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
In practice, the problem you run into, even with intrinsically motivated learners, is that they will not use the active learning techniques they are studying. Often times they will revert back to rote memorization, highlighting, re-reading, copying notes, cramming, etc rather than use the things they are learning about learning to learn the subject of learning itself.
I think you have to start with:
1) Teaching learning in the first place. No one teaches learning how to learn, so we should just start there. We already have captive audiences in the form of schools, we just put the cart before the horse and teach subjects and hope the skill of learning emerges. This is poor pedagogy.
2) Work with the students and ensure that they are actually using the learning techniques they are being taught on the subject of learning itself. This is the only way I've seen it work.
If you try to learn how to learn using passive learning techniques, you won't learn the subject of learning, which is what I think OP was referring to. People who do not know how to learn use passive learning techniques which results in rapid forgetting. They have to use the active learning techniques they are learning on the subject of learning itself.
Obviously, first you need to learn how to learn how to learn. I believe that this will be the most important skill in the future. Once you have mastered it, you can easily learn how to learn. And then you are ready to learn.
It's incredible how many people try to learn how to learn these days, without spending some time learning how to learn how to learn first. Our education is failing.
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.
There's also the fact that kids are being taught the very basics, the sorts of things increasingly intelligent models are most likely to be able to solve first. I don't think there's any level of effort that can be put into designing assignments to get around this.
Similar to how teachers haven't really been able to do anything to stop kids from sticking their algebra problems into wolframalpha or other tools besides just making them do the work in class (which then cuts into teaching time).
Beyond a certain point, all that can be done is for teachers to try to instill the importance of practice into students, and for parents to be more proactive in monitoring how their kid is doing their homework.
Maybe we'll see an increase in after-school classes for kids to do homework in, under teacher supervision.
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.
Here are some book-length reviews of currently known things about learning/teaching that I found to have a very high signal-to-noise ratio:
https://www.routledge.com/How-Learning-Happens-Seminal-Works...
https://www.routledge.com/How-Teaching-Happens-Seminal-Works...
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.
The fact that, outside of the expected exceptions, a skill/subject/section is never brought up after the test means that teachers are not thinking at all about retrieval practice. There is a time for understanding and justifications, and a time for saying things as they are.
Then, my personal experience and that of my friends, who all attended mid- to high-ranking schools outside the United States, is that regardless of class size and teacher workload, teachers never seemed to know how to teach effectively and efficiently.
> successfully doing it is another
Almost everyone treats any metric as they would a ruler or tape measure. Even your standard ruler is not as good of a measuring device as you probably think! But this becomes a huge mess when we start talking about any measurement of statistics or some other abstraction. People treat metrics and algorithms as black boxes, rather than tools. Tools still require craftsmen, who understands: when they work, when they don't work, when they can be used in a pickle, what can be substituted in a pickle, their limits, what new problems they create, and so on. It is incredible how much complexity there is to things that appear so simple. But then again, that's why you get things like an engineering manual on o-rings that is over a thousand pages. And even those aren't comprehensive.
I'm not suggesting we all need to be "master craftsmen", but I actually think we would all do better if we recognized that everything has more depth than might appear. If only to give people a moment of pause to question if they are actually doing things the right way. There's always a better way. The real trick is learning what's good enough and you'll never know what is good enough when everything is simple.
[0] The exception tends to be those that need to work with high precision, since with these jobs you tend to be forced to deal with this in an explicit manner. So more common among people like machinists or experimental physicists. Though sometimes this ends up worse as they can end up operating on vibes. I think it happens when intuitions are successful for too long and not enough meta-analysis is done to update them.
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 did not find it to be true almost at all, and I tested many other people on it. When I voiced my concerns, the usual answer was, "Yes, but when you pick up a book, you will remember". And then I asked, "Try it", and the subsequent answer was, "I have to admit you are right".
