Levels of Learning

Levels of learning
Knowledge
Comprehension
Application of knowledge to solve problems
Analysis
Synthesize or ability to find new meaning and applications
Evaluate: Ability to judge work of others

The mnemonic is eas(e) sack
but not in order so not super useful

Mammoth voice

What I'm reflecting on today, this sunny Sunday morning.

Occam's Razor and Applications from Medicine to Penal Systems

Occam’s razor (also known as the “law of parsimony”) is a problem-solving principle which serves as a useful mental model. A philosophical razor is a tool used to eliminate improbable options in a given situation. Occam’s is the best-known example.
Occam’s razor can be summarized as follows:
Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected...

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” as Einstein famously said.

Of course all of this, as well as use of mental models in general, is a whole lot harder than talking about it.

Using distraction to your advantage. Techniques from ADHD

I don't have ADHD, but I am as subject as everyone to the constant barage of information cloaked as "opportunities".  Somehow, you can't help but think that if you just focus, or do another online class, or listen to another podcast, you too can find fulfillment, or peace or money etc...

Until this happens, the distracted can always practice ‘learning to learn’, as my psychologists used to call it. For me, this began in the 1990s with colour-coded folders and a planner, and has since grown into a sprawling Google calendar. Meticulously, I track each hour of my working life (and many personal hours, too). Obsessively, I declutter to avoid visual distraction. I return to my to-do lists over and over during the day.
I have also learned to make space for distraction – which can, after all, also mean being alive to one’s surroundings, curious about new possibilities, and multifaceted in one’s interests. Getting distracted (even taking note of which interesting distractions to return to later) has helped me think about learning differently: not all learning requires sustained focus, some forms of creative and conceptual thinking benefit from repeatedly returning to a topic so as to view it differently each time.

“The secret to mastering your time is to systematically focus on importance and suppress urgency.”

https://medium.com/personal-growth/how-to-get-more-work-done-in-a-week-than-most-people-do-in-a-month-ca0328a0cdd2

Urgent tasks put us into constant “reply mode.”

They are distractions.

Important work are tasks we have planned that move goals.

Prioritization Taken Seriously

Wow.  Lots of people have put LOTS of thought into prioritization.  Had no idea...

Personal Kanban Strategy

This system is basically a system of tracking "to do's" with a tri panel of options, doing, done.  The key is that there can only be 3 items in the "doing".  The article below recommends only having one "in progress" or doing. 

This was a link from this article

Ideal

 

 

reality

I've read "Eat that Frog".  And need to remember to remember Godin's maxim that if you identify that item that you least want to do, it's like your compass for your highest yield item.

Coming up with Ideas: 5 step approach

The author from Medium borrows this from Gary Larson of Far Side

Here’s the simple five-step formula:

1. Gather material (specific and general)
2. Think (write down every idea)
3. Take a break (put the problem out of your mind)
4. Let idea emerge (idea appears, write it down)
5. Development (refine and rework idea)
6.  

• this is from "Where Good Ideas Come From" by Steven Johnson
• Go for a walk
• Cultivate hunches
• Write everything down, but keep your folders messy
• Embrace serendipity by following links
• Make generative mistakes
• Take on multiple hobbies
• Frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks
• Let others build on your ideas
• Borrow, recycle, reinvent
• Build a tangled bank (collaborate)

All of these are in service of his big idea: “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”

Requests to the Unconscious and Thought Dumping

https://medium.com/better-humans/this-10-minute-routine-will-increase-your-clarity-and-creativity-336cb82e3797

This 10-Minute Routine Will Increase Your Clarity And Creativity

Benjamin Hardy, PhD

Aug 16, 2017 · 3 min read

“Your subconscious mind works continuously, while you are awake, and while you sleep.” — Napoleon Hill

Your subconscious never rests and is always on duty because it controls your heartbeat, blood circulation, and digestion. It controls all the vital processes and functions of your body and knows the answers to all your problems.

What happens on your subconscious level influences what happens on your conscious level. In other words, what goes on internally, even unconsciously, eventually becomes your reality. As Hill further states, “The subconscious mind will translate into its physical equivalent, by the most direct and practical method available.”

Consequently, your goal is to direct your subconscious mind to create the outcomes you seek. Additionally, you want to tap into your subconscious mind to unlock connections and solutions to your problems and projects.

Here’s a simple routine to get started:

Ten minutes before going to sleep:

“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” — Thomas Edison

It’s common practice for many of the world’s most successful people to intentionally direct the workings of their subconscious mind while they’re sleeping.

How?

Take a few moments before you go to bed to meditate on and write down the things you’re trying to accomplish.

Ask yourself loads of questions related to that thing. In Edison’s words, make some “requests.” Write those questions and thoughts down on paper. The more specific the questions, the more clear will be your answers.

While you’re sleeping, your subconscious mind will get to work on those things.

Ten minutes after waking up:

Research confirms the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, is most active and readily creative immediately following sleep. Your subconscious mind has been loosely mind-wandering while you slept, making contextual and temporal connections. Creativity, after all, is making connections between different parts of the brain.

In a recent interview with Tim Ferriss, Josh Waitzkin, former chess prodigy and tai chi world champion, explains his morning routine to tap into the subconscious breakthroughs and connections experienced while he was sleeping.

Unlike 80 percent of people between the ages of 18–44 who check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up, Waitzkin goes to a quiet place, does some meditation and grabs his journal.

In his journal, he thought-dumps for several minutes. Thus, rather than focusing on input like most people who check their notifications, Waitzkin’s focus is on output. This is how he taps into his higher realms of clarity, learning, and creativity — what he calls, “crystallized intelligence.”

If you’re not an experienced journal writer, the idea of “thought-dumping” may be hard to implement. In my experience, it’s good to loosely direct your thought-dumping toward your goals.

Consider the “requests” you made of your subconscious just before going to bed. You asked yourself loads of questions. You thought about and wrote down the things you’re trying to accomplish.

Now, first thing in the morning, when your creative brain is most attuned, after its subconscious workout while you slept, start writing down whatever comes to mind about those things.

I often get ideas for articles I’m going to write while doing these thought-dumps. I get ideas about how I can be a better husband and father to my three foster children. I get clarity about the goals I believe I should be pursuing. I get insights about people I need to connect with, or how I can improve my current relationships.

To be sure, you’ll need to practice this skill. It may take several attempts before you become proficient. But with consistency, you can become fluent and automatic at achieving creative and intuitive bursts.

Conclusion:

“A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.” — James Allen

8 Traits to Foster Your Creativity from Ogilvie and Mather

Inspiring blog post from Farnham Street.
The full title of the book is

Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness Being Very Good Is No Good,You Have to Be Very, Very, Very, Very, Very Good

It costs $270 on Amazon 

Click through to see the 8 traits.  

 

 

 

 

How to read academic content once and remember it forever

Good article on how to make "consuming" material you're trying to learn (i.e. reading, watching or listening) active.  How to interact with the material, making the concepts yours and figuring out ways to fit them into a framework.  He also is a fan of spaced retrieval practice.  This comes up over and over again in the "learning how to learn" teachings. He has developed his own tech version of flash cards.

If She Knew

An entertainment book.  Give it a 3 1/2 stars.
"55 year old empty nester—and freshly retired FBI agent—Kate Wise finds herself drawn out of her quiet suburban life when her friend’s daughter is murdered in a home invasion—and she is implored to help.

Kate thought she left the FBI behind after 30 years as their top agent, respected for her brilliant mind, tough street skills and her uncanny ability to hunt down serial killers. Yet Kate, bored with the quiet town, at a crossroads in life, is summoned by a friend she can’t turn down.

As Kate hunts the killer, she soon finds herself at the forefront of a manhunt, as more bodies turn up—all suburban moms in perfect marriages—and it becomes apparent there is a serial killer stalking this quiet town. She unearths secrets from her neighbors she wishes she never knew, discovering that all is not what it seems in this picture of model streets and neighbors. Affairs and lying are rampant, and Kate must sift through the town’s underbelly if she will stop the killer from striking again.

But this killer is one step ahead of her, and it may end up being Kate who is in danger."

