Jokes aside I'm really into learning science and make youtube videos covering learning and learning papers + an ipad app. I keep a running list of my favorite learn-to-learn resources here:
https://www.ahmni.app/blog/learn-to-learn-resource-list
If I had to recommend only one resource it would be: The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them by Schwartz
Best bit of career advice I ever got, back in the 90s: "Get really good at the help system".
(At the time, it was MSDN DVDs).
If we're lucky, LLMs force people to put more effort into assignments and grading and then that would help kids learn to learn as well.
I'm afraid it might be exactly opposite. Having all the knowledge at hand. all the time will lead to knowledge atrophy. Just like it already happens with ability to travel without navigation.
I hope somebody figures this out but I don't know what the solution looks like.
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-google-ai-scientist-gene...
1. Have the kids learn new things 2. Have the kids reach a desired level of competency
Learning happens where you are at, not where the teacher wants you to be. Every student is at a different place in understanding. It's impossible without 1-on-1 instruction to really maximize learning.
Competency is only determined via testing. Learning doesn't require testing at all, you can just speak to a student to get a good idea if they're making some progress, any progress. Competency? That basically demands a test, because it has a particular bar in mind.
Now students know they need to pass the bar, somehow, but the anxiety of that is going to cause issues with them just trying to learn. This is unfixable though, because the outside pressures demand students have some level of competency otherwise teachers are viewed as failures.
It's amazing what kids can learn if they just spent a little bit of time with a 1-on-1 instructor/advisor. The anxiety you mentioned can be crippling and something I deal with regularly. Even some of the "gifted" kids (perhaps due to the expectations) have trouble avoiding the trap of overindexing on productivity/competency metrics. They're not even self aware of it, just accepts it as normal.
For most kids I have to go through the exercise of separating these two concerns, the learning part and the signaling part, early so they can put things in perspective.
My computer engineering professors also emphasized user centered design. For one of Google's top scientists to bring this up is an admission that they won't, or can't, design a good user experience for their tools.
Same goes for user-centered design. Trying to make something user-friendly is one thing, successfully doing it is another. Large organizations are especially poor at user-friendly design because the underlying structures which support that goal don't exist. Organizational science is still in its infancy.
Everything you see of its character, including emphasizing tests and practice, follows from that. Talking about good UX is miles away.
I mean, we had five years of English classes in high school, and by the end of high school, less than five out of 30 people in my cohort were able to string a couple of sentences together in English. And my class was made up of serious, studious young people. It seems to me that the time was not well spent, but did the teacher, a caring and generally competent person, reflect on the poor results? I highly doubt it.
It always surprises and saddens me that, despite having been an excellent student throughout my years of education, I remember practically nothing about 90% of the subjects I studied.
This has been the case for literally my entire career and I assume most of the professional world for the last half century.
Technology is continually reshaping industries and while many eschew learning and adopting, those who embrace it are the ones who succeed best IME.
I said it already in a reply to GP, but I'm going to say it again: I stopped caring about what people list on their resumes, your work history and education don't matter to me. I'd rather hire a hungry junior that finished a bootcamp, that has a drive and ability to absorb new things and adapt to changing environments, over somebody who's got 10 years of experience and can't do shit outside of their comfort zone.
The number of people who aren't able to learn and adapt to changing times, new tools, new ways of working, etc. is shocking.
I can teach somebody who finished a 6-month coding bootcamp Go, all the internal tooling, go over the business with them, etc. if they have these skills and end up with a productive mid-level engineer who gets shit done in a few years. What I can't teach is the drive and ability to learn, that's a much longer process and if you don't already have it then I'm not prepared to develop it.
Hell, outside of looking for signs of obvious bullshit I stopped giving a shit about resumes. Your work history does me no good, your education doesn't matter to me, and your references are useless beyond making sure you aren't straight up lying to me about your employment history. Every single time I have hired somebody who has 5 years of "experience" working with technologies I bullet pointed on a JD they ended up fumbling the moment they had to do something new. Doing leetcode, pair programming sessions, take-home assignments, whiteboarding system designs, etc. for SWE positions did nothing to really improve this; for SRE/DevOps roles I tried trivia questions (how are containers implemented - like what kernel technologies do they use and what do they do, how would you go about investigating why a service is consuming 100% CPU time), throwing them at broken VM's and more take-home assignments.
AI tools only make this skillset more important - I can throw Junie, Claude Code, or Copilot and small task and end up with...an implementation. But they still fuck up, constantly, and yet again, anything that's not already been done, regularly, requires a lot of guidance from an engineer in the loop. And with the god damned death of the web thanks to AI slop being posted anywhere, the ability to find answers and reason through problems is only going to become more important when these tools fail miserably for the third time in a row.
While we understand the importance of warming up for physical activity and recognize the need for a certain aptitude for running, weightlifting, or boxing, when it comes to more intellectual activities, we often leave things to chance: sometimes we are more alert and receptive, while at other times we are less so.
Over the years, I have found enormous benefit in practicing autogenic training, a more Western and scientific version of meditative practices that today seem to arouse the interest of those who deal with these things. I am mentally more alert, more receptive, and learning, which is always challenging, is faster.
Do you have any tips for learning more and getting started? I have searched a bit, but always appreciate anecdotes of those that have found success enough to speak about it.
Originally, it had to be taught by MDs, according to Dr. Schultz--the inventor of the method--and his followers, but that ship has long sailed.
It is fairly easy to find a copy of Karl Rosa's book “Autogenic Training”, a good starting point, and Luthe's in-depth multi-volume analysis of autogenic training, though I would only recommend the latter to the most avid enthusiasts.
In other words, until one learns how to hammer a nail, it's unreasonable to assume knowledge of how to tell another to do so. AI is no exception. It's speed-running US society's final threads being severed, and okay, sigh, here we go. No, I'm not interested in fixing the problems he's identifying.
My ex had a saying from bench science..."if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitant." That part. Off to go live in a van down by the river...
Trust me if google can do something anyone can. They are trying to "define" what "they" "want" from a "compliant workforce"
People who do stuff will make money
** "in my opinion" is always implied, unless a source is given **
Reading about airline crashes has radically changed how I view blame.
The way I was raised and the choices I made as an adult have given me a relatively rare point of view: people are made of humans, and humans are made of animals, and animals have limited capabilities.
I can explain someone's actions, or I can excuse someone's actions, and the difference is largely in the mind of the beholder.
Social punishment is micro and macro. On the macro it looks like shared morality and it feels like safety. On the micro it looks like emotional invalidation and it feels like danger and isolation.
Future internet road maps be like:
Join the Generalist bootcamp, it includes big picture of the world and everything, anything you ever need. Full access subscriptions at $1000.
You will Learn the following things:
Analytic philosophy, Mathematical logic, Pure and applied math, Physics, CS, Systems thinking, Engineering(Mech + electronics), creative problem solving And finally one art subject
Beginer Projects: Wafer stage design. Model nano tech projects. Small nuclear fusion reactors. Portable TEM machine.
Pre-req: Just enough maturity. You should be curious, persistence & hardworking. We assume you will practise problem solving till you die.
Outcomes of the bootcamp: Job guaranteed at fortune 500.
Testimonials: We have so many happy customers working for companies having trillion dollar values.
-- from "The Humanity of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
”Learning how to learn” sounds vaguely insightful just because of the repetition, but if you think for a bit about what it actually means it falls apart.
Simply showing a learner a few slides on spaced retrieval will not cut it.
lemonberry•2h ago