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Learning is an exercise in creating space in your mind to represent a new map of interrelated symbols. When you start something new, all the symbols are "too close together" and it takes time and repetition to increase the "resolution" on that map so that you can put the symbols into position with more precision and not have them confused with one another. You don't yet have a good intuition for the significance of each symbol and it won't come from being told, because sources have biases - frequency over time and space is a much stronger signal. It's the same with connections between symbols. Doing, rather than just reading, is important; you need to try and find that Goldilocks zone of growth, where if things are easier you're not learning but if they're harder you lose hope. Try something just beyond what you know how to do, page in new information on demand when you get stuck (from docs, people, source code, whatever it is). Writing notes helps me personally creating the space for symbols and reminding myself of what I already heard about but I don't know that it's necessary for everyone, and I especially think I've found it more useful as I've gotten older (and know more stuff already). Sometimes when I learn something "new", I pin it close to a concept I already know, which dulls its novelty and I'm probably more inclined to forget it, until I'm reminded of it again. And this is down to that "creating mental space" idea again. Repetition increases symbol salience, particularly when you're surprised by the divergence between what you thought something meant and what it actually means. The risk of simply reading, and not doing, is that you're not surprised often enough. Doing stuff keeps you honest. |
That might be how you learn, which is a good thing to know, but the presentation of your personal understanding of yourself come off like “this is the way for all”, which gives me the yucks.
For me I need to re-formulate things in my own words (or my own code) until I understand which parts of a system I have blind spots on, then dig into those, then rinse and repeat.
If I can express it in simple language in a way that hangs together, and go into detail about complicated parts of the system, I’m getting somewhere.
The downside of learning a system of human invention fundamentally is that one invariably comes to understand that it is a Rube Goldberg machine that some yahoos figured out how to sell.