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This is: Lessons I've Learned from Self-Teaching, published by TurnTrout on LessWrong.
In 2018, I was a bright-eyed grad student who was freaking out about AI alignment. I guess I'm still a bright-eyed grad student freaking out about AI alignment, but that's beside the point.
I wanted to help, and so I started levelling up. While I'd read Nate Soares's self-teaching posts, there were a few key lessons I'd either failed to internalize or failed to consider at all. I think that implementing these might have doubled the benefit I drew from my studies.
I can't usefully write a letter to my past self, so let me write a letter to you instead, keeping in mind that good advice for past-me may not be good advice for you.
Make Sure You Remember The Content
TL;DR: use a spaced repetition system like Anki. Put in cards for key concepts and practice using the concepts. Review the cards every day without fail. This is the most important piece of advice.
The first few months of 2018 were a dream: I was learning math, having fun, and remaking myself. I read and reviewed about one textbook a month. I was learning how to math, how to write proofs and read equations fluently and think rigorously.
I had so much fun that I hurt my wrists typing up my thoughts on impact measures. This turned a lot of my life upside-down. My wrists wouldn't fully heal for two years, and a lot happened during that time. After I hurt my wrists, I became somewhat depressed, posted less frequently, and read fewer books.
When I looked back in 2019/2020 and asked "when and why did my love for textbooks sputter out?", the obvious answer was "when I hurt my hands and lost my sense of autonomy and became depressed, perchance? And maybe I just became averse to reading that way?"
The obvious answer was wrong, but its obvious-ness stopped me from finding the truth until late last year. It felt right, but my introspection had failed me.
The real answer is: when I started learning math, I gained a lot of implicit knowledge, like how to write proofs and read math (relatively) quickly. However, I'm no Hermione Granger: left unaided, I'm bad at remembering explicit facts / theorem statements / etc.
I gained implicit knowledge but I didn't remember the actual definitions, unless I actually used them regularly (e.g. as I did for real analysis, which I remained quite fluent in and which I regularly use in my research). Furthermore, I think I coincidentally hit steeply diminishing returns on the implicit knowledge around when I injured myself.
So basically I'm reading these math textbooks, doing the problems, getting a bit better at writing proofs but not really durably remembering 95% of the content. Maybe part of my subconscious noticed that I seem to be wasting time, that when I come back four months after reading a third of a graph theory textbook, I barely remember the new content I had "learned." I thought I was doing things right. I was doing dozens of exercises and thinking deeply about why each definition was the way it was, thinking about how I could apply these theorems to better reason about my own life and my own research, etc.
I explicitly noticed this problem in late 2020 and thought,
is there any way I know of to better retain content?
... gee, what about that thing I did in college that let me learn how to read 2,136 standard-use Japanese characters in 90 days? you know, Anki spaced repetition, that thing I never tried for math because once I tried and failed to memorize dozens of lines of MergeSort pseudocode with it?
hm...
This was the moment I started feeling extremely silly (the exact thought was "there's no possible way that my hand is big enough for how facepalm this moment is", IIRC), but also extremely excited. I could fix my problem!
And a problem this was. In early 2020, I had an interview where I was asked t...
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