You can’t determine what the most effective ways of learning are by sitting and thinking. What does the empirical evidence say?
Those “100x programmers”: if you try to identify some and look at their history, are they distinguished by having learned things in an unusual order? By being extraordinarily clever? By working very hard? By starting very young?
When you have acquired a skill and become demonstrably good at it (I mean: there is actual external evidence, agreed by others, that you’re better than most), has it generally been as a result of carefully ordered theoretical learning or has there been an important element of practice?
Are you sure you aren’t setting up a false dichotomy, between just diving into a project and carefully ordered theoretical learning? You do mention the possibility of combining the two but jump immediately (with no evidence or argument I can see) to the assertion that the projects should be tightly-focused ones in the service of a carefully designed formal curriculum.
It seems to me—but this too is based on sitting and thinking rather than on much empirical evidence—that we should expect “doing” to be very important in learning. Your brain is a network of neurons, and everything we know about the artificial neural networks we’ve studied suggests that the way to teach them to do a thing involves having them do that thing repeatedly and adjusting to make them do it better. (Obvious but important caveat: real neurons do not behave the exact same way as the ones in ANNs; real brains are wired in much more complicated ways than our ANNs; there is no guarantee that what’s true of one is true of the other; the above is intended more as intuition pump than as formal argument.) No one would expect to be able to learn (say) to play the trumpet well just by reading books; I don’t see why anyone should expect to be able to learn to write parsers or prove theorems in enumerative combinatorics or find effective trading strategies or design amplifiers whose output sounds good, just by reading books. (Or attending lectures, or anything else that doesn’t involve a lot of “doing”.)
And that isn’t because of gaps in the dependency tree; it’s because “doing” is a very different activity from explicit “learning” and brings about different kinds of changes in the brain, and you need those changes as well as the ones brought about by explicit “learning” if you want to get good at things. (The way it feels from the inside, to me, is: Formal learning can enable you to do a thing by consciously working out the steps, but it’s a much less effective way of building “intuition” and “taste” and “fluency” than actual practice; and if you want to be really good at something, you need those.)
You can’t determine what the most effective ways of learning are by sitting and thinking. What does the empirical evidence say?
Those “100x programmers”: if you try to identify some and look at their history, are they distinguished by having learned things in an unusual order? By being extraordinarily clever? By working very hard? By starting very young?
When you have acquired a skill and become demonstrably good at it (I mean: there is actual external evidence, agreed by others, that you’re better than most), has it generally been as a result of carefully ordered theoretical learning or has there been an important element of practice?
Are you sure you aren’t setting up a false dichotomy, between just diving into a project and carefully ordered theoretical learning? You do mention the possibility of combining the two but jump immediately (with no evidence or argument I can see) to the assertion that the projects should be tightly-focused ones in the service of a carefully designed formal curriculum.
It seems to me—but this too is based on sitting and thinking rather than on much empirical evidence—that we should expect “doing” to be very important in learning. Your brain is a network of neurons, and everything we know about the artificial neural networks we’ve studied suggests that the way to teach them to do a thing involves having them do that thing repeatedly and adjusting to make them do it better. (Obvious but important caveat: real neurons do not behave the exact same way as the ones in ANNs; real brains are wired in much more complicated ways than our ANNs; there is no guarantee that what’s true of one is true of the other; the above is intended more as intuition pump than as formal argument.) No one would expect to be able to learn (say) to play the trumpet well just by reading books; I don’t see why anyone should expect to be able to learn to write parsers or prove theorems in enumerative combinatorics or find effective trading strategies or design amplifiers whose output sounds good, just by reading books. (Or attending lectures, or anything else that doesn’t involve a lot of “doing”.)
And that isn’t because of gaps in the dependency tree; it’s because “doing” is a very different activity from explicit “learning” and brings about different kinds of changes in the brain, and you need those changes as well as the ones brought about by explicit “learning” if you want to get good at things. (The way it feels from the inside, to me, is: Formal learning can enable you to do a thing by consciously working out the steps, but it’s a much less effective way of building “intuition” and “taste” and “fluency” than actual practice; and if you want to be really good at something, you need those.)