It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually:
- energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone
- correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I do instead of the phone will also have this poisonous quality of guilt and fear.
- uninterrupted time
I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy.
Still, it's extremely rewarding for me to learn stuff, even at this age when intelligence is becoming less useful, or at least harder to monetize.
For energy, it both requires and pays dividends. It's a bit like working out in that sense.
I think my intended takeaway was that you really don't need to have make the thing you're studying take a lot of time, that daily consistency matters more than pouring hours into practice and obsessing about it.
Though in general, I do still think it's the phones and media diet that is the problem with the sense of lacking time.
Few years ago I had a full time job I felt like I had no time. Then I had a part time job, and I still had no time. Now I'm self employed, with nobody to answer to, and I still often feel like I have no time. Like damn, to get more time than I actually already have I'd need to move in next door to a black hole. Though when I unplug, then holy crap do I suddenly end up with a lot of time.
Overall, I agree, especially the unplugging part. It's just optimizing for time doesn't really apply in my case. I can carve some time in the evening, but if I spent energy at work, I can hardly learn much.
But, some things like doomscrolling and procrastination are both huge energy sinks as well as timesinks. However, targeting them is very hard (again, for me), as it is usually not the root problem but a symptom of anxiety and uncertainty, which I often cannot deal with. If the root of the problem is boredom, it should be much easier to unplug and occupy the brain with something more wholesome.
Another thing is obsessive optimization, "am I studying/practicing the best way possible?". "Is it worth it with so little progress?". I keep falling to such traps. Writing this, I found that I feel that I lack an example of people doing stuff in a suboptimal, slacky, yolo way, deriving fun and still achieving some results in the end.
Yeah I think reaching for the phone can very easily be a soothing mechanism. Like I've noticed sometimes when something a bit socially uncomfortable has happened, like half the people in the room immediately grab their phones. If you pay attention to when people grab their phones, you start to see it a lot.
Though I think that insight is also probably the first step toward working on the issue. The phone habit masks the problem, but when you take the phone away it can also reveal the truth of how bad it's gotten. Like why are you having these anxiety issues? Is it a lack of sleep, too much caffeine, something to see a therapist about, maybe go on meds? Questions worth asking at least. Self-medicating with doom scrolling isn't going to make things better that's for damn sure.
I understand exactly what you are talking about because I had both realizations myself: thinking that I have no time because of work and chores, and realizing that the phone is addictive because it gives an exit for my anxiety. I'm still trying to solve both problems, though.
So probably the thing you need to start practicing and learning is how to deal with anxiety. Conveniently those sessions can fit right into the time slots you're currently spending procrastinating because of selfsame anxiety. See how long you can sit with it and reassure yourself, before reaching for the phone. Once that's been tamed a bit, I think the ability to enjoy doing something poorly will start to appear naturally as a by-product. Or, you can force the issue a bit by adopting a "punk" ethos: "I suck at this, but fuck you, I'm doing it anyway." And there's your example of doing things in a slacky YOLO way too: listen to early punk rock. They did a pretty good job of channeling their anxiety outward into creativity and energy. And there's a "punk" version of almost anything you can think of. Keep it simple, be a beginner, maybe even mock the experts - some of them need it. Good luck.
recently read a post on a moms' forum about her having a hard time getting her kid to practice violin and the skill plateauing.
the breakthrough was a trip to a relative's remote house with no screens / internet. Kid found violin better than other things to do. More Hours led to improvement. That fed on itself and kid spent more time with the violin and improved much faster.
The busier our lifestyle, the more cheap, meaningless pursuits we engage ourselves in, it all chips away at out natural ability to focus on one thing for long term and we're left with a recursive livelock of infinite choices laden with hidden opportunity costs.
how can humans from 1500 with everything stacked against them have better art sense and science insight than humans in 2026 ?
I think what the parent post was saying is that there is a finite amount of useful mental function time in any one day, and once you’ve exhausted this any attempted learning will be pretty inefficient. Also some jobs will have a faster burn rate. Doing a workout is separate as it doesn’t draw on the mental energy pool.
From my experience, workout draws exactly from the same pool as mental effort, so after a tough day at work/school, there is little left for a workout and vice versa. Instead of brain spending its energy on thinking, it spends it on muscle/movement coordination.
I find it easier to work out when being mentally exhausted than doing something mentally challenging when physically exhausted. My main sport is climbing and it is perfect for a Friday evening when I am exhausted from my research and teaching job.
Also there are all these feedback loops. Staying active gives motivation to do mentally challenging things, and some of this mental energy can also be invested in learning new ways of staying active!
is true that if you've done some amount of mental effort in the day, learning becomes "pretty inefficient"? I could see that being true if you're exhausted, but then doing a workout would also be a problem.
I would say that learning draws from the pool of "mental energy", but working out draws from the pool of "physical energy". Just because your brain is tired, it doesn't mean that your biceps are.
Probably good to align mental and physical tiredness. Being physically tired makes rest feel very good.
Being mentally worn out just kinda makes you feel like shit. It's a terrible state to be in, you don't want to do anything, but doing nothing also feels bad.
I'm almost certain people are different on this point, but I just want to put this out there in case it applies.
A lot of our entertainments and hobbies, especially in urban areas, are mental to begin with. The most evident example would be scrolling on your phone, which evidently is 100% a mental thing, but there's a lot in this box, videogames, music, reading can all really demand a lot from you mentally.
Explicitly physical things are not so common. Gym. Dancing. Climbing. Running. All of these are things that people who work with their brains often talk about as "relaxing" or "great against stress", even if they can put the body until great physical strain.
It is my experience that when mentally worn out, the "don't want to do anything" really translates to "don't want to do anything mentally", problem being, thinking about doing the physical thing instead is actually a little bit of mental, albeit more emotional, work, but once you ACTUALLY do that, then after spending the whole day focused on deep, complex stuff, being the caveman bench pressing is actually absolute bliss.
Yeah this is largely my experience as well, and few things will raise your quality of life if you do have a mentally taxing life as having one or more hobbies that are physical and ideally requires you to get out of your head (gym kinda does that and if nothing else is a good sort of stress degauss, but dance is arguably even more fantastic as it literally will not work if you're in your head; not that one excludes the other).
Yeah, I have a similar experience when I put the phone down for prolonged periods. Though I need to be mindful to not do the same stuff on the computer i.e. open Hacker News or other attention grabbing websites. For that stuff I find it useful to use any feature I can either in the browser or the desktop environment to separate work from leisure.
Just want to "me too" this. I have two weeks a year where I unplug completely from my daily work and it often results in a new project or skill that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise
When chatgpt dropped I found time to start making stuff with it. All the brainpower that typically went towards checking my favorite creators or reading HN links went into making my first LLM powered game.
2 months later I was finished and the sleep deprivation hit me like a brick.
I'm funnily enough 40. You can definitely overdo exercise, but going from zero to some is generally very good for energy in my experience. It generally lets you turn that sort of tiredness you can't rest yourself out of into the sort of tiredness you can.
I think it's a useful distinction between learning about something and learning to do something. They have very different paths and methods of satisfaction.
But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience. It takes up so many hours but you also don't really rest, and it also tends to keep you up too long at night.
If you can replace five hours of doom scrolling with an hour of doing nothing in particular, an hour more of sleep, some time staring at a book page or soduku, some more work on chorse, you'll most likely gain an hour or so to use on something that takes mental energy.
> But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience.
It's never been the phone for me, particularly. I just don't pick mine up very often.
To have much more time to learn things I had to learn one key skill: systematically lose interest in syndicated American television. Other people can watch Lost, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother etc.; I will use my time elsewhere.
(OK so I picked three that are widely recognised as having a major letdown as an ending, but you see my point I guess.)
Once I stopped sharing an interest in watching every episode of some show that a friend or the general zeitgeist was obsessed with, that is hundreds of hours (per show!) for a hobby.
And these days it's hobby-enabling money, because in many cases these shows are the only reason to pick up an extra streaming subscription. You can buy a good 3D printer and some filament, or an electric guitar and a little amp or headphone effects unit for less than a year's premium plan for an American streaming service, and a fully playable guitar alone costs about as much as a year's standard Netflix.
I learned this long enough ago that I have gone without a television for decades now. I had to re-learn it in the era of streaming TV. If you think you want to see one of these shows, they will be around forever so you can watch them from a hospital bed one day.
It isn't always just phone. If you are in a "bad" state, you'll find something else to ease it. And it's often hardly more productive than doomscrolling: just brooding, switching between activities rapidly, or drowsing.
But phone is still the worst offender, of course. It doesn't just steal time and energy, it also reinforces its usage by producing more anxiety
Wondering, which would you consider healthier, an hour scrolling on the phone or an hour watching a tv show (either a fictional one or talk show, either with commercials)?
It's hard to say because it depends on what you're looking at too, of course.
But doomscrolling seems to teach your brain to never pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds, while at the same time being more exhausting than watching TV.
I think when people say "not enough time", they just mean "uninterrupted time". This is the thing that is extremely difficult in conjunction with parenting (and not just toddlers). There is a close to zero sum tradeoff between being truly present with your kids, and having intellectually high quality uninterrupted time. But there is actually lots of time scattered about throughout the days! It's just in little moments here and there before you hear "dad, can you help me?". I really struggle with this, I have enough time in these scattered moments for my mind to get bored frequently, but I have nowhere close to the uninterrupted time necessary to develop a real serious hobby like woodworking. (Parenting is also the best thing in the world, this is not a complaint about parenting, it just happens to be that the specific topic of this article is the hardest thing about it, for me.)
Uninterrupted time? Is there such a thing? Let me explain: Having retired from a tech world that didn't provide me with very many gigs, I have found myself being the roommate of my own mother. I am 69 and 1/2 years old. She is 93 and 1/2. She is in a wheelchair. And she has been widowed twice. I have never been married, and there are no prospects. I do all the cooking. That isn't easy as I am vegetarian, and have trouble cooking for her since she is not. But she can't live alone, and doesn't want to get married a third time.
Basically, I have windows of 5 minutes when I can do almost anything, then she calls me to do something for her that takes 15 minutes, then I have another 5 minutes of work. Instead of coding, my writing efforts have transitioned to writing fiction.
When I had kids, I made a deliberate choice to focus on hobbies that were more amenable to interruption.
I mostly put aside music and any physical artform that required getting out and putting stuff away each session. Instead, I did a lot more writing, programming, and making stuff on my laptop since pausing and resuming was only a Ctrl-S away.
It also required learning the meta-skill of being able to break a large project into tiny pieces. I got a lot better at leaving notes to myself, not having too many projects going on in parallel, and thinking about problems when I was otherwise idle.
This makes sense but I don't think it works for me. I get irritable when I'm trying to do something like the activities you listed, if I can't focus on what I'm doing without interruption, and then that's bad for everyone, both the interruptee and the interruptor. This seems to be a personality thing (disorder?), my wife seems to be able to switch back and forth from working to parenting without it affecting her ability to perform on either task.
That's a really nice point - about uninterrupted time.
I do notice however, in myself as well as in others, that given an amount of uninterrupted time, we quickly get bored and pick up our phones to break it.
I recall that when Covid hit, I suddenly had a lot of interrupted time on my hands. It quite felt like the times from when we were kids, when he had these vast swathes of time in the afternoon and before bedtime.
I think for a lot of adults, besides the chores and errands that keep life busy, it's become a habit for us to fill up what little uninterrupted time we get with distractions.
Making a strict hour and a half of no-interruption a day has worked well for me. Learned this from John Cleese (feel free to ignore the word “management” in the title of the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
Still occasionally get interrupted because of life, of course, but marking off an hour and a half and closing a door and putting all chores/calls on silent during that time is very helpful. And I understand that for many it is simply not possible. Private space is a luxury in much of the world.
A sense of play and no obligation also helps. For more on this I recommend Rubin’s The Creative Act.
Your comment is self-contradictory. Here's what you wrote:
> It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually (...) uninterrupted time (...)
Let's ignore the semantics nitpicking of trying to make believe that "time" does not reflect "energy" or "correct psychological state". Trying to frame "I don't have uninterrupted time" as something distinct from "I don't have time" is a choice that cannot be explained, let alone justified. I mean, do you honestly believe that setting 10minutes aside each day for a task has the same impact as being able to set aside an hour a week to invest in the same task?
Perhaps it's more productive to focus on the actual problem: not having time.
Psychological state is key, and I think you're understating it.
The human mind is always passively working on problems. We are not necessarily aware of how much working memory is "tied up" on background computations, but when it's a lot, we will feel a natural aversion to new learning, it will be exhausting, and we will lack for curiosity. This is fine, working as intended.
When in this state, what one usually needs to do is a different part of the learning process: not absorbing new information or abstractions, but making sense of what one already knows, working out contradictions, assembling larger-scale theories--synthesis, basically. "Learning" is only one part of the arc of "thinking".
Usually this is best done by writing, and usually comes easiest when trying to convince someone else or what we believe. If you can't find the energy to learn, try writing instead.
I'd argue all of those are often issues of how we perceive circumstances vs what actually is going on. There are real situations that crowd out this sort of thing, but they don't apply to everyone (having people that need care comes to mind or crunches at work).
Jung has a great quote to the effect of, "we don't solve our problems, but rather outgrow them." Life is going to feel like mostly-imperfect circumstances for any venture, and your brain can be too good at rationalizing any [lack of] behavior.
I have too much emotional attachment to progress. A lot of people made the mistake of putting too much energy into e.g. career instead of what you really want outside of a paycheck. Well, now I really am doing the thing I've always wanted, of course I suck at it, and most days I feel bad in the process.
Some people feel good about making mistakes. Though necessary for long-term success, this is a completely foreign mindset to me. I have no idea how a person can do such a thing. I tend to overreact instead.
It's not any wonder I would turn to doomscrolling in response, it seems the stakes in my mind are too high and effort invariably leads to depression (speaking from experience). It's too important to me to fail at. Maladaptive phone usage is for escaping that anxiety. I'm most likely burnt out from other attempts in the past. I don't get this feeling at all with work since I'm only doing it for money.
