

Eric Drexler: How to Learn About Everything - ph0rque
http://metamodern.com/2009/05/27/how-to-learn-about-everything/

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pierrefar
I'd expand this a bit more. Firstly, I'd include non-scientific journals like
business, politics, and humanities. Honestly, as a geek through and through,
the best way to learn about the world is to figure out how other disciplines
think. It gives you a whole new toolset and perspective.

The other thing I'd do is actually dive into a subject deep enough as if I
need to pass a test. I'm doing that with statistics now. It's going very
slowly, but that's kinda the point of this whole exercise.

~~~
stcredzero
_Honestly, as a geek through and through, the best way to learn about the
world is to figure out how other disciplines think._

Failing to do this is what a lot of CS people do that _really_ annoys
physicists, chemists, and other scientists. (Especially when we post
comments!) We think that we can instantly grok anything that has good
documentation. But not everything is an API. Other fields are full of very
smart people, and they had to devote years to fully understand. It's like
people who learn your native language, but speak it with a heavy accent and
clumsy use of idioms.

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notaddicted
I am adopting an approach more similar to a Classical Scholar, similar to
this: <http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/odonnell1.html>

For the newest fields that isn't an option though, I think his suggestion is
really the only way.

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billswift
A lot depends on how much you want to learn. I wrote a post about depth of
knowledge in March ([http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/03/learning-
journal-a...](http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/03/learning-journal-and-
record.html)) - lowest is recognition where you can remember things about it
when you come across it again, usually just reading about something is enough
for me to reach this level. Progressively more difficult, and requiring more
work, are being able to recall information from memory without an immediate
stimulus, understanding the subject matter, and being able to use what you
have learned to make things or do original research in the field. I have
several other posts in March and April about independent learning that you may
find useful.

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msluyter
Sounds plausible, and I've done a lot of it myself, but I'm curious if there's
any hard evidence as to its effectiveness vs. other study methods?

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dbul
_How to Read a Book_ by Mortimer Adler may be useful if anyone is thinking of
actually doing this. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book>

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kristiandupont
I think that learning is much more that "obtaining knowledge". I am almost at
a point where I think that nothing interesting can be learned by only reading
- anything that is worth learning involves doing. If you want to learn
something that is physical or social, this is a given but it also applies to,
say, programming or even math. You don't really learn by reading - reading can
only help you when you want to get started or get stuck at certain levels.

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tocomment
Is it really possible to learn something by skimming books way over your head?
I Always figured I was fooling myself when I did that.

~~~
_phred
There is inestimable value in doing so. I find the approach especially
valuable for learning new programming technologies — in practice, learning a
new technology comes down to the questions: what does the code look like, and
why? By looking deeply at the hardest parts of the source code, I find out how
much I don't know about the software and learn more about the system itself.

