This resonates with something I’ve been thinking about lately. Despite getting high grades, graduating highschool with an IB diploma, and going most of the way through a PhD, I was actually kind of bad at school in several ways, and one of those was that I was trying to actually learn the stuff I studied. Like a fool, you might say, I failed to realize school was a system to be gamed and tried to actually learn everything I was asked to learn for real. This was exhausting, and I dropped out of the PhD because of burnout over this as much as any other reason, having finally crossed the threshold where my intelligence couldn’t beat the system without gaming it.
I find learning outside school quite different. Mostly memorizing things doesn’t matter and curiosity and ability to do things matter way more. Remembering stuff helps you be fast, but natural spaced repetition of stuff you actually use often works well enough. It’s a lot more fun and I’m better at it.
Post forthcoming, but here’s the teaser. School combines game-able systems and authentic career building. Distinguishing the two is the killer skill. To build a career, you’re making yourself into an interface with your profession. A law student is making themselves into a useful and convenient interface with the legal system for their clients. An engineer is making themselves into a useful and convenient interface with computers, chemicals, and robotics for theirs.
To efficiently build your career, you’d ask, when encountering a set of facts/skills in school, “would memorizing/practicing these facts/skills be the best way to make me a better interface with my intended profession?”
My biochem class is on photosynthesis this week. My intended path is biomedical engineering. Will the facts in my photosynthesis chapter likely be of use in helping me understand research on tissue engineering or gene therapy? Unlikely, so I can do the minimum in this unit. By contrast, we did a unit on transcription and translation in molecular biology six months ago that I think I could benefit greatly from by memorizing it in detail.
Similarly, it’s probably generally more valuable to read just the abstracts and commit the 3 most important factoids to memory via flashcards, just so that you know the paper exists and what it’s about. If the ideas turn out to be relevant later, you have a handy memory reference to it. If not, you only wasted time on the abstract and maybe a total of 5-10 minutes on flashcards.
This resonates with something I’ve been thinking about lately. Despite getting high grades, graduating highschool with an IB diploma, and going most of the way through a PhD, I was actually kind of bad at school in several ways, and one of those was that I was trying to actually learn the stuff I studied. Like a fool, you might say, I failed to realize school was a system to be gamed and tried to actually learn everything I was asked to learn for real. This was exhausting, and I dropped out of the PhD because of burnout over this as much as any other reason, having finally crossed the threshold where my intelligence couldn’t beat the system without gaming it.
I find learning outside school quite different. Mostly memorizing things doesn’t matter and curiosity and ability to do things matter way more. Remembering stuff helps you be fast, but natural spaced repetition of stuff you actually use often works well enough. It’s a lot more fun and I’m better at it.
Post forthcoming, but here’s the teaser. School combines game-able systems and authentic career building. Distinguishing the two is the killer skill. To build a career, you’re making yourself into an interface with your profession. A law student is making themselves into a useful and convenient interface with the legal system for their clients. An engineer is making themselves into a useful and convenient interface with computers, chemicals, and robotics for theirs.
To efficiently build your career, you’d ask, when encountering a set of facts/skills in school, “would memorizing/practicing these facts/skills be the best way to make me a better interface with my intended profession?”
My biochem class is on photosynthesis this week. My intended path is biomedical engineering. Will the facts in my photosynthesis chapter likely be of use in helping me understand research on tissue engineering or gene therapy? Unlikely, so I can do the minimum in this unit. By contrast, we did a unit on transcription and translation in molecular biology six months ago that I think I could benefit greatly from by memorizing it in detail.
Similarly, it’s probably generally more valuable to read just the abstracts and commit the 3 most important factoids to memory via flashcards, just so that you know the paper exists and what it’s about. If the ideas turn out to be relevant later, you have a handy memory reference to it. If not, you only wasted time on the abstract and maybe a total of 5-10 minutes on flashcards.