I would feel bad if I couldn't learn the things I really wanted to in life because the emotional toll is too high to pay, after putting in all the work to have a stable income. I still have to manage the rest of my life on top of optional things.
I have been having more 'luck' with those factors and less luck with physical comfortability (I don't mean air conditioning; I have that). Also, timing.
It is very true that it is becoming hard to monetize knowledge. The depth a lot of people seek is often the depth of about at most five or six websearch queries, or maybe three or four AI-enabled queries.
It blows my mind that people want things like neural interfaces and human/computer physical integration, in part because, okay, let's say you have all that information there in your head, 24/7. What would it even be useful for, especially if others had it. You could not really make pay in any career involving a thought economy, and at the same time, you would destroy curiosity and actual learning, and you would almost certainly be (ugh) Bored (and Boring to anyone else). One reason Elon rubs me the wrong way.
Re: energy specifically - I think "psychological state" is the main thing. Once there's a will, there's a way. Make it not draining on your psyche to explore new stuff and you're good to go. This really is as simple as not watching random feeds.
Re: "taking things way too serious" - a general life advice is to be after the journey, not the result. Goes for career, sports achievements and anything along the lines. Worry about getting to some place/rank/etc in particular and it's an endless stream of despair. Worry about just enjoying the practice and not being afraid to rock the boat (i.e. try something outside _your_ beaten path) and you're set.
Actual intelligence is as useful as it gets nowadays, given that it's at a premium.
Have you considered it might be something medically treatable? There are drugs for that sort of thing. I've tried some and wouldn't have believed it was possible before - aren't I anxious because I haven't done things I'm supposed to do and the consequences are nebulous and growing? Isn't anxiety a real signal telling me to get them finished? If you lose that feeling, you'll be even more screwed! But it turns out neurotypical people can be productive without being driven by stress.
There are side effects and you may have to try different drugs to minimize them and maximize the effect. Medicine makes sense when the side effects are less bad than the problem that the main effect is solving, not only when there are no side effects.
Some people choose what, if any pill to take each day according to what they intend to do that day.
> I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy
This is a common trait of perfectionists. I have long forgotten the source, but someone once wrote that “Perfectionists have a special ability to turn the voluntary into the obligatory.” I, too, find this in voluntary pursuits.
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
Beautiful quote I strongly relate to. When I was 16, I had a sudden realisation one day that no one knows what anything of this actually is. That was a profoundly defining moment of who I am and the deepest and most beautiful thought my limited mind managed to grasp. It made me become in awe of the universe, inspired me to learn and has been a pillar I could lean on during difficult times. I cherish that thought every day.
Wanna say that this is a much better argument for learning than productivity or "becoming a more interesting person". Sometimes it is simply a way to keep the mind pointed outward
If you think of the world as the activity of people and nations, I can understand that reaction.
If you think of the world as everything it is possible to see and experience, learning about the world won't bring torture, it will bring freedom from it.
that is beautiful, its something i believe as well but never seen it written so eloquenty. when everythings gone to hell and your backed into a corner, learning something interesting is always there for you.
“The Once and Future King” is an odd book. I read it recently - as an adult - and I’m not sure I ‘enjoyed’ reading it. It has a lot of ‘childishness’, especially in the first 2/3, of a kind I’ve never really liked in it. Perhaps the kind _adults_ think kids enjoy. But it’s also full of stuff like this at unexpected moments. Wonder at the world; consideration of others; the burden of leadership.
I ended up thinking of it extremely fondly - way more fondly than I would’ve expected when halfway through. It’s one of my favorite books in spite of itself. I’d recommend it.
There's a good article on White and the book in the "Encyclopedia of Fantasy". It made me appreciate that this set of stories is more than just a book for children. I haven't actually read it but the entry for "White, T H" made me bump it up the list of books in my queue.
Some of my favorite books are ones I didn't really "like", but which influenced me deeply. The ones that go at the very top of the list are those that achieve both things. But that's very rare.
Knowing a lot used to be attractive too, before the septic cavalcade of reddit reduced us to wordcels and the 'actually' meme. The continued pursuit of knowledge for me has been a much more private matter in this last decade of the unravelling academic institutions I once called home.
It's all about context. Everybody likes someone who has well informed answers to questions they ask. Nobody likes someone who frequently injects answers to questions nobody asked. Knowing a lot is attractive, but being a know-it-all is unattractive. The wisdom to know the difference between the two is a different kind of skill than knowing a lot of things.
One thing I wish this emphasized more is that adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning, which is why my useful rule has become: if I'm not producing errors, I'm probably not practicing yet
Meta learning can be useful, but I take your overall point. You can get lost in the weeds trying to figure out the "best" way to learn something. Autodidacts do have some up-front costs: they have to figure out how to best teach themselves a thing, which usually means researching and trying various pedagogical approaches to find something that might work for them.
Language learning, for example is a huge category. You can get completely mired trying to sort out "grammar translation" versus "direct method" or "comprehensible input" approaches, the pros and cons of spaced repetition vs extensive/intensive reading, phonology & minimal pairs, picking a textbook/grammar/dictionary -- it's a lot. I imagine there are some people who are broadly interested in language learning, and don't actually use that information to actually learn a language. It might be more fun to prepare to learn a language than to get into the challenging and less fun work of actually doing it. I see the parallels with "Gear Acquisition Syndrome".
I think the book Superlearning just gives the simple rule that you should spend 10% of your budgeted time on meta concerns (what to learn, what order, what strategies to use, etc) and that’s always seemed a sensible, good-enough default that takes away the doubt. Knowing how deep to go is, as you point out, only half the battle unfortunately, but the rule helped me at least.
>adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning
True, and even more insidious than that can be consuming the actual learning material (e.g. textbooks), but not doing the required work to integrate it. I find that I need to do projects to properly learn something. Once I actually start doing things, I quickly identify the parts I knew in theory from reading about them but had never put to the test by solving real problems.
Also engaging with others learning the same thing within the overall community is also tremendously helpful and accelerates learning. Though you need to get over the fear of asking silly or obvious in hindsight questions in the wrong Discord channel sometimes.
I love this take. I built some feature and then when I tried to layer new features on top, I saw all the bad decisions surface and errors appear. Its beautiful to walk back and have it "click"
I’ll chime in. I started learning to draw in my early twenties, couple hours a week. What helps a lot is joining a club, I’ve got a group in my town that just goes to a bar one night a week and draws and chats for 3 hours. Great way to ensure that you get at least a few hours of drawing in, even if your week is too busy for “practice”.
It takes about 2-3 years of mild practice to get good enough that you’ll routinely impress yourself, about 5 years to get good enough that you could do paid commissions.
Seems like a long time, but unless you start in your seventies you’ll have decades left of enjoying being an artist afterwards.
There's really a feeling now pushing back against learning in general. The feeling is that it is pointless since technology would just do it for you. When I started learning Chinese a friend just wouldn't stop talking about how the latest airpods will just be able to translate for you. It was really rather demoralising. But there is still something incredibly rewarding about having that knowledge in your own head and not having to go find someone or something to ask. I push on regardless.
Funny that your example is Chinese. Have you seen the reports that Chinese universities are cutting back on foreign-language programmes because the expectation is that AI translation is the way of the future?
So, your friend was just expressing the general zeitgeist. But something to be aware of, is that “having that knowledge in one’s own head” might be unrewarding in time. Namely, once high-quality AI translation in near-real-time becomes the social norm, Chinese people (and most other people on earth) will become much less tolerant of a foreigner trying to speak their language imperfectly. You can already see something similar if you go to countries like Netherlands or Sweden and try to speak the local language at anything short of a high B2-level: people will complain you’re wasting their time compared to just using English.
Maybe because these is an obvious benefit of physical exercises and that there are no health benefits to learn a new topic after having already exhausted your brain sitting +7 hours at work?
> there are no health benefits to learn a new topic after having already exhausted your brain sitting +7 hours at work
There are. Unless your work requires almost constant creative reiteration over your mistakes on new topics, learning new things even when exhausted is still healthy for your brain.
I've been learning Spanish and I find a big positive motivator is finding and practicing slang words and vulgar phrases. They usually have cultural roots and are highly contextual, so it requires a deeper understanding than just translation. I only speak them sparingly with my few native speaker friends, who find it hilarious when I inevitably use them incorrectly - or rarely get it exactly right.
Learning a language is still absolutely worth it. The feeling you get when finally being able to communicate with native speakers is not something you could achieve with technology. Sure if all you care about is exchanging information then translation technology does the job, but if you want to actually connect with people I believe you have to do the talking
I've been learning Russian by myself since the pandemic and along the way I've picked up bits and bobs about food, history, geography, music, and even electronics. Learning a language is not just about the language per se.
I've even realised a few things about my own language.
It is helpful in such cases to look up, touch grass, and realise that "do it for you" is doing a lot of work there. The technology still can only emit a convolution of its training, and this is an ontological, conceptual limit on the technology, not something that the next model will just overcome. It's not "intelligence" -- you still have to know things.
It's easy to think, reading HN, that we're in some "post-knowledge" apocalypse, but that's just not the reality. It is, however, tragic that the irrationality of capitalism can be sustained so long, perhaps longer than some of us can stay solvent.
LLMs can definitely be helpful, but you need your radar set to 11 because they will convincingly feed you smart sounding nonsense when you are most at risk.
Yeah, but this is like saying that one needn't focus so much on LLMs making mistakes because humans also mistakes.
They do, but the shape of the way LLMs will confidently mislead you is quite different to the way misinformed humans, or even the malevolent and mendacious humans, will mislead you.
Yes, but human errors are based on genuine and elaborate misconceptions (or propagandistic intent), not squishy, facile "you're right to push back on that, I straight up made that up" type stuff.
I just apply the "Wikipedia model" to things like LLMs (and StackOverflow, which can be just as bad -but without the admitting error part).
I look for citations and footnotes. In many cases, accuracy isn't something that I worry about, as bad info becomes apparent, almost immediately. In cases where it matters, though, I may try a couple of verifications.
One problem with humans, is that we can be quite insecure, and will fight to the death to defend a provably wrong position, because we can't bear to be seen as in error.
Can you elaborate on this? I suspect that you’re thinking mostly of cases in which you already have a fair bit of domain expertise. But in the general case, this seems to be very untrue. Which is why it’s so pernicious that LLMs can generate such quantities of syntactically-plausible-but-factually-untrue text.
Valid point, but I don’t really just start learning whole new vocations, cold. I’m an engineer/software developer, with over 40 years’ experience, and my learning is generally some branch off that (like learning asynchronous programming, or a new UI framework).
Can’t really put it into precise terminology, but I get a “gut feeling,” that something is/is not plausible, and it happens pretty quickly; usually when I start some implementation. I tend to learn by do[0] (note the “sample playground,” in each essay), so the “reality filter” gets applied fairly rapidly.
In any case, I have been dealing with misinformation (sometimes, deliberate), for a long time, and I’m still working fairly effectively, so I guess it works.
Sure, I take your point that the smell-test works reasonably well for domains related or adjacent to one's own.
But (not speaking about your use specifically here) many people (most, I'd wager) use LLMs for many things beyond their own expertise. And it's there that they're most likely to be ensnared without even knowing it.
I definitely agree with your notion that learning-by-doing is a helpful salve for LLM falsehoods. It's no panacea (working != correct (an incorrect solution can appear correct over a given interval)), but it's a good way of working in general that helps keep LLMs in check. And it's very natural to code or other things that can be immediately applied.
But learning-by-doing of course doesn't work with topics that aren't immediately applied. Which includes lots of topics that people use LLMs for (Wikipedia too, for that matter).
The set of unfamiliar-or-unapplied is practically a lot larger than the set of familiar-or-applied.
Fair enough, but I'm not sure this is how the general population uses LLM chatbots, nor how the highly qualified always use LLMs.
On the contrary, I believe most people use them precisely to find out more about topics of which they know vanishingly little, much as they'd have used Google before LLMs.
I started playing video games in Spanish about a year ago. I've finished about 20 now. I had a base of course & was doing little courses etc. But I've sunk 100s of hours now focusing on text and voice heavy games and it went from very tiring and looking up the dictionary constantly to fun and fluid. I can finally watch a lot of stuff without subtitles now. Someone catalogues which games have been dubbed (focused on Spanish of Spain) at this site https://www.doblajevideojuegos.es/ the quality of most new dubs I've seen has been very high
I live in Europe, had to get my permanent residence permit and for that - you have to pass the language exam. Boy, that was some experience!
I'm in my 40's so learning a new language has activated the brain muscles that were last active when I was... 4?
They were so rusty, slow and amost physically refused to cooperate at first. This was tough. Now looking back it was absolutely worth it, best brain workout ever. Best.
This is why I don’t get the perverse pleasure people get when they say they don’t look at code anymore
It’s not like we’ve created a new abstraction layer with coding agents. It’s a leaky factory where every part up and down can break and/or be improved.
The best factories thrive in a learning culture. Where humans grow their knowledge to improve the operation of the factory. From nuts and bolts up to larger systems.
How do you do that without reading code? Without writing code?
I started even replacing my use of specs with exploratory coding to grow my own knowledge and context
Kids are conditioned to associate learning with a formal course with a tutor culminating in exams.
It's also intentional to segregate skills, if schools taught every child basic plumbing or car mechanics for example instead of spending a month teaching something that won't get used in life, there would be less job in those fields.
So there's a conspiracy between plumbers, mechanics, and public schools to not teach basic handyman skills to the students?
We used to have "shop" (or similarly named) classes for this in junior high/middle school. They have mostly been cut, but more for budgetary reasons. A lot of high schools still have a vocational department for the kids who are not college-bound and not complete wasteoids.
I'm not in USA, so can't speak for you. But here in UK it is accepted that schools were, and remain, designed to produce well behaved consumers and workers.
One “trick” nowadays is to just do a thing for the sake of doing the thing. I draw. Not to post my drawings to social media, not to try to get income from paid commissions, but rather just to enjoy the act of drawing. It’s very liberating in a world where it feels like almost everything has to be in service of some kind of larger scheme.
I retired a few years ago and now do a slew of things (photography, robotics, 3D printing, etc.) entirely for myself. I'll start a project, have a blast learning/building, then simply move on to the next thing.
Learning for the sake of learning is one of my favorite things in life.
Not finishing - or even being able to define the finish line - is a great sign you're doing this right. You're not a tortoise seeking mastery; it's ok to be a distracted hare!
"have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos, then you may want to put this ambition aside for now and deal with that instead"
Even older kids... my 6 year old is jumping on the couch as I type this..
I like remote work but when I had to commute it was really nice to have that downtime built in to the day. I learned a lot of Dutch vocabulary on the train.
Don’t be fooled, the first few years you get spoiled with “the first moments” of things. Then suddenly the “last moments” start creeping in, “the last nappy”, “the last car seat”, at first they seem like a god send but then they accumulate like an avalanche.
One day you will pick them up and, and most likely neither of you will know it, but it will be the last time you ever do.
There's something useful about time that is already spoken for. You're on the train, you can't do much else, so learning some Dutch feels easy. At home the same half hour somehow gets fragmented into six different things
Children are not god for peace of mind and a life of liberty. I do not recommend anyone to have children, becaues of how negatively it affects your life, cost of living etc. It is basically just tying yourself down to the wheel of consumption, and in order to jutsify everything, all the struggle, push your hopes and aspirations to the next generation, and then letting them deal with it.
If you are rich, you can get around this by hiring people to take care of the children, so then it could be possible, but it will still be a huge financial burden.
This comment actually triggered something in me and I wanted to write a dismissive and condescending response but in the spirit of HN I’d like to try a different approach.
I’ve honestly never been able to understand this kind of thinking (uniformly ruling children as a negative because of the downsides), but I’d be curious to understand more about your perspective.
How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people find in having a family against the economic and time freedom costs?
Or the fact that societies do need to continue having children in order to: sustain economic growth, service their elderly population (that will be us in a few years to decades), maintain their armed forces, perpetuate their culture and values into the future, invest in scientific research, etc.
Are these not things you value? Or do you just see the tradeoff as not worth it?
> How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people find in having a family against the economic and time freedom costs?
That's a very presumptuous question.
I don't know if the original commenter has kids or a family, but I can assure you that not everyone finds as much joy in it as you may. You can easily end up with a kid that just hates your guts, and is problematic in many other ways to boot.
It’s not that these aren’t valuable. It’s that you can also see the enormous damage done to children and the suffering that you put them through as parents. Life is a grueling, often thankless and cruel situation. It has no real explanation and we toss more and more people into the meat grinder every year.
I see very little love from parents, but I generally see an enormous amount of selfishness. True betrayal, overt and subtle abuse, and kids seem more to push through that to really thrive… occasionally.
This idea that someone has never felt to love this powerful before? Incredibly selfish. It feels almost disgusting to write about let alone really think about. Who the hell are these people saying these things? Do they even hear themselves?
Every metric and every explanation I ever hear or read about when it comes to kids seems… ultimately selfish. The future for civilization looks awfully bleak, and bringing children to this world? Now?! Their future is a dodgy proposition at best.
Having children consistently seems to be for people with little creativity, little prospect in their lives, and very little thought or consideration for a wide and colorful world which could actually use some help instead of holding up in a house for 20 years.
Society uses our biology against us. It uses it to create enormous anxiety, depression, and poverty through having children. I wish to live the second half of my life in a meaningful way rather than shackling some unsuspecting little-me to the insane whims of hyper consumerist and capitalist culture designed only to extract everything from them and create as much anxiety and hurt as possible, that it might produce as much from them as possible.
For someone to not see that this is what most societies have become? The height of blindness; i’m not sure I’ve ever seen a parent in America who didn’t have their kids as part of this culture of spectacle , of blindly shambling without critical thinking. It’s as if most people want to collect all the check boxes in life, like little Pokémon, little experiences that they simply must have and show off to people to fluff their ego.
Sure, the process produces all kinds of crazy chemicals but so do hallucinogenic drugs. They’re basically both the same thing, but one of them really makes people unhealthy, intense, and emotionally unbalanced while the other just makes them see weird stuff that isn’t there.
The more you look at it, just the less it makes sense. All the uncritical, thoughtless people that I’ve ever met in my life are the ones having kids, while all the people I’ve respected, who are generally considerate, intelligent, kind, intentional, mindful, and honestly quite accomplished and as helpful as possible toward their fellow people? None of them have kids. Not a single one. Not my entire life. Well one. One, and it’s such a bad experience, and is so painful and difficult for he, his wife, and the child that he says he would never wish it on his worst enemy, despite absolutely loving his child and doing his best to demonstrate that every day.
Wise words. But you must remember that society is a self-perpetuating system, that grows to consume all, like cancer, and for "it" (society) to exist, children must be produced to fuel its growth. Politicians, the sole benefactors of the modern society, therefore scream about children to fuel the machine.
Of course there are kind and loving parents, but you are right in that many (most?) just follow their biological program on autopilot, never thinking about the consequences.
But I do think, at some level, the species is starting to realize how unsustainable this is, and we see this in dropping fertility and child birth levels.
These levels I think, will only start to increase again, once society has adapted to man, instead of like today, when authoritarian politicians try to adapt man, pushing him like a cog wheel into the machinery of the state. Man is now tired, and refuses, and as a result, more and more people just stop procreating, which I see as a sign of health.
Children don't necessitate a consumption spiral. The fact that they grow so quickly means there's plenty of cheaply available used items (clothes, books, toys, etc.). If you have multiple, or if they have cousins, then there's also hand-me-downs. Then there's free stuff like parks or libraries, or e.g. our county has a nearby recreation center with a splash pad.
We did buy a more expensive home to live near better peers, but that's not really a consumption issue; it's a cultural one.
Having a child was a profoundly selfish act for me. I wanted one because I can't imagine any challenge more fascinating and rewarding (for me) than raising a child.
I don't understand what the point of hiring people to take care of mine would be. That's the fun part. Makes about as much sense as going to an amusement park and paying someone to take the rides for you.
You’re correct about peace of mind (I’ve never been more afraid than I have been for my kids) and liberty (modern parenting is akin to house arrest at times) but the fact remains I never knew I could love someone as much as I love my kids, and I’m richer for it.
The fact that you need to fight an incredibly strong biological motivator to do this suggests you're wrong. If you have a builder mentality and want to leave the world better than you found it, having kids is the best path. They're also my retirement plan.
This resonated with me, although my experience has been a little different.
I started playing pool in college around 2017 and, without really intending to, it became something I did at least once a week. I never had a structured practice routine or any goal of getting really good. I just enjoyed playing, and after enough years I realized I'd become a decent player.
I never gambled, but we usually played loser-pays, so every session still cost a bit. I'm unemployed right now, so I've stopped going because it just doesn't fit my budget anymore.
Learning process must be accompanied with enough space for an individual to realistically challenge himself to actually acquire that knowledge with foreseeable success of doing it. A person must believe s/he can really learn something. But in this status quo of AI hypeism (believing that knowing refined set of know-hows would be enough) people gradually begin losing that optimistic "a priori" belief to learn things.
But another side effect of this process is if people stop believing in the accrual of the knowledge which will lead them to nowhere (use cases for those information becoming irrelevant by the time you start using it), justifying this mentally exhausting practice becomes really hard. And I don't mean this on learning static information but also on how to define and build a meta-cognitive framework to systemically learn things.
I don't quite get the "lifelong learning" approach, since lifelong learning must usually be accompanied with organic evolution of the information space. Employers wont pay you because you are a lifelong learner, they'll pay you to actually fix a problem you provide a solution for. And that solution isn't guaranteed by the knowledge you possess and doesn't usually qualify the marginal cost of being a lifelong learner.
I came to a similar conclusion last weekend. My 20 year old car was having some issues and instead of taking g it to the mechanic to be charged $1,000, thought I would give it a try myself. 3 hours later and the problem was fixed. And I learned a lot in the process.
I had the same with my motorcycle. Every time I brought it to the dealer, they came up enthusiastically with things to spend money on. Your tires are done! Your break pads are gone! With the help of a friend, I got into doing (very) basic maintenance myself. I just replaced the tires. I fixed a problem with the electrical system. And next will be the chain and sprocket.
That's why I do all DIY myself, incliding plumbing or electrics. Craftsmen cost money and they try to finish in one session, so they do lots of compromises.
Examples: under a sink, there were two 2m-long supply hoses, where 40cm would be enough, convoluted in a double loop together, to spare a visit to a DIY store. Or dowels made to be driven by hammer, for plastic baseboards, used to hang a cupboard (almost fell out). Or a too long corrugated plastic tube making a virage and another, unnecessary, water seal, and impeding outflux -- also to spare a visit to a store.
YouTube has been a godsend for these types of problems. It's like LLM output, you need to validate and cross reference but combined with other sources of information, easy purchase of parts and problems that actually have solutions (vs "buy a new one") I've saved thousands on cars, appliances and home repairs
> Practice is when you gather data for the brain to process overnight. Sleep is when improvements happen.
This shift is such a game changer for me personally. It reduces how many times I ask myself “am I actually making any progress or just wasting time?” by putting all the pressure on “sleep’s REM phase” instead of me and my ability to learn.
I don’t like cooking mostly because of how many dishes you have to wash afterwards. Saying “your sleep will handle the learning part” is like someone saying “feel free to cook the craziest dishes, I will do all the washing afterwards”.
I cannot deny the value of learning but there is a fact that learning can be a way of procrastination. This happens when the joy of learning overtake and diverge you from a goal. Nothing wrong about it, it is a time well spent. But I think there must be a balance as well
The only way I ever learned anything or built anything of value (one of those things still accounts for most of my revenue, 10-15 years later) was by blowing off doing what I was supposed to be doing at that moment, in the classic sense described by PG here:
(Except, his essay insinuates that there is some kind of brilliance at work here. In my own case, that remains to be seen.)
Never have I ever managed to accomplish anything of merit by just heading straight for it in the plainspoken sense. Some people will say that provides the basic architecture of some kind of "diagnosis", but I think it's just a normal human variance.
Learning can be the goal if you're lucky. Maybe sharing your learning is the next step and that's enough too. You don't need to apply it to something someone defines as "worthy" for validation.
> While you practice the thing you want to learn, you will not feel good, especially not starting out. This honestly is a bit of an understatement, it really sucks and depending on the task, odds are you may want to lie down for a bit when you’re done with your first practice session. You’ll also almost certainly perform significantly worse toward the end of the session. All this is your brain and muscles getting tired. It’s a good meta-skill to learn to self-assess and pick up on this.
> Learning something completely new from scratch is really awful, and at this point most people are very disheartened and want to give up, which is unfortunate, because if they got back to it the next day, they’d find it’s actually gotten tangibly easier.
This certainly applies to some people, but not all people, and I suspect that the people who actually take the time to "learn new things" are those who enjoy the process. People tend to avoid things they don't enjoy, especially when those things are discretionary, so telling the people who don't enjoy the process of learning new things to do so anyway is preaching to the wrong audience.
I think there's a middle group too: people who like having learned something, but don't really enjoy those first few sessions. For them, just knowing that the initial frustration is normal can help a lot
For me the biggest learning investment outside work I put is learning Chinese and Vietnamese. I tried music but I gave it up after a year. And I can just do it on my commute to work as well. I also like reading about 19 century comparative history. Gives me a lot of relevant talking points in a lot of conversation.
Learning something new often can take as little 10-15 minutes a day of focused time. If you do it consistently, it becomes easier and easier to maintain, and it starts to require less and less mental capacity to start
> You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn.
shameless plug: if you are interested in learning touch typing, i built a data driven touch typing application:
it started as a side project (combined wanting to learn typing with my desire to build a side business while working at amazon. working on this (almost) full time now
Very impressive. In my own experience, starting something new is usually fun, just that sometimes it's like I'm burnt out or hyper focused on it. Let's say for example, I have a YouTube video that is an hour long, I watched the first 30mins the first day, on he second day, I watch the first half of the video again as a preamble but by the time I'm into the second half of the video, I loose focus and need to take a break again.
An attention span of 30mins seems too little to me. Any ways to incrementally work on this? Anyone with similar experience?
I don't suggest auto diagnosing, but those could be ADHD symptoms. I have the inattentive subtype and it sounds similar to my experience. Unfortunately, I don't have any advice on this
Because this seems like an appropriate topic/place to ask, are there say 20 books on a variety of topics that one can say are very useful to build a foundation of our world, in the physical and metaphorical sense? Literature probably shouldn't be in that list because literature is just a universe of its own and a lot of it is just not that accessible. E.g. I am not knowledgeable enough to be able to read Mahabharata or Odyssey in the original language.
It's great to be an amateur learner, but if you want to get better (or just make learning more effective) I really liked the (very easy read) Little Book of Talent. It focuses on how to get good, but that's really about how we learn and practice. Highly motivational and some interesting counterintuitive ideas:
I learned a lot myself, but lately I just can't make it on stable regime because you don't get much positive feedback you you're learning something yourself. There's no grades, no exams and all of your motivation is internal. In that case you need to work on a motivation and goals. Why would you learn something that doesn't pays off then?
To improve your life, circumatances, abilities. To have a larger amount of known concepts to connect to each other. To increase your stability, security, quality of life, and self reliance. To make more money. To decrease your reliance on uncontrollable and unstable factors.
I'm quite fortunate to keep piling on knowledge without extrinsic rewards: the acquisition itself and the rewiring of my brain is what makes it enjoyable for me.
I look up to people who are well-read and try to follow their example. Maybe one day I can inspire somebody else.
The key is to find something that you enjoy sucking at. I recently picked up quad rollerskating and the process of getting steadier and smoother at it (while just enjoying the vibes, music and community at my local rink) has become an obsession. It's my new third-favorite hobby (after programming and competitive cornhole).
The idea overall is fine. Do adults have success learning art? Like actually getting good at it? I've been kind of overwhelmed by how much time is expected of students to learn art to get good. Like its treated like a full time job? I see people online casually throw out spending 8-10 hours a day on things.
> and/or have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos
Slightly off topic, but as a parent I found this hilarious and will now be closely watching to see if any of my own screaming logos ever perfectly hit the corner of a room.
