That is the paradox: If your students have internal motivation, don't give them external motivation, because that would harm their internal motivation. On the other hand, if your students don't have internal motivation, you have to give them external motivation, otherwise nothing ever gets done.

Most people when talking about education understand only one part of it, and then they suggest techniques which work well in some environments, and fail in different environment. And usually instead of realizing their mistake they insist that if you just did more of the same thing, it would work everywhere.

For example there are creative and motivated students who achieve impressive results when left on their own... and then you have people insisting that every student should be left on their own and that it will magically bring a new generation of super-motivated super-creative superheroes... and instead of that, we mostly get grade inflation and unemployable young people.

Please write the sequence so that each article independently presents one idea (or one group of ideas), and thus can be rated according to how well the idea in the article is presented.

I hate articles which are just an "introduction" to something that is supposed to be written in the second part (which sometimes also is just an introduction to the third part). It is OK if an article contains hyperlinks to previous articles, but it is bad if it references unexisting (at given moment) future articles.

Also, many self-help books start with 100 pages of motivation, followed by an advice that could be expressed using 5 sentences but is expanded to another 100 pages. I am not going to criticize this at books; there could be a good reason for this. For example, the customers prefer thick books, because their heuristics say that thick books contain more information; and if you don't conform to their biases, they will simply not buy your book. -- But this is a blog, we don't need to fill a given amount of pages just to make a customer happy. You can get directly to the point.

Makes sense. For someone who can't tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, it is no help that both good advice and bad advice is out there. Telling them the difference is useful.

But the problem is: Why should we trust you that the selection of good advice you made is really good?

No offence meant, it's just an observation that many people posting bad advice also believe in what they say, and believe in their ability to tell good advice from bad advice. What evidence is there that they are wrong but you are right?

I would prefer not to move.

But that may be an irrational decision. Where by "irrational" I don't mean "emotional", but "failing to calculate the costs and benefits of each option properly" (impacts of moving vs impacts of early retirement).

people appreciate what they pay for, and do not care about what they may have for free.

The relation is there, but I think the causality is the other way round. You are more willing to pay to people for their service if you respect them.

Evidence: 1) People also pay for public schools, by paying their taxes. But even if the law required them to pay a fixed amount of money to the public school directly, situation would remain the same. Paying is not essential here, paying voluntarily is. 2) Sometimes people pay for a product or service simply because they need it and they can't obtain it otherwise. For example, people pay to prostitutes, but typically don't respect them. 3) If you respect your friend as an expert, and your friend explains you something for free, you don't stop respecting them. -- This is why I think respect comes before payment.

In my opinion (which is supported by my first-hand experience as a teacher), the most direct impact on teachers' status had the removing of almost everything that our ape brains perceive as status-related. Teachers are not allowed to punish students physically. (I am not saying this is a bad thing. I am just saying it removes a part of what would be obviously status-related in the ancient environment, and our brains notice that.) Students are allowed to disobey and even offend teachers (within some limits they carefully explore and share with each other) with virtually no consequences. This is responsible for maybe 80% of the change. -- Note: Some people even consider teachers' status lowering a good thing! They usually describe a (strawman?) tyrrant, and explain a need to make people more equal. In reality, in many schools the teachers are already at the bottom of the status ladder, and the most agressive students are at the top, bullying their classmates and teachers.

The remaining 20% is related to the fact that lower degrees of education are no longer a status symbol (because almost everyone has them), and even the higher degrees become a weaker evidence (as countries participate in a pissing contest about who has more % of population with a university degree by lowering the standards); many employers care about having a diploma but don't care about specific knowledge (especially the government is guilty of this; may be different in your country), which makes teachers and schools replaceable commodities, so most customers only care about the price. Having better education (assuming the same diploma) seems to have absolutely no consequences; people underestimate the inferential distances and say everything is online anyway. And then we have the vicious cycle of lower respect driving some good teachers away, which reinforces lower respect for those who stayed, who are suspect that they didn't have a better choice.

Okay, I seem to get it. Originally it seemed to me like: "I want to know everything without having to actually understand everything (just give me the most important bits and I will memorize them)."

But now I guess you simply want the information well-ordered, meaning that if you invest e.g. 100 hours of your time into learning, you get the most value anyone could get from 100 hours. Where "value" could mean perhaps: how useful it would be for average programmer's average task.

Two possible issues:

1) Maybe sometimes specialization provides better results. For example in 20 hours you could learn how to declare variables in 1000 programming languages, or... well, something else, that would be connected with what you already know, and would allow you to do some useful new thing. (Because knowing to declare variables in 1000 programming languages is rather useless.) So you could have different specialization paths. Perhaps too many of them.

Possible real-world examples: Using many programming languages / many frameworks, or becoming good at one or two of them. Learning many different things (algorithms, databases, GUI, networks, cryptography, etc.), or becoming a specialist for e.g. databases (or even e.g. Oracle databases).

