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August 19 - August 27, 2023
After a month, de Montebello won his area competition, beating out a competitor with two decades of experience in Toastmasters. He won his district and division competitions, too. Finally, less than seven months after he first tried his hand at public speaking, he was going to compete in the World Championships. “There are about thirty thousand people who compete every year,” he noted, adding “I’m pretty confident I’m the fastest competitor in history to make it this far, since if I had started ten days later, I couldn’t have competed.” He made it into the top ten.
Yeah...now tell me about the other 11 or so who presumably *didn't* benefit from luck and social connections
Soon they had landed their first client, to the tune of twenty thousand dollars. Gendler and de Montebello weren’t mercenary; they wanted to focus only on speakers whose message they really believed in.
Uh huh. Of course they did. And no one who couldn't pay an entire year's salary had anything of worth to say, obviously. It's not as if people who have 20 fucking grand to spare are highly correlated with people who have *already* learnt to sell their ideas or anything
Of the other dozen or so people I spent some time coaching into ultralearning, none offered so dramatic an example. Some dropped out. Life got in the way (or perhaps revealed that they weren’t actually as committed as they had initially appeared to be).
Blaming lack of committment rather than unreasonable demands and infringements on work-life balance is so fucking typical of capitalist snake oil salesmen
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Others had respectable successes, making significant improvements in learning medicine, statistics, comic book drawing, military history, and yoga, even if they didn’t reach de Montebello’s degree of success.
You listed 5 things there. Even being kind and presuming there were a couple more who experienced minimal benefit rather than dropping out, that's still a failure rate approaching 50%. If I proposed a theory based on those stats even as an undergrad, my professors would've laughed me out of their offices
Even those who didn’t have such dramatic results among the small group I spent time coaching, those who stuck with their project still ended up learning a new skill they cared about. You may not compete in world championships or completely switch careers, but as long as you stick with the process, you’re bound to learn something new.
The same could be said of a housewife who spends 10 minutes a day sketching in the school pickup queue. You dont have to apply this bullshit to improve at anything
What de Montebello’s example encapsulated for me was not only that you can become an ultralearner but that such successes are far from being the inevitable consequences of having a particular kind of genius or talent.
Obviously. Plenty of geniuses working as janitors and shop clerks. What set him apart was luck and connections
The principles of ultralearning are going to be the focus of the second part of this book.
They should've been the whole book. This is a ridiculous slog
How can Everett start speaking a new language from scratch, without teachers or translations or even knowing what language he’s learning, in half an hour, when most of us struggle to do the same after years of high school Spanish classes? What enables Everett to pick up vocabulary, decode grammar, and pronunciation so much faster than you or I, even with all those additional constraints? Is he a linguistic genius, or is there something else going on?
1: To say he's learnt Hmong is questionable. He's begun to analyse it, that's a different skill
2: He's quite obviously a linguist, idiot. This is not an unusual method for linguistic study
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Over the last thirty years he has become one of only a handful of outsiders to become fluent in Pirahã, one of the most unusual and difficult languages on the planet, spoken only by a remote tribe in the Amazon jungle.3
Something tells me theres more to it than this
I find it useful to break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?,” “What?,” and “How?” “Why?” refers to understanding your motivation to learn. If you know exactly why you want to learn a skill or subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most to you. “What?” refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful. Breaking things down into concepts, facts, and procedures can enable you to map out what obstacles you’ll face and how best to overcome them. “How?” refers to
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This is the first useful thing you've said so far
Once you’ve gotten a handle on why you’re learning, you can start looking at how the knowledge in your subject is structured. A good way to do this is to write down on a sheet of paper three columns with the headings “Concepts,” “Facts,” and “Procedures.” Then brainstorm all the things you’ll need to learn. It doesn’t matter if the list is perfectly complete or accurate at this stage. You can always revise it later. Your goal here is to get a rough first pass. Once you start learning, you can adjust the list if you discover that your categories aren’t quite right.
I suspect this method won't work very well for arts, but it's not a bad start
However, I learnt by habit to leave a subject and resume it again at once, like putting a mark into a book I might be reading.”
Yeah...I put a book down and have to spend a bit sorting out where I was when I pick it up again
The mathematician Paul Erdős was a heavy user of amphetamines to increase his capacity for focus. When a friend bet him that he could not give them up, even for a short time, he did manage to do so. Later, however, he complained that the only result had been that mathematics as a whole was set back a month in his unfocused absence.
Is this really the example you want to give?
Which brings me to the first step to overcoming procrastination: recognize when you are procrastinating.
No shit Sherlock
Much procrastination is unconscious. You’re procrastinating, but you don’t internalize it that way. Instead you’re “taking a much-needed break” or “having fun, because life can’t always be about work all the time.”
Ok yknow what fuck you
In some cases, the moment of frustration may not come at the beginning, but still be predictable. When I was learning Chinese characters through flash cards, for instance, I’d always feel an urge to give up whenever I couldn’t remember the answer to one of my cards. I knew this feeling was temporary, however, so I added a rule for myself: I can only quit when I’ve remembered the most recent card correctly.