I’m attempting to learn to use a slide rule. It’s quite a history lesson - we take for granted the large precision we get on calculators. But the learning is taking repeated visits, about 30 minutes at a time. I’m slowly getting it.
I've been running my own website lately (www.makonea.com), and writing out my knowledge as articles made me realize just how much I was lacking. Running your own website is something I'd recommend trying.
I honestly don't feel rewarding learning anymore. I might be depressed, because I feel all human experiences are overrated. And such, learning is such futile exercise in postponing the reality of life.
I struggle with the same feeling - though maybe I’d say I don’t find honing my craft as rewarding anymore. For years it’s been the gradually creeping expansion of the world - the more I develop new skills, the more I find there are so many others that (seem to) have done it better and faster. Then all at once I find that chatbots seems to be better and faster. It has sapped my enthusiasm. I don’t know if it’s depression or anhedonia, but I probably need to spend more time figuring it out.
I like learning new things, and have done so my whole life. But thinking about our AI future, I think that learning as a goal will be greatly diminished, when the reward of learning many things is essentially zero other than your own personal satisfaction. I can see this already to some degree in my kids. I taught my older daughter, when she was young (8~12) how to build websites (html/js), code games (ruby), build 3D models (lightwave), etc. It was a great experience plus she now has a degree from a great college in engineering and has been gainfully employed since college at a good tech company (not using the exact things I taught her but tangentially related). I now have kids that are preteen/teen and I struggle with 1) "why bother", and 2) convincing them how these or similar skills might be of use to them. My teen boy is like "why do I need to learn this when I can just ask Claude" etc. I'm frankly at a bit of a loss.
I need a benevolent alien to force me out of my rut when I’m in one. I had no problems as a kid because I had little choice at times, like the weekends where I was going to learn how to put siding on a cottage or plumb a bathroom, even though I wanted to play Zelda more than anything. I hated those summers and now that I’m a homeowner, I am deeply thankful for them.
Literally an hour ago my 7 and 9 year olds came to mom and I and said, “thank you for disabling YouTube. We are having so much fun.” I know this sounds like a fake Donald Trump kind of story but I swear to god it just happened.
"Learning anything is a long term project, and long term projects are necessary for building a sense of control over your circumstances. Almost nothing can be deliberately and meaningfully changed within the scope of a day, but in months, certainly years, a lot of things can be made to happen."
Nothing is as sad as seeing some young motivated student losing patience if the task doesn't turn out to be a quick, easy win. The saddest however are students so eager for the quick, easy win that throughout their academic career they repeat the pattern and never really dive deep into any topic.
I had a student come to me with essentially the same problem over two years and each time I helped her she was in refusal to listen as she stressed herself to just make it work now. Her problem was that she never took the time to do the basics and rejected any learning opportunity as it stared her in the face.
You get results over time if you dedicate yourself to just doing the thing. For many subjects there is no shortcut, no way to walk the path without actually walking it. Every time you encounter an issue there is a learning opportunity. Use it.
Something I find myself struggling with is the "tutorial trap"
You follow a tutorial to do something, feel happy about it. Then you start a new project to put your new skills to good use and... Blank. No idea where to start, no idea how to proceed.
It's so important to build stuff, using references is fine, but following tutorials is not the way forward! You have to work on your own without the training wheels.
The great lesson here is: have your own thing you want to make or do, and then select tutorials that help you approach it, step by step. Reproduce the tutorial but also bring it to bear on something you want.
In my experience most people can do this, if they think about it a bit — identify the thing they want to learn and find a tutorial for it. Which is amazing, really; this sort of meta-knowledge is a remarkable human concept.
Tutorials are fine, especially if you know nothing doing the motion is often better than fooling around. Just like with languages there are passive skilla (your capability to understand a certain thing) and active skills (you capability to use a thing practically when the situation demands it). It is natural to understand more than you can apply.
Once you're a little more confident (you know a bit, but not much) I suggest to modify the tutorial as you follow along, that makes the tutorial harder and gives you small challenges to overcome while still giving you general guard rails.
Then as soon as you're dangerous enough to be let loose you should pick your own projects that are slightly above your skill level. Maybe try different approaches if you're unhappy with the first result.
When I wanted to improve my comic drawing skills ca. 2009 I started drawing and publishing a daily webcomic strip for a year. That really helped.
But tutorials remain useful even if you're advanced or a pro. E.g. if you use blender a lot and a new feature comes around watching a tutorial on it is a very efficient way of getting up to speed. Of course you will watch tutorials differently from a beginner, you will pick up on different things etc.
The best way to learn is a serious project with a deadline, but if you have that deadline it will make you wish you had watched some tutorials when you had the time. Source: I teach this kind of stuff at the university level for 6 years now.
why not both. limit yourself to 1 tutorial/book (i prefer books). then build something. For any creative hobby i think the biggest issue is not having something you want to build.
What does wonders for me is to go out into nature, a beach, a lake or a park, or even a longer train ride, with nothing but a pen and notebook, while keeping the phone in my bag. When I return usually I have a few pages of ideas.
Sometimes distraction is the main issue when it comes to having ideas.
I am learning a bit of 3D modeling in Blender so I can mod games that I like (just for private use), I do get stuck sometimes on the silliest things and Blender docs don’t help, but neither did LLMs tbf when I tried to troubleshoot issues with them. I wonder how I can make it a bit less tedious.
Curious, what's issues you encounter that LLM or Blender forum can't help? I also still learning Blender though not complex like yours (Product and Architecture), and LLM help me so much, it is save times that I previously will search on forum and YouTube.
I don't think we should expect to short-circuit learning for everything. Fumbling in Blender for hours on end is part of the process and what makes you good at it in the long term, much like grinding exercises in math or physics.
> just find some starting point that doesn’t look like a sales funnel
this adds to the difficulty in getting started; so many times you start down a path, don't make good progress and hit a paywall or realize the path you started on is just marketing for some (not even valuable) learning resource
this is super common with language learning stuff, especially because AI makes it seem so cheap to produce learning content
a couple of decades ago there was viral advice going around about "the 1000 hour rule" saying that's how long it would take to master something new. Maybe it's time to refresh that?
I'm not the world's most productive person in terms of getting any kind of tangible economic benefit from my activities, but I probably am the most dedicated learner I've ever known. I'm sure there are people on the Internet who learn even more, but I'm a sponge for information. Every weekend in the late 80s, I rode my bicycle down to the Norwalk branch of the LA public library, spent the entire day reading, then checked out the maximum number of books they allowed, which was 6 as far as I remember. Every week, another 6 books. Never fiction, not biographies or light reading. I was heavily interested in the SDI or "Star Wars" proposals Reagan had and read about particle beams, lasers, satellite communications, all public information about how missile defense worked. I was nationally ranked at NTN in the early 90s and won a television quiz show when I was 12. I came in 2nd in the California state spelling bee at one point. Got a perfect SAT score. I also came in 3rd in a statewide art competition and won my high school district's annual art show 3 of 4 years I was in high school. I've never had even an ounce of focus and master nothing, but get reasonably good at everything. Lettered in four different sports. Ended up with (so far) 4 bachelor's degrees and 3 master's. I'm the last person I know who still never uses an LLM for anything, in part because I don't feel I need to because I have answers and know how to do what I need to do without assistance, but also because I want that to continue to be the case. I'm willing to struggle and practice and devote more time to learning and less time to sleep or anything else because there is nothing in the world that gratifies me more and strokes my egoistic self-image than always having the answer, not because I'm asking the web but because I actually have the answer in my own mind.
But I never tout this as some kind of way of being everyone needs to or should try to emulate. As I said at the outset, I can't think of any tangible benefit from doing this. I'm exactly the same upper middle-class, white-collar office worker earning a very good but nowhere near "fuck you" level of money exactly the same as all my peers who are mostly more ordinary people doing ordinary things like watching Love Island and whatever else ordinary people do.
This isn't the automatic golden ticket to a good life. I have no social media accounts. I don't even know where my phone is right now and often don't have it with me. I watch no video on it ever. Most of my entertainment comes from listening to music and even then it's active because I usually listen to songs I can sing and sing along while listening. Even then, I'm still practicing and I'm a very good singer. None of this makes me any happier or any better than anyone else. My mental health is not skyrocketing through the roof because I'm unplugged from the 24 hours news cycle and don't feel the scrutiny of my body and lifestyle not matching an Instagram ideal. In fact, I probably do match that. I've managed to lift at least an hour a day far more days in my adult life than not. I still run even in my mid-40s. I can't get a sub-16 minute 5k like I could as a teenager but I'm in shape. I still sometimes hit 80 miles in a week. My BMI hasn't been over 22 and I haven't had double-digit body fat since being bedridden with spine injuries a decade ago. I look like an underwear model for no reason at all because nobody ever sees it and nobody cares.
It doesn't matter. It's compulsion. I doubt myself and hate myself just as much as anyone else does. I can't sleep because I feel like nothing I ever do is enough and the slightest disturbance in sleep jolts me instantly awake with my mind racing anxious over all the things I believe I need to do, all the ways I'm not living up to my own potential. All those degrees? Shitty schools. No PhDs. Good job. Okay, but I've never made 7 figures in a year. Someday I will but that won't be enough, either. Even Michael Jordan was angry more often than happy, alienated every person he ever knew, and spent his hall of fame induction insulting people and being mad rather than celebrating his own accomplishments. The only real ticket is satisfaction, being able to say good enough is good enough. Spending too much time doomscrolling and not enough learning a second language? So what? Give yourself some grace. People who speak 19 languages are no happier or better than you are. Learning a 20th is every bit as compulsive and pointless as you watching TikTok.
I want more content on the Internet, or anywhere else, telling people all the ways and all the reasons they're already good enough, not constantly pointing out any and all shortcomings of the world and their own personal habits.
Maybe, but unless you are unusually talented I'd advise against it. For every consumer there is a producer and vice versa. Most people are better off as consumers and this give more eyeballs and resources to the few talented producers.
This makes me sad. I am very confident it's also wrong; it fundamentally misapprehends what talent is.
As well as not particularly being innate or "god-given", talents tend to emerge only when supported by learned ability. And not even just your own learned ability. Talented violinists exist only in a world that had talented violin makers: you perhaps cannot fully know how society could benefit from things you could learn.
Two of my mini-talents are things I used to think were not just difficult but actually things I would be specifically bad at, like, worse than most people. (Which may for complex reasons be a sign I would not be)
I believe it also misapprehends where the boundary between practice and consumption can sit, too, but that's a longer comment.
No matter which side of the equation you sit, try to unlearn this belief you have, and help others unlearn it.
It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually:
- energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone
- correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I do instead of the phone will also have this poisonous quality of guilt and fear.
- uninterrupted time
I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy.
Still, it's extremely rewarding for me to learn stuff, even at this age when intelligence is becoming less useful, or at least harder to monetize.
(Author of the post)
For energy, it both requires and pays dividends. It's a bit like working out in that sense.
I think my intended takeaway was that you really don't need to have make the thing you're studying take a lot of time, that daily consistency matters more than pouring hours into practice and obsessing about it.
Though in general, I do still think it's the phones and media diet that is the problem with the sense of lacking time.
Few years ago I had a full time job I felt like I had no time. Then I had a part time job, and I still had no time. Now I'm self employed, with nobody to answer to, and I still often feel like I have no time. Like damn, to get more time than I actually already have I'd need to move in next door to a black hole. Though when I unplug, then holy crap do I suddenly end up with a lot of time.
Overall, I agree, especially the unplugging part. It's just optimizing for time doesn't really apply in my case. I can carve some time in the evening, but if I spent energy at work, I can hardly learn much.
But, some things like doomscrolling and procrastination are both huge energy sinks as well as timesinks. However, targeting them is very hard (again, for me), as it is usually not the root problem but a symptom of anxiety and uncertainty, which I often cannot deal with. If the root of the problem is boredom, it should be much easier to unplug and occupy the brain with something more wholesome.
Another thing is obsessive optimization, "am I studying/practicing the best way possible?". "Is it worth it with so little progress?". I keep falling to such traps. Writing this, I found that I feel that I lack an example of people doing stuff in a suboptimal, slacky, yolo way, deriving fun and still achieving some results in the end.
Yeah I think reaching for the phone can very easily be a soothing mechanism. Like I've noticed sometimes when something a bit socially uncomfortable has happened, like half the people in the room immediately grab their phones. If you pay attention to when people grab their phones, you start to see it a lot.
Though I think that insight is also probably the first step toward working on the issue. The phone habit masks the problem, but when you take the phone away it can also reveal the truth of how bad it's gotten. Like why are you having these anxiety issues? Is it a lack of sleep, too much caffeine, something to see a therapist about, maybe go on meds? Questions worth asking at least. Self-medicating with doom scrolling isn't going to make things better that's for damn sure.
I understand exactly what you are talking about because I had both realizations myself: thinking that I have no time because of work and chores, and realizing that the phone is addictive because it gives an exit for my anxiety. I'm still trying to solve both problems, though.
So probably the thing you need to start practicing and learning is how to deal with anxiety. Conveniently those sessions can fit right into the time slots you're currently spending procrastinating because of selfsame anxiety. See how long you can sit with it and reassure yourself, before reaching for the phone. Once that's been tamed a bit, I think the ability to enjoy doing something poorly will start to appear naturally as a by-product. Or, you can force the issue a bit by adopting a "punk" ethos: "I suck at this, but fuck you, I'm doing it anyway." And there's your example of doing things in a slacky YOLO way too: listen to early punk rock. They did a pretty good job of channeling their anxiety outward into creativity and energy. And there's a "punk" version of almost anything you can think of. Keep it simple, be a beginner, maybe even mock the experts - some of them need it. Good luck.
recently read a post on a moms' forum about her having a hard time getting her kid to practice violin and the skill plateauing.
the breakthrough was a trip to a relative's remote house with no screens / internet. Kid found violin better than other things to do. More Hours led to improvement. That fed on itself and kid spent more time with the violin and improved much faster.
