Have you changed the way (and what) you learn?

[AstonJ]

@dimitarvp

That’s a deceptively easy and tempting explanation to reach for. But I would argue for many of the knowledge workers it’s something else entirely: we are sick of everyone blabbering when we just want to be told “use that special argument in that function in the library X to solve your problem”.

Most books usually aim to walk people through things to help them understand the concepts, unless they are specifically more about providing you with recipes - one of my favourite Ruby books was Rails Recipes and it did exactly that, give you solid advice and how-tos. I loved it because it saved me time having to google things and then determine for myself which way might be better. The authors were experienced Rubyists so I could rest assured that what they recommended would be one of if not the best solution, thus saving me having to agonise over what might be best myself. If these are the kind of books you like, you should definitely let your feelings be known to publishers and authors/content creators (I’d second your suggestion as I love recipe style books too!)

@dimitarvp

I have struggled with ADHD for a number of years before I finally started beating it, and when I started truly pushing it back, I realized something (that is depressing for many): for a lot of people ADHD comes to existence because they don’t want to listen to most people around them (and to most on the internet).

Have you always struggled reading books? If not then what I said in my second post may be a contributing factor (the way our brains/attention spans have changed).

Either way if you have ADHD I’d recommend the GAPS book - it stands for the Gut And Psychology Syndrome and is all about the connection of food (and all the rubbish in it) to health/mental health etc. It’s a bit old now but still a good introduction to the microbiome.

@dimitarvp

I like books. A lot. But with time technical books became harder and harder to read because it happened no less than 15 times to me that the true insights started at 65% of the book and lasted to about 80%. The rest was either a setup (i.e. “why do we need this?”) or meaningless story-telling (“I had this problem when I worked for Oracle back in 1998…”).

Admittedly it’s been a while since I read a book (think the last one I read in full was the Ecto book) but I’ve not had the same experience as you. Perhaps this is because I tend to do all my reading first, before getting stuck in (as I like to have a good grounding first) and so everything I read is usually teaching me (or reinforcing) something.

Having said that the more you know the more likely you will find books cover much of what you know - books aim to teach a broader reader base than a hyper specific one… as otherwise they may sell notably fewer copies.

@sodapopcan

I’d be interested in reading such a thing, so long as it takes less than 3 mins

Haha, I’ll try! Tho I think what they found is they can do 3 mins then need a quick break/distraction (dopamine hit) before getting back to it. It’s pretty much what I said tho - complete break and meditate (clear your mind) before reading. Takes about 3 days for the complete reset.

Alternatively you could put your most addictive apps on your least used device - that way you are less likely to use them. I no longer trust mainstream media here in the UK due to their highly biased and extremely poor coverage of events over the last couple of years, and so we have little choice now but to rely on certain social media for real-world events, so what I’ve done is put TikTok on my iPad and deleted it from my phone. This makes it difficult to use in an addictive way as it’s less convenient (iPad is large, needs to be plugged in to charge, not with me all the time, etc). While on the topic of certain social media vs mainstream media for news, sadly, even the apps that were relatively good are becoming more and more compromised… but that’s a topic for another thread (watch this space, hehe!)

@sodapopcan

YouTube is the big problem and I actually felt mild panic when you suggested that. I’m completely addicted.

YouTube is the worst!! When Google’s new CEO took over he instructed their content creators to make vids that lasted at least 11 minutes - just so they can show more ads!! Pretty much overnight the platform went from being super-useful, to full of fillers and fluff. He destroyed that platform imo, now to get the bit of info you need you have to sit through pointless fillers (and ads). Thank goodness TikTok came onto the scene, now when I want a quick reminder on how to do something (eg a recipe, or a how to) I look on TikTok first - like @dimitarvp said earlier, in this situation, I just need the info I am looking for.

@sodapopcan

Is this a good way to go about things? I dunno, but it’s what I’ve been doing.

I think it is sensible not to rely on these tools if they come from big companies like ClosedAI, if paying, I’d personally prefer to use/support/trust the services from José and Chris.

@plcholder

Ive actually stumbled upon this topic before and I have tried detox, for me it usually takes 1 week from quitting social media, to start seeing the benefits. Also another good method is to find the best study time and length, for me it’s early in the morning and I can sit & study for ~5 hours pomedoro style. I can only do this on the weekends though because of the day job

Sounds like you’ve found a system that works for you I’d try adding meditating before reading/learning sessions too if you can, I think that could help cut the time from a week to 3 days as I mentioned. I’ll try to cover it in my blog post when I get around to it, but it is essentially:

@AstonJ

…and then meditating (just closing your eyes and counting to 20 until you can do it without any distracting thoughts - ideally before reading sessions). It takes around 3 days to reset your system (the first day is the hardest).

Give it a go and let me know whether you feel it helps

@adamu

LLMs are just making this worse, IMO. Those things are bad for you. I’m quite distressed at the assumption by the majority of the industry that they increase productivity, when the only scientific studies (actual ones, not pseudo-science commissioned by the AI companies) have demonstrated they decrease productivity.

I agree it is worrying, I guess like most short-cuts (or perceived short-cuts) there is a price to pay (eg: calculators). I’m actually enjoying just having general conversations with AI at present - last night I asked it for its interpretation of a song I am addicted to at present. I thought it got the meaning of the song pretty well… and then I asked it to psychoanalyse me based on my thoughts and how much I liked it (I won’t share what it said )

There is a saying in the dog world “The more I spend time with my dog, the less I like humans” (I think Mark Twain also said something like “The more I learn about people the more I like my dog.” I think, in a few years from now, people might start saying the same thing about the favourite AI

@SirWerto

I have managed to reduce my daily consumption of youtube by blocking the app with the digital wellbeing section in settings and also by downloading the videos and listening them like podcast with yt-dlp. However, not being able to delete the app is still a pity.

Nice! I didn’t know you couldn’t delete it on Android. For those on a Mac you can block sites with LittleSnitch.

@SirWerto

And about the topic of this thread, I am increasing my ratio of books vs docs now but mostly is docs and a little bit of blogs for emacs hehe.

There are some great Elixir books around - we’re very lucky compare to other languages