A guide to the Good Life: the ancient art of stoic joy

I've had this book for 10 years, and read it when I first bought it.  But it has come up a few times on various podcasts, so I took a look at it again.
Some of the strategies for Stoic living

• Negative Visualization this helps us to want what we already have and not take anything for granted
• spend time imagining things you have.  Your health, family, eyesight etc... 
• think about how much you would miss your eyesight, or ability to walk if they were gon
• pay attention to misfortunes that happen to other people and think about if they happened to you
• keep firmly in mind that everything we value will be lost to us eventually

• remember there will always be a final occurrence of everything we 

• Dichotomy of Control 
• only focus on your internal goals
• some things are out of our control (whether it rains)
• some things are partially in our control (how well we try at tennis)
• some things are in out control  our internal goals

• Fates
• learn to adapt ourselves to the environment in which fate has places us
• A "good man" will welcome "every experience the looms of fate may weave for him"

•  Epictetus says admiration of other people is a negative barometer of our progress as Stoics.  To be immune to insults also.
• Blame ourselves, not others, when our desires are thwarted.  We find we have fewer desires.

Mental Check list

1. Do we engage in negative visualization?
2. Are we careful to internalize goals? (meaning, how many pages you write a day, not whether others like it, etc..
3. Have we refrained from dwelling in the past?
4. Do we distinguish between things we have complete control over and no control or partial?
5. Do we practice the art of self denial? (This is where you purposely do without so you see that the worst may not be so awful.)
6. Daily meditations on our actions of the day and how skillful they were

Ultralearning: Retrieval

Retrieval is a key concept in the "Learning How to Learn" course in Coursera. I've "done" the course

twice. Ha ha.  Guess I'm not so great at learning.
In the course, they advocate trying to do practice problems at the back of a chapter before you read the chapter.  The act of trying to work on a problem with keys your brain to pay better attention when you read.
In Ultralearning by Scott H. Young, his chapter on retrieval makes some of the same points with the examples of the genius mathematician, Ramanujan and .  Both had limited resources, so they had to retrieve and work the problems in their heads.  Closed book, as it were. Ben Franklin tried to replicate essays he'd read.  This active effort to solve, or retrieve makes the material stickier.
In this chapter, Young has a few strategies for this.
 For actual academic subjects, the pretesting makes sense.
Flash cards and spaced-retrieval online apps can help. But there are many subjects or projects where the answers aren't so clear. 
For those types of projects, he reiterates the "directness"  or just going straight into the skill or project you want to accomplish can help.  It is uncomfortable, but that's kind of the point.  You immediately become aware of what your gaps are and can drill down on them.  I think, again, at least in my case, you need to ignore the inner voice that tells you that this just isn't something you're good at and urges you to do something easier.  I like to think that more things can be learned than we realize.
Another way to self test is to ask questions on a sheet of paper, instead of taking notes.  Just by putting the material in the form of a question it can help to make the brain work a bit.
Another strategy is to ask yourself "what is the bigger concept or question?"  To try to understand basic concepts, not just the facts.
The whole idea is to test before you're ready.  That lack of comfort and strain makes the learning process faster.

Ultralearning: Drilling

As with so many aspects of more efficient learning, the key is to concentrate on the hard things.  It sounds easier than it is.  When confronted with things that are hard, you have to battle your own fears of not being up to the task (comment mine), and the very natural tendency to avoid hard things.  The mind is slippery.  You have to stay alert and force the mind to concentrate on what's difficult. The distinction in ultralearning is to be extremely mindful and keep it difficult. Don't waste time on what you already know.
Some aspects of drilling.
Divide by time:  Particularly valuable for things like music or pronunciation.  drill the difficult aspect and skip the rest
Divide by cognitive components:  eg  pronunciation versus vocabulary
in, say, geography how countries relate to the whole, what are components within the country
Magnifying glass
This is to do 10 times the intensity on things that are hard for you.  His example was research.  He spent 10 X on researching something because he was having a hard time doing that.
Prerequisites
If you find you're lost and not getting something.  Go backwards until you find the step that you don't understand.

Ultra Learning: Focus

What has come up over and over again in learning and in getting the most from non-fiction reading is

pretesting and post reading summarizing.
In chapter 3 of the book by Scott H. Young called Ultralearning he deals with focus.
There are 3 basic impediments to focus.
Procrastination-  main strategies to help are to force your self to do 5 minutes, or the
 Pomodoro technique. In the course "learning how to learn" there is a segment by a highschool girl who noticed that if she just started, go through the first 5 minutes, then she could skate.  I've found this to often be true
Carve out scheduled time to work is also a technique.
 He provides the example of a highly intellectual and accomplished woman from the 18th or 19th century who was able to accomplish a ton in addition to having full responsibility for children and running a household.  She was able to immediately dive back into a task.
Leave something half done Though not mentioned in this book, the Hemingway technique would fit in here.  He would leave something midway so that he had an easy entry back in.