The busier our lifestyle, the more cheap, meaningless pursuits we engage ourselves in, it all chips away at out natural ability to focus on one thing for long term and we're left with a recursive livelock of infinite choices laden with hidden opportunity costs.
how can humans from 1500 with everything stacked against them have better art sense and science insight than humans in 2026 ?
I think what the parent post was saying is that there is a finite amount of useful mental function time in any one day, and once you’ve exhausted this any attempted learning will be pretty inefficient. Also some jobs will have a faster burn rate. Doing a workout is separate as it doesn’t draw on the mental energy pool.
From my experience, workout draws exactly from the same pool as mental effort, so after a tough day at work/school, there is little left for a workout and vice versa. Instead of brain spending its energy on thinking, it spends it on muscle/movement coordination.
I find it easier to work out when being mentally exhausted than doing something mentally challenging when physically exhausted. My main sport is climbing and it is perfect for a Friday evening when I am exhausted from my research and teaching job.
Also there are all these feedback loops. Staying active gives motivation to do mentally challenging things, and some of this mental energy can also be invested in learning new ways of staying active!
I find it slightly easier to do mental work after a hard workout, especially when it's cardio, but not by much.
is true that if you've done some amount of mental effort in the day, learning becomes "pretty inefficient"? I could see that being true if you're exhausted, but then doing a workout would also be a problem.
I would say that learning draws from the pool of "mental energy", but working out draws from the pool of "physical energy". Just because your brain is tired, it doesn't mean that your biceps are.
Yeah exactly. After a hard day when my brain is frazzled, a workout will actually make me feel better.
Probably good to align mental and physical tiredness. Being physically tired makes rest feel very good.
Being mentally worn out just kinda makes you feel like shit. It's a terrible state to be in, you don't want to do anything, but doing nothing also feels bad.
I'm almost certain people are different on this point, but I just want to put this out there in case it applies.
A lot of our entertainments and hobbies, especially in urban areas, are mental to begin with. The most evident example would be scrolling on your phone, which evidently is 100% a mental thing, but there's a lot in this box, videogames, music, reading can all really demand a lot from you mentally.
Explicitly physical things are not so common. Gym. Dancing. Climbing. Running. All of these are things that people who work with their brains often talk about as "relaxing" or "great against stress", even if they can put the body until great physical strain.
It is my experience that when mentally worn out, the "don't want to do anything" really translates to "don't want to do anything mentally", problem being, thinking about doing the physical thing instead is actually a little bit of mental, albeit more emotional, work, but once you ACTUALLY do that, then after spending the whole day focused on deep, complex stuff, being the caveman bench pressing is actually absolute bliss.
Yeah this is largely my experience as well, and few things will raise your quality of life if you do have a mentally taxing life as having one or more hobbies that are physical and ideally requires you to get out of your head (gym kinda does that and if nothing else is a good sort of stress degauss, but dance is arguably even more fantastic as it literally will not work if you're in your head; not that one excludes the other).
Yeah, I have a similar experience when I put the phone down for prolonged periods. Though I need to be mindful to not do the same stuff on the computer i.e. open Hacker News or other attention grabbing websites. For that stuff I find it useful to use any feature I can either in the browser or the desktop environment to separate work from leisure.
Idk if this is universal but as soon as I’m on vacation I start learning new things, reading, and getting creative.
When I work, my brain is fried from work. On the weekends I need a long period of idleness to recover before I can read a chapter of a novel.
An hour of study every day is unrealistic for me right now.
Just want to "me too" this. I have two weeks a year where I unplug completely from my daily work and it often results in a new project or skill that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise
When chatgpt dropped I found time to start making stuff with it. All the brainpower that typically went towards checking my favorite creators or reading HN links went into making my first LLM powered game.
2 months later I was finished and the sleep deprivation hit me like a brick.
working out in my 40s just makes me tired. used to energize me when i was younger.
I have a feeling you are a young person :)
I'm funnily enough 40. You can definitely overdo exercise, but going from zero to some is generally very good for energy in my experience. It generally lets you turn that sort of tiredness you can't rest yourself out of into the sort of tiredness you can.
If you haven't tried a creatine supplement, I'd suggest trying it. 5g/day makes a huge difference for me in workout recovery.
yea it just gave me tummy ache and poor sleep. i tried to get used to it but no longer how long i tried tummy ache never went away.
Just wait till you're in your late 70s...
I think it's a useful distinction between learning about something and learning to do something. They have very different paths and methods of satisfaction.
But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience. It takes up so many hours but you also don't really rest, and it also tends to keep you up too long at night.
If you can replace five hours of doom scrolling with an hour of doing nothing in particular, an hour more of sleep, some time staring at a book page or soduku, some more work on chorse, you'll most likely gain an hour or so to use on something that takes mental energy.
> But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience.
It's never been the phone for me, particularly. I just don't pick mine up very often.
To have much more time to learn things I had to learn one key skill: systematically lose interest in syndicated American television. Other people can watch Lost, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother etc.; I will use my time elsewhere.
(OK so I picked three that are widely recognised as having a major letdown as an ending, but you see my point I guess.)
Once I stopped sharing an interest in watching every episode of some show that a friend or the general zeitgeist was obsessed with, that is hundreds of hours (per show!) for a hobby.
And these days it's hobby-enabling money, because in many cases these shows are the only reason to pick up an extra streaming subscription. You can buy a good 3D printer and some filament, or an electric guitar and a little amp or headphone effects unit for less than a year's premium plan for an American streaming service, and a fully playable guitar alone costs about as much as a year's standard Netflix.
I learned this long enough ago that I have gone without a television for decades now. I had to re-learn it in the era of streaming TV. If you think you want to see one of these shows, they will be around forever so you can watch them from a hospital bed one day.
It isn't always just phone. If you are in a "bad" state, you'll find something else to ease it. And it's often hardly more productive than doomscrolling: just brooding, switching between activities rapidly, or drowsing.
But phone is still the worst offender, of course. It doesn't just steal time and energy, it also reinforces its usage by producing more anxiety
Wondering, which would you consider healthier, an hour scrolling on the phone or an hour watching a tv show (either a fictional one or talk show, either with commercials)?
(aside from this, fascinating math ;))
It's hard to say because it depends on what you're looking at too, of course.
But doomscrolling seems to teach your brain to never pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds, while at the same time being more exhausting than watching TV.
So I'd say the TV is healthier.
Whichever one you are more likely to do with friends and family, I'd say. IME that's TV because we're experiencing the same thing.
If you're alone, it's probably a wash.
this is true
I think when people say "not enough time", they just mean "uninterrupted time". This is the thing that is extremely difficult in conjunction with parenting (and not just toddlers). There is a close to zero sum tradeoff between being truly present with your kids, and having intellectually high quality uninterrupted time. But there is actually lots of time scattered about throughout the days! It's just in little moments here and there before you hear "dad, can you help me?". I really struggle with this, I have enough time in these scattered moments for my mind to get bored frequently, but I have nowhere close to the uninterrupted time necessary to develop a real serious hobby like woodworking. (Parenting is also the best thing in the world, this is not a complaint about parenting, it just happens to be that the specific topic of this article is the hardest thing about it, for me.)
Uninterrupted time? Is there such a thing? Let me explain: Having retired from a tech world that didn't provide me with very many gigs, I have found myself being the roommate of my own mother. I am 69 and 1/2 years old. She is 93 and 1/2. She is in a wheelchair. And she has been widowed twice. I have never been married, and there are no prospects. I do all the cooking. That isn't easy as I am vegetarian, and have trouble cooking for her since she is not. But she can't live alone, and doesn't want to get married a third time.
Basically, I have windows of 5 minutes when I can do almost anything, then she calls me to do something for her that takes 15 minutes, then I have another 5 minutes of work. Instead of coding, my writing efforts have transitioned to writing fiction.
When I had kids, I made a deliberate choice to focus on hobbies that were more amenable to interruption.
I mostly put aside music and any physical artform that required getting out and putting stuff away each session. Instead, I did a lot more writing, programming, and making stuff on my laptop since pausing and resuming was only a Ctrl-S away.
It also required learning the meta-skill of being able to break a large project into tiny pieces. I got a lot better at leaving notes to myself, not having too many projects going on in parallel, and thinking about problems when I was otherwise idle.
This makes sense but I don't think it works for me. I get irritable when I'm trying to do something like the activities you listed, if I can't focus on what I'm doing without interruption, and then that's bad for everyone, both the interruptee and the interruptor. This seems to be a personality thing (disorder?), my wife seems to be able to switch back and forth from working to parenting without it affecting her ability to perform on either task.
That's a really nice point - about uninterrupted time.
I do notice however, in myself as well as in others, that given an amount of uninterrupted time, we quickly get bored and pick up our phones to break it.
I recall that when Covid hit, I suddenly had a lot of interrupted time on my hands. It quite felt like the times from when we were kids, when he had these vast swathes of time in the afternoon and before bedtime.
I think for a lot of adults, besides the chores and errands that keep life busy, it's become a habit for us to fill up what little uninterrupted time we get with distractions.
Making a strict hour and a half of no-interruption a day has worked well for me. Learned this from John Cleese (feel free to ignore the word “management” in the title of the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
Still occasionally get interrupted because of life, of course, but marking off an hour and a half and closing a door and putting all chores/calls on silent during that time is very helpful. And I understand that for many it is simply not possible. Private space is a luxury in much of the world.
A sense of play and no obligation also helps. For more on this I recommend Rubin’s The Creative Act.
Your comment is self-contradictory. Here's what you wrote:
> It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually (...) uninterrupted time (...)
Let's ignore the semantics nitpicking of trying to make believe that "time" does not reflect "energy" or "correct psychological state". Trying to frame "I don't have uninterrupted time" as something distinct from "I don't have time" is a choice that cannot be explained, let alone justified. I mean, do you honestly believe that setting 10minutes aside each day for a task has the same impact as being able to set aside an hour a week to invest in the same task?
Perhaps it's more productive to focus on the actual problem: not having time.
Psychological state is key, and I think you're understating it.
The human mind is always passively working on problems. We are not necessarily aware of how much working memory is "tied up" on background computations, but when it's a lot, we will feel a natural aversion to new learning, it will be exhausting, and we will lack for curiosity. This is fine, working as intended.
When in this state, what one usually needs to do is a different part of the learning process: not absorbing new information or abstractions, but making sense of what one already knows, working out contradictions, assembling larger-scale theories--synthesis, basically. "Learning" is only one part of the arc of "thinking".
Usually this is best done by writing, and usually comes easiest when trying to convince someone else or what we believe. If you can't find the energy to learn, try writing instead.
I'd argue all of those are often issues of how we perceive circumstances vs what actually is going on. There are real situations that crowd out this sort of thing, but they don't apply to everyone (having people that need care comes to mind or crunches at work).
Jung has a great quote to the effect of, "we don't solve our problems, but rather outgrow them." Life is going to feel like mostly-imperfect circumstances for any venture, and your brain can be too good at rationalizing any [lack of] behavior.
I have too much emotional attachment to progress. A lot of people made the mistake of putting too much energy into e.g. career instead of what you really want outside of a paycheck. Well, now I really am doing the thing I've always wanted, of course I suck at it, and most days I feel bad in the process.
Some people feel good about making mistakes. Though necessary for long-term success, this is a completely foreign mindset to me. I have no idea how a person can do such a thing. I tend to overreact instead.
It's not any wonder I would turn to doomscrolling in response, it seems the stakes in my mind are too high and effort invariably leads to depression (speaking from experience). It's too important to me to fail at. Maladaptive phone usage is for escaping that anxiety. I'm most likely burnt out from other attempts in the past. I don't get this feeling at all with work since I'm only doing it for money.
I would feel bad if I couldn't learn the things I really wanted to in life because the emotional toll is too high to pay, after putting in all the work to have a stable income. I still have to manage the rest of my life on top of optional things.
I have been having more 'luck' with those factors and less luck with physical comfortability (I don't mean air conditioning; I have that). Also, timing.
It is very true that it is becoming hard to monetize knowledge. The depth a lot of people seek is often the depth of about at most five or six websearch queries, or maybe three or four AI-enabled queries.
It blows my mind that people want things like neural interfaces and human/computer physical integration, in part because, okay, let's say you have all that information there in your head, 24/7. What would it even be useful for, especially if others had it. You could not really make pay in any career involving a thought economy, and at the same time, you would destroy curiosity and actual learning, and you would almost certainly be (ugh) Bored (and Boring to anyone else). One reason Elon rubs me the wrong way.
Re: energy specifically - I think "psychological state" is the main thing. Once there's a will, there's a way. Make it not draining on your psyche to explore new stuff and you're good to go. This really is as simple as not watching random feeds.
Re: "taking things way too serious" - a general life advice is to be after the journey, not the result. Goes for career, sports achievements and anything along the lines. Worry about getting to some place/rank/etc in particular and it's an endless stream of despair. Worry about just enjoying the practice and not being afraid to rock the boat (i.e. try something outside _your_ beaten path) and you're set.
Actual intelligence is as useful as it gets nowadays, given that it's at a premium.
Anxiety procrastination is basically my default state. I find doing things with my hands while listening to dumb podcasts helps dissipate that energy.
Have you considered it might be something medically treatable? There are drugs for that sort of thing. I've tried some and wouldn't have believed it was possible before - aren't I anxious because I haven't done things I'm supposed to do and the consequences are nebulous and growing? Isn't anxiety a real signal telling me to get them finished? If you lose that feeling, you'll be even more screwed! But it turns out neurotypical people can be productive without being driven by stress.
I am a firm believer in the saying, "Show me a pill with no side-effects, and I will show you a pill that does nothing."
It appears you definitely have received some benefit, but if you do not mind me asking, at what cost?
> But it turns out neurotypical people can be productive without being driven by stress.
As some that is neurodivergent, I cannot even fathom this. I cannot function without stress.
There are side effects and you may have to try different drugs to minimize them and maximize the effect. Medicine makes sense when the side effects are less bad than the problem that the main effect is solving, not only when there are no side effects.
Some people choose what, if any pill to take each day according to what they intend to do that day.
> I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy
This is a common trait of perfectionists. I have long forgotten the source, but someone once wrote that “Perfectionists have a special ability to turn the voluntary into the obligatory.” I, too, find this in voluntary pursuits.
