Tips on learning things

I tried to quickly summarize thoughts I’ve had for the past few years. Self-analysis is inherently flawed, and so is this list. — Aziliz

1. I can’t really learn stuff that I don’t want to learn, although it is sometimes possible to find a right approach to make something interesting.
2. Have reasonable goals. Be patient with yourself, forgive yourself.
3. Learning is more complicated and chaotic than going from prerequisites to main subject.
4. Spaced repitition softwares such as Anki are useful for what I call scalar knowledge, such as mapping names to dates. You can’t learn vector knowledge such as “what is a planet”.
5. Especially when dealing with advanced maths, physics or computer science, you’ll usually want to work on several things at once. Going book by book or course by course isn’t the way.
6. It is impossible to write exhaustive notes about a subject, you want to have some angle.
7. There is a balance to be found between 1) making a subject your own, by approaching it in a way that matches what you are, and 2) focusing on whatever will make you pass the tests or complete the project.
8. Self-learners do too much of 1 while pros do too much of 2.
9. My brain does this thing where it disengages as soon as I don’t understand something that has the appearance of a prerequisite. For instance when learning about set theory, I dropped almost immediately because I wasn’t 100% convinced by the informal introduction to logic chapters. I had to go read a few chapters about formal logic before my brain “allowed” me to go on with set theory.
10. My brain doesn’t like when everything is sorted in a mechanical way (ex: Maths → Abstract Algebra → Category theory → Functors) I can always sort things better and sometimes one thing will fit in several boxes and then I just lose sight of whatever I’ve been doing in the first place.
11. I also don’t like chronological order as I can’t have a clear feeling of what needs to be done.
12. A website structure is cool as long as things aren’t sorted according to a rigid hierarchy and that it does not try to be exhaustive.
13. It’s not about taking notes or building a knowledge base it’s about having a project.
14. The site’s structure should match the dark stuff that happens in your brain (yours not mine)
15. Some things won’t fit on the site, and it’s okay, not everything needs to be saved forever in big cables brain.
16. If I find myself editing the same few lines over and over again, it often means that they’re aren’t that important.
17. Sometimes duplicates and contradictions are fine.
18. Just as with writing fiction, the hardest part is being immersed in your own thought process and actually committing to it. Throw everything you can on paper and stop when your brain goes elsewhere. Write everything that your brain feels: how come this word means that when it meant this earlier in the text? Why do I feel that something important was left out by whomever wrote this? Could this be changed? What if I tried to guess the shape of what’s missing.
19. Commit.
20. Take care of other parts of your life, be self-reliant, stuff like that. You’ll feel less anxiety when learning things.
21. One day you will have changed enough as a person that notes you’ve been working on for years won’t make sense anymore. It’s okay, just do something else, or nothing.
22. Yes I have untreated attention issues.
23. Sometimes I write out something that came up to me before asking myself what it could be used for. For instance when learning a programming language, I write some code by guessing and then troubleshoot for syntax or semantic mistakes. Same goes for maths stuff.