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estimator comments on The most important meta-skill - LessWrong
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I think that all self-help / "learning to learn" / etc. articles should contain a short summary telling us some reasons to actually believe anything written below. Like references to relevant research, or author's real life achievements, or something. Generally, one shouldn't rely on personal anecdotes; but for self-help, even having a single data point is often too high a standard.
In your article, I couldn't find a single bit of evidence in support of your claims.
Sure, I could, but would that make you any more likely to accept it? Generally I've found that the more someone expounds on their own credentials, the less credible (and likable) they sound.
If my own personal achievements would genuinely make a difference to you personally, then I'd be glad to tell you them. If not, then I don't quite see the point.
Articles on such topics are notorious for their average bad quality. Reformulating in Bayesian terms, the prior probability of your statements being true is low, so you should provide some proofs or evidence -- or why I (or anyone) should believe you? Have you actually checked if it works? Have you actually checked if it works for somebody else?
I don't think that personal achievements are a bullet-proof argumentation for such an advice. Still, when I read something like this, I'm pretty sure that it contains valuable information, although it is probably a mistake to follow such advice verbatim anyway. So, if you have Hamming-level credentials, it will help.
As for your article, probably the only way to fix it is to add proofs to your statements. What evidence supports them? Is there any psychological research to back up your claims? Why do you think it is optimal (or near-optimal) way to learn skills?
This is a good self-help article. Can you see the reference list? :)
That's interesting, I wasn't aware of that reputation. That's good to know and certainly justifies your skepticism.
All that said, I think one can still evaluate your point (and in my case, my Less Wrong post) based on its internal logic and how consistent it is with one's own observations, without needing research to back it up. It would be easy enough to dismiss your own post for the very reasons you cited. Consider the following:
"In general, people new to a community are notoriously bad at gauging the pulse of said community. To reformulate in Bayesian terms, based on the length of time you've been posting here, the prior probability of your statement being true is low, so shouldn't you provide some proofs or evidence -- or why should I (or anyone) believe you?"
But to me, your logic checks out, and is fairly consistent with my own observations (that most self-help publications tend to be garbage), so that shifts the probabilities significantly in your favor. I'm hoping that people will evaluate my own post by similar criteria, rather than immediately dismissing it.
I've started commenting here recently, but I'm a long time lurker (>1 year). Also, I was speaking about self-help articles in general, not conditional on whether they are posted on LW -- it makes sense, because pretty much anyone can post on LW.
Now I found a somewhat less extreme example of what I think is an OK post on self-help although it doesn't have scientific references, because a) the author told us what actual results he achieved and, more importantly, b) the author explained why he thinks that the advice works in the first place.
Personally, I don't find your post consistent with my observations, but it's not my main objection -- my main objection is that throwing an instruction without any justification is a bad practice, especially on such a controversial topic, especially in a rationalist community.
That's totally fine, like I said, your post made sense and was consistent with what I've seen.
I still don't really think that stating my qualifications would do much. In this context, it still just seems too much like bragging. "I helped build a multi-million dollar company, I compete in barbecue competitions and consistently place in the top 10% of the field and was sponsored by a major barbecue website, was ranked in the top 100 players in the world for a popular collectible card game, learned how to code with no formal education (and used that knowledge wrote a somewhat well-received calibration test, and also write a bunch of boring business platforms), wrote an article about a baseball statistic I co-developed and was published in a publication that's important for people who care about baseball stats, learned how to be a carpenter, at one point was a licensed pharmacy technician, blah blah blah"
Even though I'm sure there's a less crass way to phrase it, to me it still sounds exceedingly arrogant. I might be overreacting though. You tell me: if I prefaced my post with that, would you be more or less inclined to take me seriously?
I do like the idea of explaining why I think the advice works in the first place. I will start writing something up about that and append it to the original post.
If I may suggest spending some space on explaining why do you think your experience generalizes -- that is, why do you think that your methods will work for people who are not you.