[dead]
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
- T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Beautiful quote I strongly relate to. When I was 16, I had a sudden realisation one day that no one knows what anything of this actually is. That was a profoundly defining moment of who I am and the deepest and most beautiful thought my limited mind managed to grasp. It made me become in awe of the universe, inspired me to learn and has been a pillar I could lean on during difficult times. I cherish that thought every day.
I kept trying to find 'the people who have it all figured out' for way too long. I was in my mid-20s before I able to start letting go of it.
I'm still angry and upset that there are so many entities which prey upon this natural human tendency and twist it toward fruitless, bizarre ends.
Wanna say that this is a much better argument for learning than productivity or "becoming a more interesting person". Sometimes it is simply a way to keep the mind pointed outward
> Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never <...> be tortured by
Right.
If you think of the world as the activity of people and nations, I can understand that reaction.
If you think of the world as everything it is possible to see and experience, learning about the world won't bring torture, it will bring freedom from it.
The truth shall set you free.
Only if it's a closed loop
that is beautiful, its something i believe as well but never seen it written so eloquenty. when everythings gone to hell and your backed into a corner, learning something interesting is always there for you.
“The Once and Future King” is an odd book. I read it recently - as an adult - and I’m not sure I ‘enjoyed’ reading it. It has a lot of ‘childishness’, especially in the first 2/3, of a kind I’ve never really liked in it. Perhaps the kind _adults_ think kids enjoy. But it’s also full of stuff like this at unexpected moments. Wonder at the world; consideration of others; the burden of leadership.
I ended up thinking of it extremely fondly - way more fondly than I would’ve expected when halfway through. It’s one of my favorite books in spite of itself. I’d recommend it.
There's a good article on White and the book in the "Encyclopedia of Fantasy". It made me appreciate that this set of stories is more than just a book for children. I haven't actually read it but the entry for "White, T H" made me bump it up the list of books in my queue.
[1] https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/white_t_h
Some of my favorite books are ones I didn't really "like", but which influenced me deeply. The ones that go at the very top of the list are those that achieve both things. But that's very rare.
Knowing a lot used to be attractive too, before the septic cavalcade of reddit reduced us to wordcels and the 'actually' meme. The continued pursuit of knowledge for me has been a much more private matter in this last decade of the unravelling academic institutions I once called home.
It's all about context. Everybody likes someone who has well informed answers to questions they ask. Nobody likes someone who frequently injects answers to questions nobody asked. Knowing a lot is attractive, but being a know-it-all is unattractive. The wisdom to know the difference between the two is a different kind of skill than knowing a lot of things.
There's tact to be deployed when you know a lot.
People are less frustrated with the actually meme if it's insightful and not some pedantry.
One thing I wish this emphasized more is that adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning, which is why my useful rule has become: if I'm not producing errors, I'm probably not practicing yet
Meta learning can be useful, but I take your overall point. You can get lost in the weeds trying to figure out the "best" way to learn something. Autodidacts do have some up-front costs: they have to figure out how to best teach themselves a thing, which usually means researching and trying various pedagogical approaches to find something that might work for them.
Language learning, for example is a huge category. You can get completely mired trying to sort out "grammar translation" versus "direct method" or "comprehensible input" approaches, the pros and cons of spaced repetition vs extensive/intensive reading, phonology & minimal pairs, picking a textbook/grammar/dictionary -- it's a lot. I imagine there are some people who are broadly interested in language learning, and don't actually use that information to actually learn a language. It might be more fun to prepare to learn a language than to get into the challenging and less fun work of actually doing it. I see the parallels with "Gear Acquisition Syndrome".
I think the book Superlearning just gives the simple rule that you should spend 10% of your budgeted time on meta concerns (what to learn, what order, what strategies to use, etc) and that’s always seemed a sensible, good-enough default that takes away the doubt. Knowing how deep to go is, as you point out, only half the battle unfortunately, but the rule helped me at least.
reminds me of "tutorial hell"
>adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning
True, and even more insidious than that can be consuming the actual learning material (e.g. textbooks), but not doing the required work to integrate it. I find that I need to do projects to properly learn something. Once I actually start doing things, I quickly identify the parts I knew in theory from reading about them but had never put to the test by solving real problems.
Also engaging with others learning the same thing within the overall community is also tremendously helpful and accelerates learning. Though you need to get over the fear of asking silly or obvious in hindsight questions in the wrong Discord channel sometimes.
I love this take. I built some feature and then when I tried to layer new features on top, I saw all the bad decisions surface and errors appear. Its beautiful to walk back and have it "click"
Knowing is input and skills are output. If you can't produce some kind of output in response to input, you've got a nice imagination but no skills.
Excellent motto, too good to pass a genuine appreciation comment
I’ll chime in. I started learning to draw in my early twenties, couple hours a week. What helps a lot is joining a club, I’ve got a group in my town that just goes to a bar one night a week and draws and chats for 3 hours. Great way to ensure that you get at least a few hours of drawing in, even if your week is too busy for “practice”.
It takes about 2-3 years of mild practice to get good enough that you’ll routinely impress yourself, about 5 years to get good enough that you could do paid commissions.
Seems like a long time, but unless you start in your seventies you’ll have decades left of enjoying being an artist afterwards.
And even if you don’t get all that good or turn it into a lifelong hobby, that just sounds fun.
There's really a feeling now pushing back against learning in general. The feeling is that it is pointless since technology would just do it for you. When I started learning Chinese a friend just wouldn't stop talking about how the latest airpods will just be able to translate for you. It was really rather demoralising. But there is still something incredibly rewarding about having that knowledge in your own head and not having to go find someone or something to ask. I push on regardless.
Funny that your example is Chinese. Have you seen the reports that Chinese universities are cutting back on foreign-language programmes because the expectation is that AI translation is the way of the future?
So, your friend was just expressing the general zeitgeist. But something to be aware of, is that “having that knowledge in one’s own head” might be unrewarding in time. Namely, once high-quality AI translation in near-real-time becomes the social norm, Chinese people (and most other people on earth) will become much less tolerant of a foreigner trying to speak their language imperfectly. You can already see something similar if you go to countries like Netherlands or Sweden and try to speak the local language at anything short of a high B2-level: people will complain you’re wasting their time compared to just using English.
> The feeling is that it is pointless since technology would just do it for you.
Why walk or jog of the car can do it for you?
Maybe because these is an obvious benefit of physical exercises and that there are no health benefits to learn a new topic after having already exhausted your brain sitting +7 hours at work?
> there are no health benefits to learn a new topic after having already exhausted your brain sitting +7 hours at work
There are. Unless your work requires almost constant creative reiteration over your mistakes on new topics, learning new things even when exhausted is still healthy for your brain.
I know, right? Have the AI go to the gym and work out for you.
Personally, my deadlifts have gone way up since I started doing them with a forklift.
My love life has seen hockey stick growth since I spawned subagents to hang out with women for me.
Technology is a choice. If you speak natively you get completely different immersion in culture.
Imagine your perception as a VR headset, and any gadgets and apps are inserting a layer between you and your VR headset, making it worse.
The same goes with any augmenting technology you perceive not the real thing.
I've been learning Spanish and I find a big positive motivator is finding and practicing slang words and vulgar phrases. They usually have cultural roots and are highly contextual, so it requires a deeper understanding than just translation. I only speak them sparingly with my few native speaker friends, who find it hilarious when I inevitably use them incorrectly - or rarely get it exactly right.
Even if so, once I realized how pointless doomscrolling is I figured I might as well use that time to learn something pointless.
Learning a language is still absolutely worth it. The feeling you get when finally being able to communicate with native speakers is not something you could achieve with technology. Sure if all you care about is exchanging information then translation technology does the job, but if you want to actually connect with people I believe you have to do the talking
I've been learning Russian by myself since the pandemic and along the way I've picked up bits and bobs about food, history, geography, music, and even electronics. Learning a language is not just about the language per se.
I've even realised a few things about my own language.
Приятно слышать, а то иногда народ говорит, что это мертвый язык...
It is helpful in such cases to look up, touch grass, and realise that "do it for you" is doing a lot of work there. The technology still can only emit a convolution of its training, and this is an ontological, conceptual limit on the technology, not something that the next model will just overcome. It's not "intelligence" -- you still have to know things.
It's easy to think, reading HN, that we're in some "post-knowledge" apocalypse, but that's just not the reality. It is, however, tragic that the irrationality of capitalism can be sustained so long, perhaps longer than some of us can stay solvent.
As someone who has done “self-directed” learning, for my entire life (high school dropout, with a GED), I can certainly relate.
I like to learn new stuff, every day. I have found LLMs to be a godsend, here. Makes it much easier to just barge into unfamiliar territory.
Whenever I come across essays like this, I like to post The Gap, by Ira Glass[0]; one of the more encouraging short essays out there.
[0] https://vimeo.com/85040589
LLMs can definitely be helpful, but you need your radar set to 11 because they will convincingly feed you smart sounding nonsense when you are most at risk.
Oh yeah, but the same goes for almost any information source (especially these days).
Yeah, but this is like saying that one needn't focus so much on LLMs making mistakes because humans also mistakes.
They do, but the shape of the way LLMs will confidently mislead you is quite different to the way misinformed humans, or even the malevolent and mendacious humans, will mislead you.
There are plenty of authoritative reference books full of errors. Teachers in every subject can be wrong, convincingly.
Yes, but human errors are based on genuine and elaborate misconceptions (or propagandistic intent), not squishy, facile "you're right to push back on that, I straight up made that up" type stuff.
I just apply the "Wikipedia model" to things like LLMs (and StackOverflow, which can be just as bad -but without the admitting error part).
I look for citations and footnotes. In many cases, accuracy isn't something that I worry about, as bad info becomes apparent, almost immediately. In cases where it matters, though, I may try a couple of verifications.
One problem with humans, is that we can be quite insecure, and will fight to the death to defend a provably wrong position, because we can't bear to be seen as in error.
> bad info becomes apparent, almost immediately
Can you elaborate on this? I suspect that you’re thinking mostly of cases in which you already have a fair bit of domain expertise. But in the general case, this seems to be very untrue. Which is why it’s so pernicious that LLMs can generate such quantities of syntactically-plausible-but-factually-untrue text.
Valid point, but I don’t really just start learning whole new vocations, cold. I’m an engineer/software developer, with over 40 years’ experience, and my learning is generally some branch off that (like learning asynchronous programming, or a new UI framework).
Can’t really put it into precise terminology, but I get a “gut feeling,” that something is/is not plausible, and it happens pretty quickly; usually when I start some implementation. I tend to learn by do[0] (note the “sample playground,” in each essay), so the “reality filter” gets applied fairly rapidly.
In any case, I have been dealing with misinformation (sometimes, deliberate), for a long time, and I’m still working fairly effectively, so I guess it works.
Can’t argue with results.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/
Sure, I take your point that the smell-test works reasonably well for domains related or adjacent to one's own.
But (not speaking about your use specifically here) many people (most, I'd wager) use LLMs for many things beyond their own expertise. And it's there that they're most likely to be ensnared without even knowing it.
I definitely agree with your notion that learning-by-doing is a helpful salve for LLM falsehoods. It's no panacea (working != correct (an incorrect solution can appear correct over a given interval)), but it's a good way of working in general that helps keep LLMs in check. And it's very natural to code or other things that can be immediately applied.
But learning-by-doing of course doesn't work with topics that aren't immediately applied. Which includes lots of topics that people use LLMs for (Wikipedia too, for that matter).
The set of unfamiliar-or-unapplied is practically a lot larger than the set of familiar-or-applied.
Yup. That's why I always do things carefully.
I don't think it would be a good idea for me to suddenly decide that I want to get rich, selling antivenin.
Fair enough, but I'm not sure this is how the general population uses LLM chatbots, nor how the highly qualified always use LLMs.
On the contrary, I believe most people use them precisely to find out more about topics of which they know vanishingly little, much as they'd have used Google before LLMs.
I wish humans that make up "facts" would admit to it as readily as LLMs do. Even though I know it's just a training trick to ground the response.
It's not anywhere close. Like, by four orders of magnitude.
I started playing video games in Spanish about a year ago. I've finished about 20 now. I had a base of course & was doing little courses etc. But I've sunk 100s of hours now focusing on text and voice heavy games and it went from very tiring and looking up the dictionary constantly to fun and fluid. I can finally watch a lot of stuff without subtitles now. Someone catalogues which games have been dubbed (focused on Spanish of Spain) at this site https://www.doblajevideojuegos.es/ the quality of most new dubs I've seen has been very high
I live in Europe, had to get my permanent residence permit and for that - you have to pass the language exam. Boy, that was some experience!
I'm in my 40's so learning a new language has activated the brain muscles that were last active when I was... 4?
They were so rusty, slow and amost physically refused to cooperate at first. This was tough. Now looking back it was absolutely worth it, best brain workout ever. Best.
This is why I don’t get the perverse pleasure people get when they say they don’t look at code anymore
It’s not like we’ve created a new abstraction layer with coding agents. It’s a leaky factory where every part up and down can break and/or be improved.
The best factories thrive in a learning culture. Where humans grow their knowledge to improve the operation of the factory. From nuts and bolts up to larger systems.
How do you do that without reading code? Without writing code?
I started even replacing my use of specs with exploratory coding to grow my own knowledge and context
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-spec...
The education system is to blame.
Kids are conditioned to associate learning with a formal course with a tutor culminating in exams.
It's also intentional to segregate skills, if schools taught every child basic plumbing or car mechanics for example instead of spending a month teaching something that won't get used in life, there would be less job in those fields.
So there's a conspiracy between plumbers, mechanics, and public schools to not teach basic handyman skills to the students?
We used to have "shop" (or similarly named) classes for this in junior high/middle school. They have mostly been cut, but more for budgetary reasons. A lot of high schools still have a vocational department for the kids who are not college-bound and not complete wasteoids.