2) Maybe it is important to know in advance how much time do want to spend totally. For example, let's say that knowing an information A can bring you $1000 profit, information B can bring you $500, information C can bring you $200, but a combination of B+C can give you $2000. If you know at the beginning that you will take two lessons, you can take B and C, which gives you $2000. But if you go incrementally, the best choice for the first lesson is A, then the best choice for the second lesson is B, giving you only $1500.

Possible real-world examples: If you want to spend one day or one week learning, just learn Excel. If you want to spend one year, learn Python, or perhaps Java or C#. If you want to spend 10 years, learn mathematics, formal languages, computational complexity, and at the end apply the knowledge to the programming language(s) or your choice. -- In other words: the more time you have, the more meta you can go.

I have seen people starting with PHP, because it provided useful results after ten minutes; only to hear them complaining a few years later than they can't keep up with all the new PHP frameworks, but they are scared to death from switching to another language. On the other hand, I have seen people who study theoretical computer science for years, but they would have problem to write a simple calculator app -- but also they don't need to, as they make money writing theoretical papers; and they would be able to make the calculator after a 3-days course in one language (and after a single 2-weeks course they could do it in 10 or 20 languages).

You are right. My point was that there are two ways how a "giant lookup table" could pass a Turing test.

a) It could be constructed by an enormous superhuman intelligence, in which case stop speaking about the table and show me the intelligence that created it.

b) It just got lucky... which proves nothing, because if you are lucky enough, you can pass the Turing test without the lookup table, just by sending random bits to the output.

I am not sure how much the "learning in depth" can be avoided. This may be a prejudice, but it seems to me that software development typically really has a lot of inferential depth compared with... I don't know... plumbing.

In addition to this, software development is in motion. You can use the same screwdriver for decades, but software frameworks are developed so quickly that even remembering their names becomes a difficult task. (I can't even remember all frameworks in Java.) So it's not like they can't be taught effectively... it's more like there is so much of them that the few people able to teach them effectively didn't have time to learn the topic and write a book on the topic yet. (Maybe they will do 5 years later, but then you will want to learn something different, or a new version different from the old one will appear.)

If -- somehow -- we could choose the best programming language, or just say best 10 programming languages, two or three frameworks for each of them, remove everything else, and freeze the progress... then within 20 years we would discover efficient ways of teaching them, so that how we learn them today would probably seem completely ineffective in comparison.

But that is not going to happen, for many reasons, at least during the following decades. (Some of those reasons are good, such as progress, some of them are bad, such as reinventing the wheel either because of ignorance or for profit.)

Anki decks are great when you don't go into depth. Or when you go into depth using some other source (such as a book), and then use Anki decks to memorize what you learned there.

In my opinion, a good way to learn is to get a lesson from someone who really understands the topic, knows how to explain it, and especially is later available to answer your questions. A week of education this way easily beats months spent reading online tutorials written by people who overestimate their own understanding of the topic, or just don't care and do it for adsense (w3schools, roseindia...). But in my experience people are usually averse to pay for this. (It's like in their cost-benefit calculations they assign almost zero costs to their time and they horribly understimate how much time would they need.) The second best option is to read a book on the topic, or perhaps a few of them.

My current stack is linux, apache, python, django, dynamo, js, backbone

This does not provide as much information as it seems to do. I can install Linux (using the installation wizard) and run a few programs from the command line. Linus Torvalds invented Linux and probably knows everything. Where are you on this scale? Where are you on the Python scale: are you able to write "Hello World" or what exactly? How about the many things you did not mention here, such as: do you understand algorithms, computational complexity, formal languages, automata, functional programming, etc.? That could make a huge difference in choosing the right way to learn a new language.

Also... what exactly are you trying to achieve? Add a few keywords to your CV, or some other specific goal?

Free market, in a typical situation, has the advantage of having more raw computing power, simply because every person uses their own brain to optimize for themselves. And (some people believe that) the benefits of this additional computing power overweight the costs of not having this computing power coordinated, thus wasting a part of it. (It also has the advantage of having local information, having access to this information before it was filtered by political processing, etc.)

But technically, we are speaking about a linear increase in the computing power here. Like, a few million people, instead of a few dozens of government experts. Computational complexity typically does not speak about linear factors. -- Thus you have sinned against the narrow meaning of "computational complexity". I believe the downvotes reflect this.

I can imagine some good ways to control reality perception. For example, if an addicted person wants to stop smoking, it could be helpful to have a reality filter which removes all smoking-related advertising, and all related products in shop.

Generally, reality-controlling spam filters could be great. Imagine a reality-AdBlock that removes all advertising from your view, anywhere. (It could replace the advertisement with a gray area, so you are aware that there was something, and you can consciously decide to look at it.) Of course that would lead to an arms race with advertisement sellers.

Now here is an evil thing Google could do: If they make you wear Google glasses, they gain access to your physical body, and can collect some information. For example, how much you like what you see. Then they can experiment with small changes in your vision to increase your satisfaction. In other words, very slow wireheading, not targeting your brain, but your eyes.