowledge start to become blatantly obvious. Some things will niggle and refuse to make sense. After a while, you have to trust that your intuition knows where to dig. That’s when a good investigator first begins to bring the big guns of Method to bear. This kind of digging requires a certain calming of the monkey-mind; first, to read-around in more detail to analyse the disconnect precisely, then to stare really hard at the gap until something becomes apparent. I find modern I.T. very poor for this calm kind of thought. Pencil, paper, a good book and frequent walks round the block is the way to go at that point.
*
A friend of mine is a University lecturer. For several years now he has had trouble with students answering essay questions by copying out the Wikipedia page verbatim. In recent months he has hit upon a solution: with every problem, he presents the students with all the relevant Wikipedia entries /as a starting point/.
Comment by speedbird — June 9, 2009 @ 3:28 am
I think you may have just described meditation, turned outwards instead of inwards. Take that exact same approach to your own awareness and that’s exactly how to meditate. Or at least, that’s how I’ve experienced it. “Turn the light back on itself”, as the Buddha said. The scientific method applied to the self…
Comment by Ian — June 9, 2009 @ 9:27 am
Wow.
Comment by speedbird — June 9, 2009 @ 10:10 am
Yeah, I was really impressed by that description.
That’s what I was trying to get at with my old iceberg essay, closing up the holes in the knowledge of self. Didn’t really realize those connections at the time, of course, but still.
Comment by Ian — June 9, 2009 @ 10:46 am
Ha! Hey speedbird, you’re not the only one.
Check out this comment from Kevin Kelly’s blog:
I don’t need a 3G system and ugly cell towers to outsmart the gaggles of texting, lane-swerving scatterbrains–I just need a good book, pad and pencil, natural light, and a calm, focused mind. It’s more noble to deny technology’s claim to life’s center, more sane to breathe deeply once in a while in actual reality, as opposed to somebody else’s fake pixel representation of it.
Comment by Ian — June 9, 2009 @ 12:13 pm
Fook, talk about a zeitgiest…
Comment by speedbird — June 10, 2009 @ 2:31 am