I'm not in USA, so can't speak for you. But here in UK it is accepted that schools were, and remain, designed to produce well behaved consumers and workers.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
One “trick” nowadays is to just do a thing for the sake of doing the thing. I draw. Not to post my drawings to social media, not to try to get income from paid commissions, but rather just to enjoy the act of drawing. It’s very liberating in a world where it feels like almost everything has to be in service of some kind of larger scheme.
I retired a few years ago and now do a slew of things (photography, robotics, 3D printing, etc.) entirely for myself. I'll start a project, have a blast learning/building, then simply move on to the next thing.
Learning for the sake of learning is one of my favorite things in life.
Not finishing - or even being able to define the finish line - is a great sign you're doing this right. You're not a tortoise seeking mastery; it's ok to be a distracted hare!
"have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos, then you may want to put this ambition aside for now and deal with that instead"
Even older kids... my 6 year old is jumping on the couch as I type this..
I like remote work but when I had to commute it was really nice to have that downtime built in to the day. I learned a lot of Dutch vocabulary on the train.
Don’t be fooled, the first few years you get spoiled with “the first moments” of things. Then suddenly the “last moments” start creeping in, “the last nappy”, “the last car seat”, at first they seem like a god send but then they accumulate like an avalanche.
One day you will pick them up and, and most likely neither of you will know it, but it will be the last time you ever do.
Treasure everything, even the insanity.
I plan to keep lifting my kids everyday like Milo. Hopefully I can push off the last time I pick them up till they’re 30 or so.
At 30, they'll probably be picking you up instead, I'm 37, grown too strong and easily lift my dad lol
The hobby can be with the kid! E.g. go out on a kayak with them (safety first etc.) or learn to coach sport.
That's probably the sweet spot
There's something useful about time that is already spoken for. You're on the train, you can't do much else, so learning some Dutch feels easy. At home the same half hour somehow gets fragmented into six different things
Children are not god for peace of mind and a life of liberty. I do not recommend anyone to have children, becaues of how negatively it affects your life, cost of living etc. It is basically just tying yourself down to the wheel of consumption, and in order to jutsify everything, all the struggle, push your hopes and aspirations to the next generation, and then letting them deal with it.
If you are rich, you can get around this by hiring people to take care of the children, so then it could be possible, but it will still be a huge financial burden.
This comment actually triggered something in me and I wanted to write a dismissive and condescending response but in the spirit of HN I’d like to try a different approach.
I’ve honestly never been able to understand this kind of thinking (uniformly ruling children as a negative because of the downsides), but I’d be curious to understand more about your perspective.
How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people find in having a family against the economic and time freedom costs?
Or the fact that societies do need to continue having children in order to: sustain economic growth, service their elderly population (that will be us in a few years to decades), maintain their armed forces, perpetuate their culture and values into the future, invest in scientific research, etc.
Are these not things you value? Or do you just see the tradeoff as not worth it?
> How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people find in having a family against the economic and time freedom costs?
That's a very presumptuous question.
I don't know if the original commenter has kids or a family, but I can assure you that not everyone finds as much joy in it as you may. You can easily end up with a kid that just hates your guts, and is problematic in many other ways to boot.
I like this. If you can share your email address I will give you a personal answer.
It’s not that these aren’t valuable. It’s that you can also see the enormous damage done to children and the suffering that you put them through as parents. Life is a grueling, often thankless and cruel situation. It has no real explanation and we toss more and more people into the meat grinder every year.
I see very little love from parents, but I generally see an enormous amount of selfishness. True betrayal, overt and subtle abuse, and kids seem more to push through that to really thrive… occasionally.
This idea that someone has never felt to love this powerful before? Incredibly selfish. It feels almost disgusting to write about let alone really think about. Who the hell are these people saying these things? Do they even hear themselves?
Every metric and every explanation I ever hear or read about when it comes to kids seems… ultimately selfish. The future for civilization looks awfully bleak, and bringing children to this world? Now?! Their future is a dodgy proposition at best.
Having children consistently seems to be for people with little creativity, little prospect in their lives, and very little thought or consideration for a wide and colorful world which could actually use some help instead of holding up in a house for 20 years.
Society uses our biology against us. It uses it to create enormous anxiety, depression, and poverty through having children. I wish to live the second half of my life in a meaningful way rather than shackling some unsuspecting little-me to the insane whims of hyper consumerist and capitalist culture designed only to extract everything from them and create as much anxiety and hurt as possible, that it might produce as much from them as possible.
For someone to not see that this is what most societies have become? The height of blindness; i’m not sure I’ve ever seen a parent in America who didn’t have their kids as part of this culture of spectacle , of blindly shambling without critical thinking. It’s as if most people want to collect all the check boxes in life, like little Pokémon, little experiences that they simply must have and show off to people to fluff their ego.
Sure, the process produces all kinds of crazy chemicals but so do hallucinogenic drugs. They’re basically both the same thing, but one of them really makes people unhealthy, intense, and emotionally unbalanced while the other just makes them see weird stuff that isn’t there.
The more you look at it, just the less it makes sense. All the uncritical, thoughtless people that I’ve ever met in my life are the ones having kids, while all the people I’ve respected, who are generally considerate, intelligent, kind, intentional, mindful, and honestly quite accomplished and as helpful as possible toward their fellow people? None of them have kids. Not a single one. Not my entire life. Well one. One, and it’s such a bad experience, and is so painful and difficult for he, his wife, and the child that he says he would never wish it on his worst enemy, despite absolutely loving his child and doing his best to demonstrate that every day.
I know it’s a bit rambling, but there you go.
Wise words. But you must remember that society is a self-perpetuating system, that grows to consume all, like cancer, and for "it" (society) to exist, children must be produced to fuel its growth. Politicians, the sole benefactors of the modern society, therefore scream about children to fuel the machine.
Of course there are kind and loving parents, but you are right in that many (most?) just follow their biological program on autopilot, never thinking about the consequences.
But I do think, at some level, the species is starting to realize how unsustainable this is, and we see this in dropping fertility and child birth levels.
These levels I think, will only start to increase again, once society has adapted to man, instead of like today, when authoritarian politicians try to adapt man, pushing him like a cog wheel into the machinery of the state. Man is now tired, and refuses, and as a result, more and more people just stop procreating, which I see as a sign of health.
I think your view is… skewed… but also, remember that many parents are not, in fact, in America.
Children don't necessitate a consumption spiral. The fact that they grow so quickly means there's plenty of cheaply available used items (clothes, books, toys, etc.). If you have multiple, or if they have cousins, then there's also hand-me-downs. Then there's free stuff like parks or libraries, or e.g. our county has a nearby recreation center with a splash pad.
We did buy a more expensive home to live near better peers, but that's not really a consumption issue; it's a cultural one.
Ironically having kids motivated us to live somewhere we could be car free, which is a pretty major reduction in consumption.
Having a child was a profoundly selfish act for me. I wanted one because I can't imagine any challenge more fascinating and rewarding (for me) than raising a child.
I don't understand what the point of hiring people to take care of mine would be. That's the fun part. Makes about as much sense as going to an amusement park and paying someone to take the rides for you.
You’re correct about peace of mind (I’ve never been more afraid than I have been for my kids) and liberty (modern parenting is akin to house arrest at times) but the fact remains I never knew I could love someone as much as I love my kids, and I’m richer for it.
The fact that you need to fight an incredibly strong biological motivator to do this suggests you're wrong. If you have a builder mentality and want to leave the world better than you found it, having kids is the best path. They're also my retirement plan.
I will now never be a parent, but what are you suggesting people preserve their money for if not consumption?
what money?
How many children do you have?
This resonated with me, although my experience has been a little different.
I started playing pool in college around 2017 and, without really intending to, it became something I did at least once a week. I never had a structured practice routine or any goal of getting really good. I just enjoyed playing, and after enough years I realized I'd become a decent player.
I never gambled, but we usually played loser-pays, so every session still cost a bit. I'm unemployed right now, so I've stopped going because it just doesn't fit my budget anymore.
Learning process must be accompanied with enough space for an individual to realistically challenge himself to actually acquire that knowledge with foreseeable success of doing it. A person must believe s/he can really learn something. But in this status quo of AI hypeism (believing that knowing refined set of know-hows would be enough) people gradually begin losing that optimistic "a priori" belief to learn things.
But another side effect of this process is if people stop believing in the accrual of the knowledge which will lead them to nowhere (use cases for those information becoming irrelevant by the time you start using it), justifying this mentally exhausting practice becomes really hard. And I don't mean this on learning static information but also on how to define and build a meta-cognitive framework to systemically learn things.
I don't quite get the "lifelong learning" approach, since lifelong learning must usually be accompanied with organic evolution of the information space. Employers wont pay you because you are a lifelong learner, they'll pay you to actually fix a problem you provide a solution for. And that solution isn't guaranteed by the knowledge you possess and doesn't usually qualify the marginal cost of being a lifelong learner.
One could brain storm on these issues by critiquing the premise of this book: https://www.amazon.com/100-Year-Life-Living-Working-Longevit...
I came to a similar conclusion last weekend. My 20 year old car was having some issues and instead of taking g it to the mechanic to be charged $1,000, thought I would give it a try myself. 3 hours later and the problem was fixed. And I learned a lot in the process.
I had the same with my motorcycle. Every time I brought it to the dealer, they came up enthusiastically with things to spend money on. Your tires are done! Your break pads are gone! With the help of a friend, I got into doing (very) basic maintenance myself. I just replaced the tires. I fixed a problem with the electrical system. And next will be the chain and sprocket.
That's why I do all DIY myself, incliding plumbing or electrics. Craftsmen cost money and they try to finish in one session, so they do lots of compromises.
Examples: under a sink, there were two 2m-long supply hoses, where 40cm would be enough, convoluted in a double loop together, to spare a visit to a DIY store. Or dowels made to be driven by hammer, for plastic baseboards, used to hang a cupboard (almost fell out). Or a too long corrugated plastic tube making a virage and another, unnecessary, water seal, and impeding outflux -- also to spare a visit to a store.
YouTube has been a godsend for these types of problems. It's like LLM output, you need to validate and cross reference but combined with other sources of information, easy purchase of parts and problems that actually have solutions (vs "buy a new one") I've saved thousands on cars, appliances and home repairs
> Practice is when you gather data for the brain to process overnight. Sleep is when improvements happen.
This shift is such a game changer for me personally. It reduces how many times I ask myself “am I actually making any progress or just wasting time?” by putting all the pressure on “sleep’s REM phase” instead of me and my ability to learn.
I don’t like cooking mostly because of how many dishes you have to wash afterwards. Saying “your sleep will handle the learning part” is like someone saying “feel free to cook the craziest dishes, I will do all the washing afterwards”.
I cannot deny the value of learning but there is a fact that learning can be a way of procrastination. This happens when the joy of learning overtake and diverge you from a goal. Nothing wrong about it, it is a time well spent. But I think there must be a balance as well
The only way I ever learned anything or built anything of value (one of those things still accounts for most of my revenue, 10-15 years later) was by blowing off doing what I was supposed to be doing at that moment, in the classic sense described by PG here:
https://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
(Except, his essay insinuates that there is some kind of brilliance at work here. In my own case, that remains to be seen.)
Never have I ever managed to accomplish anything of merit by just heading straight for it in the plainspoken sense. Some people will say that provides the basic architecture of some kind of "diagnosis", but I think it's just a normal human variance.
Learning can be the goal if you're lucky. Maybe sharing your learning is the next step and that's enough too. You don't need to apply it to something someone defines as "worthy" for validation.
Learning is not just strictly studying.
I'd say most of the learning is done by actually doing.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm an athlete who trained all day for years, then before my first professional match, I retired and went off to teach PE."
Is this a quote from something?
> While you practice the thing you want to learn, you will not feel good, especially not starting out. This honestly is a bit of an understatement, it really sucks and depending on the task, odds are you may want to lie down for a bit when you’re done with your first practice session. You’ll also almost certainly perform significantly worse toward the end of the session. All this is your brain and muscles getting tired. It’s a good meta-skill to learn to self-assess and pick up on this.
> Learning something completely new from scratch is really awful, and at this point most people are very disheartened and want to give up, which is unfortunate, because if they got back to it the next day, they’d find it’s actually gotten tangibly easier.
This certainly applies to some people, but not all people, and I suspect that the people who actually take the time to "learn new things" are those who enjoy the process. People tend to avoid things they don't enjoy, especially when those things are discretionary, so telling the people who don't enjoy the process of learning new things to do so anyway is preaching to the wrong audience.
I think there's a middle group too: people who like having learned something, but don't really enjoy those first few sessions. For them, just knowing that the initial frustration is normal can help a lot
For me the biggest learning investment outside work I put is learning Chinese and Vietnamese. I tried music but I gave it up after a year. And I can just do it on my commute to work as well. I also like reading about 19 century comparative history. Gives me a lot of relevant talking points in a lot of conversation.
I went back to school in my 50's to learn how to teach. Two of the most important takeaways from that experience were:
1) learning how to learn; and
2) using projects to learn
Writing about your experience in learning is also a powerful tool. If you can describe it to your journal (or someone else), you really know it.
What did you study, specifically? This is the life transition I am considering (and at a similar age).
Did you do a teaching degree or equivalent, or something a bit more theoretical/philosophical?
And who do you now teach?
Learning something new often can take as little 10-15 minutes a day of focused time. If you do it consistently, it becomes easier and easier to maintain, and it starts to require less and less mental capacity to start
> You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn.
shameless plug: if you are interested in learning touch typing, i built a data driven touch typing application:
https://typequicker.com
it started as a side project (combined wanting to learn typing with my desire to build a side business while working at amazon. working on this (almost) full time now
I'll get my agent on it right away.
Very impressive. In my own experience, starting something new is usually fun, just that sometimes it's like I'm burnt out or hyper focused on it. Let's say for example, I have a YouTube video that is an hour long, I watched the first 30mins the first day, on he second day, I watch the first half of the video again as a preamble but by the time I'm into the second half of the video, I loose focus and need to take a break again.
An attention span of 30mins seems too little to me. Any ways to incrementally work on this? Anyone with similar experience?
I don't suggest auto diagnosing, but those could be ADHD symptoms. I have the inattentive subtype and it sounds similar to my experience. Unfortunately, I don't have any advice on this
Because this seems like an appropriate topic/place to ask, are there say 20 books on a variety of topics that one can say are very useful to build a foundation of our world, in the physical and metaphorical sense? Literature probably shouldn't be in that list because literature is just a universe of its own and a lot of it is just not that accessible. E.g. I am not knowledgeable enough to be able to read Mahabharata or Odyssey in the original language.
It's great to be an amateur learner, but if you want to get better (or just make learning more effective) I really liked the (very easy read) Little Book of Talent. It focuses on how to get good, but that's really about how we learn and practice. Highly motivational and some interesting counterintuitive ideas:
https://danielcoyle.com/the-little-book-of-talent/
I learned a lot myself, but lately I just can't make it on stable regime because you don't get much positive feedback you you're learning something yourself. There's no grades, no exams and all of your motivation is internal. In that case you need to work on a motivation and goals. Why would you learn something that doesn't pays off then?
To improve your life, circumatances, abilities. To have a larger amount of known concepts to connect to each other. To increase your stability, security, quality of life, and self reliance. To make more money. To decrease your reliance on uncontrollable and unstable factors.
I'm quite fortunate to keep piling on knowledge without extrinsic rewards: the acquisition itself and the rewiring of my brain is what makes it enjoyable for me.
I look up to people who are well-read and try to follow their example. Maybe one day I can inspire somebody else.
You are tending a garden
The key is to find something that you enjoy sucking at. I recently picked up quad rollerskating and the process of getting steadier and smoother at it (while just enjoying the vibes, music and community at my local rink) has become an obsession. It's my new third-favorite hobby (after programming and competitive cornhole).
The idea overall is fine. Do adults have success learning art? Like actually getting good at it? I've been kind of overwhelmed by how much time is expected of students to learn art to get good. Like its treated like a full time job? I see people online casually throw out spending 8-10 hours a day on things.
I really like how the article focuses on rest and not doing the thing as a core part of learning.
How learning and doing aren't exactly the same and that you need to get back to it many times rather than doing a lot at once.
It's ofc nothing new and the same principle as for example spaced repetition.
> and/or have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos
Slightly off topic, but as a parent I found this hilarious and will now be closely watching to see if any of my own screaming logos ever perfectly hit the corner of a room.
I’m attempting to learn to use a slide rule. It’s quite a history lesson - we take for granted the large precision we get on calculators. But the learning is taking repeated visits, about 30 minutes at a time. I’m slowly getting it.
I've been running my own website lately (www.makonea.com), and writing out my knowledge as articles made me realize just how much I was lacking. Running your own website is something I'd recommend trying.
I honestly don't feel rewarding learning anymore. I might be depressed, because I feel all human experiences are overrated. And such, learning is such futile exercise in postponing the reality of life.
I struggle with the same feeling - though maybe I’d say I don’t find honing my craft as rewarding anymore. For years it’s been the gradually creeping expansion of the world - the more I develop new skills, the more I find there are so many others that (seem to) have done it better and faster. Then all at once I find that chatbots seems to be better and faster. It has sapped my enthusiasm. I don’t know if it’s depression or anhedonia, but I probably need to spend more time figuring it out.
Do you have any interest in trying a new language? If you have, there is a language.
Couldn't find a mention of age in the article.
It was probably written by a relatively young person.
Nice intent and advice, but in practice, mostly harder and harder to do as time passes by.
(author) I'm 40. Haven't really had any increase in difficulty learning things yet. Maybe when I'm 60 I'll have different ideas.
I like learning new things, and have done so my whole life. But thinking about our AI future, I think that learning as a goal will be greatly diminished, when the reward of learning many things is essentially zero other than your own personal satisfaction. I can see this already to some degree in my kids. I taught my older daughter, when she was young (8~12) how to build websites (html/js), code games (ruby), build 3D models (lightwave), etc. It was a great experience plus she now has a degree from a great college in engineering and has been gainfully employed since college at a good tech company (not using the exact things I taught her but tangentially related). I now have kids that are preteen/teen and I struggle with 1) "why bother", and 2) convincing them how these or similar skills might be of use to them. My teen boy is like "why do I need to learn this when I can just ask Claude" etc. I'm frankly at a bit of a loss.
I need a benevolent alien to force me out of my rut when I’m in one. I had no problems as a kid because I had little choice at times, like the weekends where I was going to learn how to put siding on a cottage or plumb a bathroom, even though I wanted to play Zelda more than anything. I hated those summers and now that I’m a homeowner, I am deeply thankful for them.
Literally an hour ago my 7 and 9 year olds came to mom and I and said, “thank you for disabling YouTube. We are having so much fun.” I know this sounds like a fake Donald Trump kind of story but I swear to god it just happened.
"Learning anything is a long term project, and long term projects are necessary for building a sense of control over your circumstances. Almost nothing can be deliberately and meaningfully changed within the scope of a day, but in months, certainly years, a lot of things can be made to happen."
Nothing is as sad as seeing some young motivated student losing patience if the task doesn't turn out to be a quick, easy win. The saddest however are students so eager for the quick, easy win that throughout their academic career they repeat the pattern and never really dive deep into any topic.
I had a student come to me with essentially the same problem over two years and each time I helped her she was in refusal to listen as she stressed herself to just make it work now. Her problem was that she never took the time to do the basics and rejected any learning opportunity as it stared her in the face.
You get results over time if you dedicate yourself to just doing the thing. For many subjects there is no shortcut, no way to walk the path without actually walking it. Every time you encounter an issue there is a learning opportunity. Use it.
Something I find myself struggling with is the "tutorial trap"
You follow a tutorial to do something, feel happy about it. Then you start a new project to put your new skills to good use and... Blank. No idea where to start, no idea how to proceed.
It's so important to build stuff, using references is fine, but following tutorials is not the way forward! You have to work on your own without the training wheels.
The great lesson here is: have your own thing you want to make or do, and then select tutorials that help you approach it, step by step. Reproduce the tutorial but also bring it to bear on something you want.
In my experience most people can do this, if they think about it a bit — identify the thing they want to learn and find a tutorial for it. Which is amazing, really; this sort of meta-knowledge is a remarkable human concept.
Tutorials are fine, especially if you know nothing doing the motion is often better than fooling around. Just like with languages there are passive skilla (your capability to understand a certain thing) and active skills (you capability to use a thing practically when the situation demands it). It is natural to understand more than you can apply.
Once you're a little more confident (you know a bit, but not much) I suggest to modify the tutorial as you follow along, that makes the tutorial harder and gives you small challenges to overcome while still giving you general guard rails.
Then as soon as you're dangerous enough to be let loose you should pick your own projects that are slightly above your skill level. Maybe try different approaches if you're unhappy with the first result.
When I wanted to improve my comic drawing skills ca. 2009 I started drawing and publishing a daily webcomic strip for a year. That really helped.
But tutorials remain useful even if you're advanced or a pro. E.g. if you use blender a lot and a new feature comes around watching a tutorial on it is a very efficient way of getting up to speed. Of course you will watch tutorials differently from a beginner, you will pick up on different things etc.
The best way to learn is a serious project with a deadline, but if you have that deadline it will make you wish you had watched some tutorials when you had the time. Source: I teach this kind of stuff at the university level for 6 years now.
why not both. limit yourself to 1 tutorial/book (i prefer books). then build something. For any creative hobby i think the biggest issue is not having something you want to build.
> For any creative hobby i think the biggest issue is not having something you want to build.
For me it is. Even in my domain where I’m an expert and it’s fun, it only is if I’m working on something interesting.
What does wonders for me is to go out into nature, a beach, a lake or a park, or even a longer train ride, with nothing but a pen and notebook, while keeping the phone in my bag. When I return usually I have a few pages of ideas.
Sometimes distraction is the main issue when it comes to having ideas.
My problem is honestly that I have too much I want to build, but I don't have all of the skills I need.
I get stuck into this mentality of "I need to learn and master X, Y and Z before I can even start building my dream"
Would be much better served by just building whatever and learning the skill
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>especially with modern AI agents
Do you people have to mention AI in every single subject.
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I agree with you, AI agents are fantastic for learning.
Can you share how AI helps here?
I am learning a bit of 3D modeling in Blender so I can mod games that I like (just for private use), I do get stuck sometimes on the silliest things and Blender docs don’t help, but neither did LLMs tbf when I tried to troubleshoot issues with them. I wonder how I can make it a bit less tedious.
Curious, what's issues you encounter that LLM or Blender forum can't help? I also still learning Blender though not complex like yours (Product and Architecture), and LLM help me so much, it is save times that I previously will search on forum and YouTube.
I don't think we should expect to short-circuit learning for everything. Fumbling in Blender for hours on end is part of the process and what makes you good at it in the long term, much like grinding exercises in math or physics.
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Why the alt account?
What are some cool random things you've learned?
// you == the reader of this comment
> just find some starting point that doesn’t look like a sales funnel
this adds to the difficulty in getting started; so many times you start down a path, don't make good progress and hit a paywall or realize the path you started on is just marketing for some (not even valuable) learning resource
this is super common with language learning stuff, especially because AI makes it seem so cheap to produce learning content
a couple of decades ago there was viral advice going around about "the 1000 hour rule" saying that's how long it would take to master something new. Maybe it's time to refresh that?
Agreed wholeheartedly!
Struggling with what to learn?
Learn to write! It’s the ultimate meta-skill.
In the future we will just have our agentic assistant learn it for us.
This is an article written by a young person.
Post like this is what keeps me on HN.
Lifelong learning as the ultimate skill
I'm not the world's most productive person in terms of getting any kind of tangible economic benefit from my activities, but I probably am the most dedicated learner I've ever known. I'm sure there are people on the Internet who learn even more, but I'm a sponge for information. Every weekend in the late 80s, I rode my bicycle down to the Norwalk branch of the LA public library, spent the entire day reading, then checked out the maximum number of books they allowed, which was 6 as far as I remember. Every week, another 6 books. Never fiction, not biographies or light reading. I was heavily interested in the SDI or "Star Wars" proposals Reagan had and read about particle beams, lasers, satellite communications, all public information about how missile defense worked. I was nationally ranked at NTN in the early 90s and won a television quiz show when I was 12. I came in 2nd in the California state spelling bee at one point. Got a perfect SAT score. I also came in 3rd in a statewide art competition and won my high school district's annual art show 3 of 4 years I was in high school. I've never had even an ounce of focus and master nothing, but get reasonably good at everything. Lettered in four different sports. Ended up with (so far) 4 bachelor's degrees and 3 master's. I'm the last person I know who still never uses an LLM for anything, in part because I don't feel I need to because I have answers and know how to do what I need to do without assistance, but also because I want that to continue to be the case. I'm willing to struggle and practice and devote more time to learning and less time to sleep or anything else because there is nothing in the world that gratifies me more and strokes my egoistic self-image than always having the answer, not because I'm asking the web but because I actually have the answer in my own mind.
But I never tout this as some kind of way of being everyone needs to or should try to emulate. As I said at the outset, I can't think of any tangible benefit from doing this. I'm exactly the same upper middle-class, white-collar office worker earning a very good but nowhere near "fuck you" level of money exactly the same as all my peers who are mostly more ordinary people doing ordinary things like watching Love Island and whatever else ordinary people do.
This isn't the automatic golden ticket to a good life. I have no social media accounts. I don't even know where my phone is right now and often don't have it with me. I watch no video on it ever. Most of my entertainment comes from listening to music and even then it's active because I usually listen to songs I can sing and sing along while listening. Even then, I'm still practicing and I'm a very good singer. None of this makes me any happier or any better than anyone else. My mental health is not skyrocketing through the roof because I'm unplugged from the 24 hours news cycle and don't feel the scrutiny of my body and lifestyle not matching an Instagram ideal. In fact, I probably do match that. I've managed to lift at least an hour a day far more days in my adult life than not. I still run even in my mid-40s. I can't get a sub-16 minute 5k like I could as a teenager but I'm in shape. I still sometimes hit 80 miles in a week. My BMI hasn't been over 22 and I haven't had double-digit body fat since being bedridden with spine injuries a decade ago. I look like an underwear model for no reason at all because nobody ever sees it and nobody cares.
It doesn't matter. It's compulsion. I doubt myself and hate myself just as much as anyone else does. I can't sleep because I feel like nothing I ever do is enough and the slightest disturbance in sleep jolts me instantly awake with my mind racing anxious over all the things I believe I need to do, all the ways I'm not living up to my own potential. All those degrees? Shitty schools. No PhDs. Good job. Okay, but I've never made 7 figures in a year. Someday I will but that won't be enough, either. Even Michael Jordan was angry more often than happy, alienated every person he ever knew, and spent his hall of fame induction insulting people and being mad rather than celebrating his own accomplishments. The only real ticket is satisfaction, being able to say good enough is good enough. Spending too much time doomscrolling and not enough learning a second language? So what? Give yourself some grace. People who speak 19 languages are no happier or better than you are. Learning a 20th is every bit as compulsive and pointless as you watching TikTok.
I want more content on the Internet, or anywhere else, telling people all the ways and all the reasons they're already good enough, not constantly pointing out any and all shortcomings of the world and their own personal habits.
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Maybe, but unless you are unusually talented I'd advise against it. For every consumer there is a producer and vice versa. Most people are better off as consumers and this give more eyeballs and resources to the few talented producers.
This makes me sad. I am very confident it's also wrong; it fundamentally misapprehends what talent is.
As well as not particularly being innate or "god-given", talents tend to emerge only when supported by learned ability. And not even just your own learned ability. Talented violinists exist only in a world that had talented violin makers: you perhaps cannot fully know how society could benefit from things you could learn.
Two of my mini-talents are things I used to think were not just difficult but actually things I would be specifically bad at, like, worse than most people. (Which may for complex reasons be a sign I would not be)
I believe it also misapprehends where the boundary between practice and consumption can sit, too, but that's a longer comment.
No matter which side of the equation you sit, try to unlearn this belief you have, and help others unlearn it.
Maybe other people, besides you; obviously, like doing, knowing or learning things without the need to be the most efficient at it.
Like, in a just having a life kind of way.
But what do I know?