I took your advice as well as estimator's into account and added two paragraphs at the beginning to offer 1. Some research showing that many systems follow a distribution where a small portion of work accounts for a large portion of results, and 2. and explanation as to why it's generalizable.
Also, I'd like to compare your system against common sense reasoning baseline. What do you think are the main differences between your approach and usual approaches to skill learning? What will be the difference in actions?
I'm asking that because that your guide contains quite long a list of recommendations/actions, while many of them are used (probably intuitively/implicitly) by almost any sensible person. Also, some of the recommendations clearly have more impact than others. So, what happens if we apply the Pareto principle to your learning system? Which 20% are the most important? What is at the core of your approach?
As I mentioned in another comment, the difference between this and the "common sense" approach is in what this system does not do.
As for what the 20% of this system that gives you the most bang for your buck? That's a good question. Right now my "safe" answer is that it's dependent on the type of skill you're trying to learn. The trouble is that the common threads among all the skills ("Find the 20% of the skill that yields 80% of the results") doesn't have a lot of practical value. Like telling someone that all they need to do to lose weight is eat less and exercise more.
Let me think about it some more and I'll get back to you.
One piece of information you can use to determine what is most important is the number of other skills which require a certain skill as a prerequisite. Prerequisites should obviously be learned first, and it makes sense to learn them in order of how many doors they open. This is how I prioritize at the moment if I'm not considering subjective measures of "usefulness".
For my learning goals, I've started making concept maps, partly as it helps me understand a subject by understanding how concepts are related, and partly to identify what to learn next as described above. It becomes fairly obvious that I should learn X if I want to learn Y and Z and X is a prerequisite for both.
Nice, but beware reasoning after you've written the bottom line.
As for the actual content, I basically fail to see its area of applicability. For sufficiently complex skills, like say, math, languages or football decision-trees & howto-guides approach will likely fail as too shallow; for isolated skills like changing a tire complex learning approaches are an overkill -- just google it and follow the instructions. Can you elaborate languages example further? Because, you know, learning a bunch of phrases from phrasebook to be able to say a few words in a foreign country is a non-issue. Actually learning language is. How would you apply your system to achieve intermediate-level language knowledge? Any other non-trivial skills learning example would also suffice. What skills have you trained by using your learning system, and how?
Also, when you say "intermediate level language knowledge", what exactly do you mean? One of the key steps is defining exactly what you want to accomplish and why. I don't want to create a whole write-up, only to realize that you and I have two different definitions of "intermediate level language knowledge".
So if you'd tell me the "what" and the "why", I'll do the rest.
Basketball is an example. I'm about to head home so I'll do the ultra-abbreviated TL;DR version:
I would say basketball is fairly complex. One thing I didn't mention in the original post (mainly because it starts to get into the "how do individual people learn") but for me, I don't get good at a competitive skill by competing against people who also suck. By getting good enough to be able to play with people who are actually good, it made it easier for me to learn the advanced part of the game faster.
Also, this post has a list of (at least what I think to be) fairly non-trivial skills that I have trained using this method.
This is true, particularly because people are different, so if you tell us a lot about yourself, you're telling us comparatively little that applies to, well, us. That's why we often want some kind of organized, even if informal, study on a group of people, particularly a group in it with enough variation that personal uniqueness washes out.
Personal achievements are pretty bad as evidence. But they can still be better than no evidence.
(And personal achievements aren't all he asked for. I don't think references to relevant research would have the same problem as personal achievements here.)
I agree that in some cases, it's better than nothing to include personal achievements (as I did when I was discussing socializing in another thread). I just don't really think that's the case here. I'll say the same thing that I said to estimator: if you genuinely think that my personal achievements would make a difference to you, I'll be glad to tell you.
As for relevant research, well, (and I might be wrong on this) I thought one of the purposes of LW was to produce original content. Again, I might be misinterpreting things here. But if there was research that said, "Such-and-such approach to skill-learning works well", why not just link to that instead of trying to paraphrase it?