The "re-absorption speed" is heavily confounded by general IQ and the kind of cognitive stimulation one receives in daily life, but the original learnings are mostly gone. Among other things, this is why retrieval practice is important: it slows down the "forgetting rate".
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.
The issue with "learning to learn" is that it does not include the foundational skill of "how to communicate". Far too often it is not a lack of desire to learn, it is the inability to communicate what one is trying to learn. When seeking help, not only does the seeker have difficulty expressing their situation, those trying to help are not taught how to listen and will offer solutions to an issue only starting to be explained. This difficulty is then compounded by self conversation bias that negatively spins against the person seeking. That is two very high hurdles: negative self bias, and inarticulate communications while seeking guidance.
> that they won't, or can't, design a good user experience for their tools.
It's pretty hard to do this design but I think anyone who's played these games will both admit it is frustrating but rewarding. I think that's true for any learning. The advantage with a videogame is you can provide nearly immediate feedback as well as design feedback delays. I'm highly educated in both math and CS and I think that's actually one of the key differences. When programming there's quick feedback loops. Your program runs or doesn't[1]. Whereas in math you finish a proof and aren't even sure if it is right or not. This does end up teaching different and useful skills, but it sure does create a higher barrier to entry (barrier isn't intelligence, it is persistence).
I think my main concern today (having taught hundreds of college students over the last 5 years) is a lowering in this resilience. I mean I feel it in myself too. We've definitely generated a world where we have quick feedback mechanisms, yet this is impossible to create in more advanced education. It can take weeks, months, or even years to see the real fruits of your labors. I found that in classes where we had autograders or provided students with test cases[2] that often these ended up hurting the students more than helping. They became over-reliant on them, outsourcing their thinking to what we were providing as aids. I watched ChatGPT come out during this time and was not surprised that this only furthered the problem. I was only a grad student, so most classes I did not have good control and sometimes not much of a say, but if I were to do it again I'd try to push the aids out more slowly[3]. The most common problem was that students wrote to the test, not to the requirements. It's actually not a uncommon outside school, and I see a lot of people do quite similar things in industry. Thinking that passing tests is sufficient. But writing to tests will only result in you being as complete as the tests. It's a failed paradigm, you'll never have full coverage.[4]
There's definitely other problems with the education system and I don't want to dismiss them. There's no cureall, but I think this might be something most people might want to think about. Despite saying these words, they are still something I need to reinforce. Good habits are hard to maintain and it is only becoming easier to unknowingly slip into bad ones.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0esIfiOGFA
[1] Well there's the secret third option which is the most common: it runs, but doesn't run like you think it runs.
[2] We always stated that these were incomplete, that they should write additional ones. There probably wasn't a single office hour I held where I hadn't mentioned that one can never have complete coverage through tests.
[3] I don't know the full answer but here's something I would try. We had autograders and allowed students to submit as many times as they wanted. I'd keep these, but re-implement to have an exponential backoff (until say 2hrs before the assignment was due. I honestly never marked anyone late unless it hadn't been submitted by noon the next day). After a few failed submissions, pass them a subset of test cases. Then repeat. This definitely puts a lot more work on our end as the educator, but it would put students into a position where they need think about the problem first. That's a critical self-learning strategy. The struggle is necessary for success. Too often people just want to jump to the end, assuming a well defined answer already exists. They'll find something that looks appropriate, implement it, and declare success while missing the devil hiding in the details. Too early of feedback only reinforces that strategy.
[4] I'm certain someone will read this believing I am suggesting no tests. I assure you, if this was your interpretation then your interpretation is wrong. Trust me, it is my thoughts I'm trying to convey.
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.
Unfortunately it's hard to trust our feelings on this. There is a lot of literature that demonstrates an inverse relationship between how well we felt we learned and how well we actually learned.
> mental preparation for learning
This is actually really big in the learning literature. It's not meditation, though, it's priming through pretesting and prior knowledge activation. These types of "warm ups" have outsized effects on retention and understanding.
