Compared to any “anti-akrasia technique” ever proposed on LW or adjacent self-help blogs, joining a class works ridiculously well. You don’t need constant willpower: just show up on time and you’ll be carried along.
Hahahaha, this is so funny. You’ve never attended a seriously challenging class your entire life, I take it? There are a lot of topics/subjects that there’s no feasible way to learn successfully, other than banging your head against them over and over until they finally sink in. This is painful in a quite literal way, and doing it with any real consistency calls for willpower and anti-akrasia techniques.
And yes, joining a class may even be suboptimal compared to just learning some thing like that on your own. A class is one-size-fits-all; they’ll fully expect you to ‘grok’ something on the first try, and then just move on to some other thing. If your willpower is strong enough to keep up with that pace you can do fine, otherwise you’ll just get left in the dust. This is hardly a solution to willpower problems!
Hahahaha, this is so funny. You’ve never attended a seriously challenging class your entire life, I take it?
Got my masters in math with honors somehow...
That said, I believe that moderate effort leads to fastest learning, and nothing is inherently hard to learn but lots of things are poorly taught. In fields with a strong genius myth, like math or physics, that turns into a macho attitude which stops people from even trying to teach well. Other fields got over it, for example a Betty Edwards style drawing class leads to almost guaranteed improvement for amateurs at any age and doesn’t take much effort at all. Similar with language classes, sports, etc. One thing these areas have in common is that they took the time to develop mental cues that work for most people, instead of saying “here’s the material, now bang your head on it”. Willpower is basically a poor substitute for pedagogy.
Hahahaha, this is so funny. You’ve never attended a seriously challenging class your entire life, I take it? There are a lot of topics/subjects that there’s no feasible way to learn successfully, other than banging your head against them over and over until they finally sink in. This is painful in a quite literal way, and doing it with any real consistency calls for willpower and anti-akrasia techniques.
And yes, joining a class may even be suboptimal compared to just learning some thing like that on your own. A class is one-size-fits-all; they’ll fully expect you to ‘grok’ something on the first try, and then just move on to some other thing. If your willpower is strong enough to keep up with that pace you can do fine, otherwise you’ll just get left in the dust. This is hardly a solution to willpower problems!
Got my masters in math with honors somehow...
That said, I believe that moderate effort leads to fastest learning, and nothing is inherently hard to learn but lots of things are poorly taught. In fields with a strong genius myth, like math or physics, that turns into a macho attitude which stops people from even trying to teach well. Other fields got over it, for example a Betty Edwards style drawing class leads to almost guaranteed improvement for amateurs at any age and doesn’t take much effort at all. Similar with language classes, sports, etc. One thing these areas have in common is that they took the time to develop mental cues that work for most people, instead of saying “here’s the material, now bang your head on it”. Willpower is basically a poor substitute for pedagogy.