You literally wanted to give up at the most useful point for long term memory
solving highly idealized problems that you’ll never see again after graduation.
Those idealised problems are used because if you gave an undergrad the kinds of problems professionals with two more degrees, a post-doc, and 10 years of experience have to solve they'd die
“We expect that there will be transfer of learning, for example, from a high school course in introductory psychology to a college-level introduction to psychology course. It has been known for years, however, that students who enter college having taken a high school psychology course do no better than students who didn’t take psychology in high school. Some students who have taken a psychology course in high school do even worse in the college course.”
Has it occured to you that this has more to do with teenagers being immature than it does with education
“students who receive honors grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.”
This one I'll grant because I am that student XD Requiring physics was a cruel joke on my school's part and I did not care one tiny bit about actually learning it
The overkill approach is to put yourself into an environment where the demands are going to be extremely high, so you’re unlikely to miss any important lessons or feedback.
Again: would rather shoot myself
Deciding in advance that your work will be viewable publicly alters your approach to learning and will gear you toward performance in the desired domain, rather than just checking off boxes of facts learned.
Actually, it just stresses me outand makes me decide I don't want to do the thing anymore
Before writing his letter to Hardy, which changed the course of mathematical history, Ramanujan was a poor, pudgy south Indian boy with a special love of equations. More than anything else, he loved math. In fact, his love of math often got him into difficulties. His unwillingness to study other subjects flunked him out of university. Equations were all he cared about. In his spare time and during stretches of unemployment, he would sit for hours on the bench in front of his family home, slate in hand, playing with formulas. Sometimes he would stay up so late that his mother would need to put
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So...he was neurodivergent then
If retrieval practice—trying to recall facts and concepts from memory—is so much better for learning, why don’t students realize it? Why do many prefer to stick to concept mapping or the even less effective passive review, when simply closing the book and trying to recall as much as possible would help them so much more?
Maybe most idiot business students, but most STEM, language, and linguistics students know testing is more effective. They just don't have time to apply that when there's another exam every two weeks. There's barely enough time to read the books
Minutes after studying something using a strategy of passive review, students perform better than they would if they had practiced retrieval.3 The feeling that you’re learning more when you’re reading rather than trying to recall with a closed book isn’t inaccurate. The problem comes after. Test again days later, and retrieval practice beats passive review by a mile. What helped in the immediate time after studying turns out not to create the long-term memory needed for actual learning to take place.
Yeah mate, and most exams are not designed to test long term retrieval. That's why your idiot MIT project worked. If you'd had months between classes you'd have been fucked
One rule I’ve found helpful for this is to restrict myself to one question per section of a text, thus forcing myself to acknowledge and rephrase the main point rather than zoom in on a detail that will be largely irrelevant later.
Oh its so cute that you think this is enough
For hard problems, I suggest setting yourself a timer to encourage you to think hard on difficult problems before giving up to look at the correct answer.
Yeah, so does every advanced math and physics professor. It's much easier to do when you don't have a deadline
Knowing that your work will be evaluated is an incredible motivator to do your best.
Its an incredible way to make me a stressed out ball of anxiety is what it is
it’s better to get in and take the punches early so that they don’t put you down for the count.
God this is such a straight guy metaphor to use
The next piece of the puzzle I discovered was that Scrabble, it turns out, isn’t the only activity in which Richards possesses a strange intensity. His other love is cycling. Indeed, in an early tournament in Dunedin, New Zealand, he got onto his bicycle after work finished, pedaled through the night from Christchurch to Dunedin, a distance of over two hundred miles, without sleeping, and started the tournament first thing in the morning. After he won, competitors he met at the tournament offered to give him a ride home. He politely declined, preferring to bicycle back the entire way home to
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Autism. His secret is autism.
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He’d often eschew easier methods, such as the Lagrangian technique, forcing himself to painstakingly calculate all the forces by hand, simply because with the latter method he came to understand it better.
Yeah, he can keep his painstaking genius. I like having a life
One way you can introduce this into your own efforts is to give yourself a “struggle timer” as you work on problems. When you feel like giving up and that you can’t possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further.
This is college STEM 101. You keep trying until your brain fries, then you walk away and come back when you've had a break. It's how you end up with take-home, open book, open note, collaborative finals with 5 questions and a 50% pass rate
By now you’re probably eager to start your own ultralearning project.
Not unless the project is how to carry out and get away with the murder of a specific obnoxious writer
It’s usually the first project that requires the most thought and care. A solid, well-researched, well-executed plan can give you the confidence to face harder challenges in the future. A bungled attempt is not a disaster, but it may make you reluctant to pursue future projects of a similar nature. In this chapter, I’d like to tell you everything I’ve learned about how to get it right.
Isnt that what the last 200 or so pages were supposed to be
The decision of whether the right step forward is to set up long-term habits or to create a concentrated ultralearning project is often not crystal clear and may depend more on your personality and life constraints than a hard-and-fast rule.
And yet you've spent 200 pages going on about your magical system literally every college kid should already know
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