Learning About Learning

The week went alright enough but I am clearly making some mistakes on this project, particularly as relates to the math topics: I am spending too much time on the easy stuff. That’s my conclusion, anyway. I worked through 50 pages of examples and problems in Linear Algebra but I didn’t really learn anything since none of it was properly challenging - a violation of ultralearning principle’s 3 and 4 (Directness and focusing on your weaknesses respectively). This, unsurprisingly, is the main mistake I made in my academic career: I would try to build the perfect foundation from the first page of a textbook on, but this takes so much energy and discipline with such a low ROI the results are less than ideal. Sure, if you wanted to be as perfect as possible it might be the way to go, but that assumes there are no resource constraints. This projects main difficulty is resource constraints so that won’t work. In the upcoming week I’m going to try skipping everything I think I can do at a glance, and going straight to the sections I know I’m going to need for Quantum Mechanics, namely Eigen Vectors. I’m also going to spend more time on flash cards since as far as I can tell those have the best return for mathematical topics. That may seem counterintuitive at first since math is more about understanding than knowledge, or most people view it that way, but most math texts highlight theorems, lemmas, and important definitions for you so it’s easy to skim through and make flashcards of the most important concepts. Those theorems can then sit in your brain and work in the background for a much longer time while you go for understanding. For more philosophical topics it’s a bit harder, writing essays as I go has been the best so far, concepts aren’t as highlighted as with math texts and different authors have different densities. Not sure what I’m going to do with that yet but the majority of the background knowledge is mathematical so that will help.