As for the first part, yes, we sometimes get caught up in, like, the illusion of fluency, but you can also check how much you've learned, and we all get that there are differences between days within subject.
I have practiced decent-to-highish-level sports all my life (soccer, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, tennis and others), and now I am learning a new one (ping-pong), partly because I want to test some theories about learning, and there are days when you learn better—-you are better. We all know that.
Apart from the vagaries of life, it is my experience and belief that the way you approach a challenge plays a significant role in the quality of the experience.
As for the second part, yes. But you can see this in sports too, and I find it bizarre that cognitive abilities are treated differently from motor skills, given that repetition, climbing up the skill tree, and retrieval practice should be common learning methods. Even top player retrieve and refine continuously basic motor skills.
My approach to the issue was broader and more related to self-confidence, the perspective of having opportunities and potential, and relaxation, all aspects that can be greatly improved by the systematic practice of autogenic training. Now, the ‘funny’ part is that we all know the above (no one has ever said, ‘be as tense as possible and you will learn more’), but it is something we say and think much more than we do.
Let me present a silly example. I like cooking, and when discussing it, some say, "I am not good at cooking" or "I am terrible at cooking", which is, of course, an issue of attitude. There are recipes everywhere, millions of video showing people cooking, there is nothing to invent for the home cook. What I say is, "You won't become the next Ferran Adriá or Massimo Bottura, but I am sure you can cook something delicious, if you just follow the recipe."
How many of us say things like, “I'm not good at ironing, I'll never learn how to do it.” Of course, you can learn. You may not become as good as my grandmother with shirts (according to family lore, she was by far the best), but it's certainly not impossible to learn to do a decent job. Some might say it's laziness, but you can acquire the right attitude through systematic practice.
The same applies to languages: since I speak several languages, people ask me for tips and tricks. After observing dozens of people who have gone through this experience, I can say that there is a wide variance in aptitude, but a positive, winning, and proactive attitude makes a huge difference in the outcome. However, you need to build and reinforce it through systematic training.
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"
That said, teachers can make all the difference in connecting with students to guide them into discovery vs. cramming facts into their heads to satisfy testing metrics.
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
https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2024/04/05/profession-b...
Reading again as I've become older I can see Asimov's call to fix education in the US and how much he resented the growing anti-scientific movements. As a child I thought it would be cool to belong to this elite group of "tape makers" (people who create knowledge)[0]. But as an adult I realized the naivety and grotesqueness of a society constructed in such a way. It is inhumane because it turns man into machine, with only a few being allowed to even be given the chance to explore the world around them.
It's a really good read. I highly recommend. It's old Sci-Fi, so can be rough, but I feel it has aged well. It's under 50 pages, so easy to finish in a single sitting. It's in Asimov's "The Complete Stories Vol I" if you find a copy, but you can find it online or I believe it is also in "The Asimov Chronicles". It's also HN, so I hope everyone knows ways to get those...
Btw, the Wiki[1] has spoilers. Do not read the paragraph starting with "Suddenly a stranger appears" nor the one that follows. Here's a short non-spoiler version instead: In the 66th century, school doesn't exist and instead people are educated through a direct download into their brain. They learn to read at 8 and are fully educated at 18, allowing them to live their lives as children do. Our protagonist, George, differs than his peers, being a nerd and using his new found ability to read to read whatever he can get his hands on. At 18, children are fully educated, tested, and then assigned careers by their aptitudes. George stands out, his test results suggest he is mentally challenged, is not given a designated career, and thus is not allowed to be further educated. Not being fit for any career or education, they commit him to psychiatric ward where he'll live out the rest of his days.
[0] In some sense I still do. I have a deep passion for research and my dream job would be somebody giving me money to just explore my ideas. Probably not too far off from what people imagine a tenured professor does, though that's quite different from what one actually does.
Those two are more about humility and imperialism than learning, though.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33854
[1] https://content.cosmos.art/media/pages/library/hard-to-be-a-...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
> “Not infinite. Architects. Teachers. Teachers of teachers, but the art of teaching teaching is much the same as the art of teaching. Three levels is enough. Though the levels have to mix. The teacher who trains the next architect must be a master both of teaching and of architecture. I will spare you the math, but one needs a series of teachers at different points on the teaching-skill/architecture-skill tradeoff-curve. One will be a master teacher who has devoted decades to learning the textbook-writing skill, and who can write a brilliant Introduction To Architecture textbook that makes the first ten years of architecture ability seem perfectly natural and easy to master. Another will be a mediocre teacher who knows enough advanced architecture to write a passable textbook on the subject. Still another will do nothing but study pure Teaching itself, in the hopes that he can one day pass on this knowledge to others who will use it to write architecture textbooks.
”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.
https://www.justinmath.com/books/ (scroll for the second one)
He is a math guy, who worked in Wall Street and then left and now works on math academy buidling models to improve learning.
It's great, well researched and practical book. However, it's not easy at all. Go check it out. It's free and he has published google docs version.
0 https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/17qFY5w9uEWL4VVyJSTEm...
File > Download > epub
It really is about teaching you how to solve arbitrary problems. It teaches how to think. You can read pages xvi and xvii (in [0]) which will give you a good sense at what the book teaches. Half the first chapter is available too (this is an easy book to find online).
It's also technically a math book, but treating it as a standard math book is missing the point (honestly, missing the point of math altogether). It is really about how to solve problems, which that's what math is about. Math is really a collection of logics (plurality intended) that can be used to solve problems. Thing is, this is usually done in the abstract as mathematicians are usually interested in solving the general form of a problem. (The other part being that math is a high precision language, which is another thing it shares with programming languages). People might be scared off by the math notation in it, but I'd wager that anyone who can write anything more complicated than a hello world program is smart enough to make it through this book[1].
You do not need to be a mathematician to benefit from it, nor need to know much math at all. I'll make the strong claim that every single programmer, and anyone doing anything related to STE(A)M will benefit. If the "A" is surprising, I think you'll understand after reading a bit.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Mathematical-Princeton-Scie...
[1] Variables in math are no different than in programming. The main difference is math is terse because it's typically hand written. I'd add that programming also has types but most people are writing with languages that do duck typing.
He also has an amazing lecture series on YouTube from the naval institute up in Monterey based off this book
They are very good, just not that down to earth for regular people.
Looking forward to checking out what you provided.
But it'll be totally different in the next generation. Trust me, bro, I'm rich - so I must know what I'm talking about.
You don't go to college to get a job
You don't go to college to get a degree
You don't go to college to learn things
You go to college to LEARN HOW TO LEARN
If you do that, all the other things will come to you.
If you get out of college and have not learned how to learn, your "degree" is toilet paper.
From my personal experience and from my observations of others, the limiting factor to learning is the availability of mental energy to persevere/endure in the learning process.
You have a problem. Either an academic homework problem or a real-world problem of some sort (think error message in the console). You try one thing but it doesn't work... then another, and still you're not making progress. You're starting to realize solving this problem is not obvious and will require some "brain sweat" and you have to make a choice whether to invest the hour (or day!) of your time to learn enough to solve your problem.
Learners willingness to persevere in their efforts to solve the problem depends on lots of factors, but most importantly they are conditional on the level of learners' interest/motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic). Ideally, learners will be motivated purely by the "knowledge buzz" of learning new concepts and seeing the connections between them, but any source of motivation is OK: as long as it pushes/pulls you enough to go through the necessary learning and solve the problem.
I recognize that learning to learn is a useful multiplier, but learners need to have base rate of (1) intellectual stamina (brain muscles?) and (2) interest/motivation to push through. Otherwise learning is not going to be happening.
lemonberry•4mo ago