Eg: For RL it would be Barto&Sutton book.
Sometimes the best source is not intuitive. Eg: The best way to become a safe driver is to go to performance drivign school - its a bit expensive but they tell you how to sit and stay alert in a car which I have never seen outside of these schools.
One of my most common things nowadays is to ask ChatGPT is to ask to build a curriculum. Creating and understanding what a great curriculum looks like is 20% of the work of understanding a field.
You can LEARN ANYTHING now if you have the time and inclination and elbow grease. Truly nothing is beyond your grasp - NOTHING. Its a magical time.
I'm actually building a tool that will do all this for you and get you started down the learning path faster than what we have now.
And for the curious - the best way to learn medicine is not a textbook. There are solutions out there like Skethcy which work much better for anatomy.
My own learning project - learn Medicine "on the side". It seems ludcirous that we give up the keys to our health to doctors just so we don't have to learn 2 years of courses. Am going to fix that!
I think there's a line around "good enough", unless your goal of course is to be on the road to "become the very best". I think the better metric is making sure you have a accurate resource over a quality one. The 15-20 hour "sprint hard" methodology isn't stopping after that first sprint, just slowing down.
So if you find/can now access a better resource later, just start the sprint again on that. I know from experience (in real time, unfortunately) how easily "find the best resource" can end up becoming "spend weeks collecting resources but not consuming them".
The internet is full of information. Sometimes it’s too much, unstructured or tangential to the goal at hand. Textbooks, in my experience, are truly written by the experts. It’s been vetted, rigorously reviewed and fact checked. It’s not inspired by influencers or clickbait.
Obviously YMMV, but when you find a top recommended textbook, it’s usually miles beyond a YouTube video or medium blog for deeper level content. It usually flows better and makes more sense as you study consistently.
I've been trying to do this for some rabbit hole I decided to go through. It's great for generating a list of topics but good luck getting actual existing books or papers. In some instances it would generate a paper title and link it to some other paper that might be slightly relevant.
It's not wrong to say Curriculum does not matter. But the level of curriculum is also something that needs to adjust to your current level and related fields you have knowledge within, to prevent you becoming overwhelmed.
Most people stop learning being motivation dries up as Test Anxiety rises to the point where they are at a "low-performance" place in the eustress curve. A few days there and people pause until it becomes urgent. A lot of this is a lack of momentum, but also not dedicating or having access to judgements of learning about your own progress.
In other words, if you judge your learning at all, it helps you manage.
There is a natural tradeoff between the flow-state of "just one flashcard with one information principle at a time, endlessly" and the longer term state influencing your time in flow-state of "am I progressing, what don't I know, how do I feel about my learning and mistakes?"
Think about learning databases, or CSS. When did you really takeoff? Probably A) Practically copying others examples (existing queries ran in PhpMyAdmin, or codepen code) And then later B) Once you overcame a big mistake and saw progress - suddenly what "Display" did clicked for you, and you saw how useful it could be to use the "fixed" option, it unlocked your understanding of the items in A and confirmed or disconfirmed your understanding of how it works.
Again it all depends. Self-motivated learning, even for a job, is easier to work with than compulsory learning. Because there, you don't even have the motivation to gaze up to the horizon and gather any excitement or understanding for what the learning might later lead to. It doesn't feel like a path, it feels like a brick wall. In this regard, a list of subjects is somewhat skin to someone stacking bricks, rather than elucidating a path. Overwhelming anxiety while learning is a real thing. The context really matters as to whether this approach is always the wisest.
Building an efficient path to expertise is hard for a beginner.
I think the fastest way to learn is asking an expert to build a learning path for you, starting from what you know and what you don't know.
When it comes to learning maths, or a new programming language, there's all this tedious boilerplate you need to know. The rules, or syntax, the names of everything, how it all fits together.
There's ways to make learning this stuff more fun, but ultimately, not that much more fun. And anyway, the learning part is not the good part, it's the things you can do once you reach a certain knowledge level that are incredible, beautiful, even sublime.
On the other hand, take something like learning to paint, or taking dancing lessons. Unless you're hoping to become a member of an international ballet company, learning to dance is the fun part.
As another point, if you're a knowledge worker and you're likely to have situations in your life where someone basically says to you "right mate, you've got the job, here's a huge body of deep technical knowledge to learn, get up to speed, see you Monday" then a certain amount of skill in knowing how to absorb that quickly is a good thing.
Seems like decent enough advice if you ever have trouble getting started. It's actually not unlike cramming for a test, except you keep study afterwards and don't dump that knowledge the day after. "fun learning" or not, just make sure to really dive in in the beginning.
You probably can't. You need to rely on knowledge of others to identify good resources. And then lean that against how you learn in order to pick the best resource for you.Same for verifying being an "expert beginner". Never be the smartest person in the room if your goal is to grow.
In a crude way: google it. You'll probably get a generic (maybe even horrible AI slop) on top. But you're not looking for a perfect guide on first Google (not unless you have a very popular topic). Look for terms used and start googling those to narrow down to a more specific place. Maybe a forum post full of (hopefully) competent+ people answering your question. Maybe you find a quality guide to follow. Maybe you find you're on a completely wrong rabbit hole and figure out better terms to Google.
That's basically half my learning while on the job. Usually works pretty well in my personal time too.
Pick programming, is knowing binary operations foundational? Is knowing compilers? Is it knowing bubble sort? Or perhaps knowing data structures?
I believe that if you have been using/working in a field, whatever you touch for your own goals that's enough.
And perhaps the difference between being an expert beginner and an expert is whether you still care about such a distinction? If you can achieve your current and future goals and can eventually learn new concepts then you're good.
I'd say a beginner might be someone who wouldn't even know where to begin.
Let's pick chemistry for myself: sure, I could follow some video but without the video I wouldn't even conceive how to get started with anything.
While, say woodworking, I wouldn't call myself an expert but I would be able to imagine starting a random project from scratch and eventually figure out all the parts.
So, maybe: - beginner: can't complete a project without help/support - mid: can complete but is unsure whether that's the best way - expert: has completed it before somehow
You won't always have an optimal solution but that's okay. The most important is to try and use the thing you're learning in some real way or with practice.
In my experience, that's a necessary first step to learning. I need to get my hands dirty, get a feel for what I'm working with. An experience is worth a thousand pictures, which are worth a thousand words - you can't gain that basic understanding and instinct by reading, only by having all the sensory inputs of doing it.
Then it's time to read. Now you must find an expert to guide you. First, you'll have too many blind spots - you can't possibly find all that's current, you can't find the best sources efficiently, and much won't be in books yet. And without expertise yourself, you can't distinguish the worn-out theories from the evergreen standards from the unproven innovations; the promising from the unlikely from the absurd; you won't know the consensus from the fringe; the guy advocating their personal theory - maybe even a credible one - from the balanced survey of established ideas. You won't recognize when you're reading just a side of a well-known debate.
Do the thing you want to learn.
Now, if I say I want to get into this scene for good, I am immediately daunted with a mountain of diverging learning paths to take. Should I take to Python and its massive library ecosystem, or should focus on database fundamentals? In every choice taken there are seemingly infinite branches, and it is rather hard to focus if you aren't even sure you're on the right track.
Last time I sat in an analytics/consulting interview they grilled me on highly specific technical questions on data pipelines and warehousing and testing and other topics that I've never had to worry about before at work. In another assessment, I was grilled on some AWS/Redshift-specific things. In yet another I was expected to know deep learning. It is all too hard for someone not originally with an engineering (or adjacent) background.
For interviews you may need to lookup what type of questions to expect and memorize details on that, unfortunately. That is not useful in practice but can be necessary for interviews.
The post covers a great mindset, but the math really is one thing, and learning how you learn and how you can learn is invaluable.
This is a great course to start learning about your learning.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
After/with this, there is a slew of adult learning knowledge that will likely make you feel better.
One key is learning to understand something, before learning to memorize it.
Another is creating your own mind map of how the concepts you are learning fits together.
Farnham street has some great books on mental models as well that was recommended to me as helping
An expert is someone who can often explain complex things in very simple ways. being an innocent beginner is one of the best mindsets to cultivate - you learn what you do and don't know pretty quick, and also a sense of known vs unknown, and size and number of unknowns.
It's all too overwhelming at times.
In English for example, learning the 800 most common words, you can understand 75% of the language: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44569277.
I'd love to start fresh on a new language, take 800 new words, try to learn 10 a day, and see where I get after 3 months. Can I really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall of those 800 words?
This thing you're talking about is called 'word coverage'. It's the percentage of words you know in a given text. I've created lots of word coverage graphs in the past, and, as research has shown, you won't really be understanding much until you reach the high 90s in terms of word coverage. The famous number for being able to read English texts extensively requires a word coverage of around 98%. And while it depends on the text, in order to reach 98%, you generally need to know around the top 5k words in a language.
Funny enough, when you understand 75% of the words in a text, you subjectively feel like you're understanding like 10% of what's going on.
"I went to the sdjfkdsh and got a new ghjsakgfh."
The missing words could be "dealership" and "truck" or "embassy" and "passport" or quite a lot of other pairs that change the topic entirely, so reading or listening to something with 80% understanding generally requires a dictionary in one hand to get you up to a reasonable level of comprehension. That said, I personally think language learning is enjoyable and rewarding, and tackling the most common word list is a good first step.
The frequency of words in every human language follows the Zipf distribution, which is a power law, like the pareto distribution.
Some learners create what are called frequency lists, which are lists of the most common words, and learn those words first. In general, you get (disproportionately) more bang for your buck from learning the most common words than the rarer words when it comes to understanding.
However, due to the very long tail of word frequency distributions, you eventually need to just start learning words as they come and stop trying to over-optimize with a frequency list.
If it means you can at least take an educated guess on what a sentence means, then yes.
If it means to understand a sentence like a native speaker does (just slower), then no.
Part of learning to learn, is learning how to identify the things you don't know. Then learning how to structure your 'personal curriculum' them in a rational way - you don't need to know everything up front to be effective.