Inability to sustain focus
 External distractions These you have to manage
Internal distractions  Acknowledge and release.  The more you do this the easier it becomes.

Poor quality of focus
here is you're too hyped up you can focus on minuteea.  Sometimes laser focus is required.  Sometimes, for writing or problem solving,  a looser type of focus is required.
Interestingly when your arousal is low, loud sounds can help.  I need to try this since that is usually my problem.  Not enough "juice"
Interleaving, changing to different aspects of study can help here.
Sometimes it's easier to focus on videos, but you need to keep an awareness of your quality of learning.  That is why he is not a huge proponent of "flow".  I do see flow as more of a function of creativity, rather than study.  Study is hard.

Consistent improvement

This was an unusual take on self-improvement.  These are notes from a business guru who took a unique approach in the endeavor to broaden his mental models.  He took the last 12 years of Discover Magazine and read each of the 6 page in depth discussions of an author's topic.  For example "nanoparticles."  He admitted that if he had chosen which topics to read himself he only would have chosen 14. But the point of it was to read what he wouldn't normally read,  to "broaden" his thinking.
But one of the parts that I liked the best as a reminder was this. He talks about the need for constant increase otherwise, you lose the compounding effect of action.

"Whenever you interrupt the constant increase above a certain level of threshold you lose compounding, you’re no longer on the log curve. You fall back onto a linear curve or God forbid a step curve down. You have to be constant. How many people do you know that are constant and what they do? I know a couple. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Everybody wants to be rich like Warren Buffett Charlie Munger. I’m telling you how they got rich. They were constant. They were not intermittent."

There was also a great segment of the talk where he talks about the incredible value of being positive.  And that you should be the one to "go first" in being positive.  And why don't people do it?

For answering the question, why would people not go positive and not go first when there’s a 98 percent chance you’re going to benefit from it, and only a 2 percent chance the person’s going to tell you to ‘screw off’ and you’re going to feel horrible, lose face, and all the rest of that. And that’s real. That’s why we don’t do it. He said there’s huge asymmetry between the standard human desire for gain and the standard human desire to avoid loss. Which one do you think is more powerful? 98 percent versus 2!

further

Lou Brock set the Major League record for stolen bases with the St. Louis Cardinals many years ago. And he once said, ‘Show me a man who is afraid of appearing foolish and I’ll show you a man who can be beat every time.’ And if you’re getting beat in life, chances are it’s because you’re afraid of appearing foolish. So what do I do with my life? I risk the two percent. I was so proud the other day, I was reading Bono on Bono. Bono’s the lead singer of U2. He’s the only other person I’ve ever encountered in my entire life, and I asked all my cronies, ‘Has anybody else ever encountered this elevator model before?’ ‘No. No that’s yours Peter.’ And I said, ‘You know how I said 98-2? Guess who’s got the exact same model? Bono! Well he doesn’t have 98-2, he’s got 90-10.’ 

Get your Identity out of it

Get your "I"dentity out of it when you want to make a change.  I fully believe in the concept of this, but also realize that it is the essence of major spiritual practices (Buddhism, Jesuits) so assume it's not all that easy to do.

And changing these actions is as simple as… changing your actions. One action at a time. Forget labeling it. Forget social accountability (in fact, research has found that sharing goals with others can often backfire). Forget making a big hoo-ha-ha about who you are or what you are or what the fucking Pope thinks about you.

Because he doesn’t. And neither do most of the rest of us. And neither do you, for that matter. Your identity is this made up thing that you’re emotionally attached to. It’s a mirage in the desert. A ketchup bottle in an empty fridge. And the quickest way to change yourself is to realize that there’s no real self to change.

Tidying in a more Maximalist Interior

Another British powerhouse
Lots of tips for tidying and organizing.

Heuman’s mantra is to streamline, streamline, streamline. The only way to stem the tide of detritus, she says, is to have constant clear outs. She instigates fortnightly office “streamlining sessions,” continually sorting through her own papers and questioning her team about the buildup of boxes or packages.

Organization, lists, and keeping track of ideas

Anya Hindmarch  
I find these British women entrepreneurs incredibly inspiring.  And she has 5 kids.  I'm sure there's a back story with some craziness, but I think we can all learn something from women like this.

“Brains are brilliant at having ideas but not holding them, so having systems in place is the key to creativity for me,” she says. “I have my best ideas at a clean table.”