There’s too much to learn

By Yi-Yang @ 2022-02-27T08:01 (+45)

Now that I have less time in my hand, I find myself getting more picky with what I learn. I think most of us have some intuitions on what we pick to learn, but I haven’t seen anything that has been codified. This is my rough attempt to make my own intuitions more explicit.

Here I define learning as the act of acquiring knowledge or skills, and I’m keeping it pretty broad. It also encompasses ways of learning that are informal (checking direct messages or social media), reflective (reading fiction) as well as entertaining (watching a series). 

I think there are some benefits in knowing how to prioritise learning well:

• My guess is that our intuitions are generally good enough, but if you’re feeling frustrated or indecisive when making a choice to learn, this could be helpful.
• There are a lot of things to learn about EA and it's helpful to pick the ones that are most impactful.

In general, you want to prioritise learning something when they are: 

• Relevant to your goal
• Provides high information value (i.e. reduce a lot of uncertainty)
• Might make you pivot to a new goal
• Trustworthy
• Urgent
• Highly motivating or exciting for you
• Easy and not time consuming
• Highly likely to be achievable

 Sometimes you can’t avoid learning something despite scoring badly on some of these factors, especially for “motivation”, “challenge”, and “probability of success”. Here are some ways that can help:

• If you are reading a tough-to-understand book, read summaries and reviews of the book instead. It’s possible that this is a more cost-effective way to learn instead of reading the entire book.^[1][2][3]
• If building up a habit of consuming daily news is tedious, read newsletters that give 5 minute summaries. Small accessible habits help improve consistency.
• If you’re new to a topic, a good rule of thumb is to start with a breadth-first approach. There are larger diminishing returns when learning something in-depth.
• If you’re testing a new feature/product but want to gain insights that are trustworthy, test it cheaply first. There is some trade-off between “trust level” and “challenge”, but it’s more likely than not that a cheap test could be pretty insightful enough.
• If you want to increase the trustworthiness of what you learn, writing seems like a good thing to do too.^[4][5]
• If you have a tough final exam to take in a few months and you want to increase your chances of success, there are pretty well-researched study principles (e.g. space repetition, chunking, etc) that are helpful. ^[6]

I'm looking to improve how this decision making tool works. If you have any suggestions, please let me know! 

1. ^{^}

   https://www.cold-takes.com/reading-books-vs-engaging-with-them/

2. ^{^}

   https://www.cold-takes.com/honesty-about-reading/ 

3. ^{^}

   https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/72QA8qk9g6wZNDWeS/on-not-reading-papers

4. ^{^}

   http://www.paulgraham.com/words.htm

5. ^{^}

   https://www.cold-takes.com/learning-by-writing/

6. ^{^}

   https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn