I encounter something I want to learn about. For example, let’s pick transformers.
I scroll through the tweet/paper/article and get some sort of general gist. “Okay, there’s positional encoding, and an encoder-decoder setup, and something called self-attention which people seem to think is important, and people claim this somehow makes it so that the model understands how words in a sentence relate to each other.”
Then, I think to myself: “Understanding this topic seems relevant to my goals! But, I don’t feel like putting in the mental energy to fully understand it. Maybe later.”
And then I abandon the topic. If transformers come up later, my knowledge is limited to a couple of related keywords (“self-attention”, “encoder”/”decoder”) with no real gears-level understanding of anything.
It’s like intellectual edging. I read just enough so that I almost understand the topic, but then I quit and never reach full understanding.
I believe the source of this habit is 1) social media and 2) school. On social media, it’s easy to get in the habit of scrolling past dense intellectual content, because the fluff goes down so much easier. With school, often the way to get adequate grades with minimal time spent is to learn just enough so that you can do shallow keyword matching—full understanding is not needed.
I think this habit is bad because I end up spending too much time skimming content I don’t need and won’t remember, and not enough time trying to deeply understand content I do need and want to remember.
I have noticed this habit in myself, and I intend to unlearn it. Here is the process I intend to follow instead:
My goal is to follow the “YES” branch at least once per day.
I consider this to be attainable because the topics I am envisioning are quite small (“understand how a basic transformer works”, not “understand all variants of transformers ever used”) and my bar for understanding is not too high (“be able to explain how transformers work to a technical friend”, not “be able to implement a transformer from scratch with no references”).
Notice when you stop reading right before you understand
Here is a bad habit I noticed in myself.
I encounter something I want to learn about. For example, let’s pick transformers.
I scroll through the tweet/paper/article and get some sort of general gist. “Okay, there’s positional encoding, and an encoder-decoder setup, and something called self-attention which people seem to think is important, and people claim this somehow makes it so that the model understands how words in a sentence relate to each other.”
Then, I think to myself: “Understanding this topic seems relevant to my goals! But, I don’t feel like putting in the mental energy to fully understand it. Maybe later.”
And then I abandon the topic. If transformers come up later, my knowledge is limited to a couple of related keywords (“self-attention”, “encoder”/”decoder”) with no real gears-level understanding of anything.
It’s like intellectual edging. I read just enough so that I almost understand the topic, but then I quit and never reach full understanding.
I believe the source of this habit is 1) social media and 2) school. On social media, it’s easy to get in the habit of scrolling past dense intellectual content, because the fluff goes down so much easier. With school, often the way to get adequate grades with minimal time spent is to learn just enough so that you can do shallow keyword matching—full understanding is not needed.
I think this habit is bad because I end up spending too much time skimming content I don’t need and won’t remember, and not enough time trying to deeply understand content I do need and want to remember.
I have noticed this habit in myself, and I intend to unlearn it. Here is the process I intend to follow instead:
My goal is to follow the “YES” branch at least once per day.
I consider this to be attainable because the topics I am envisioning are quite small (“understand how a basic transformer works”, not “understand all variants of transformers ever used”) and my bar for understanding is not too high (“be able to explain how transformers work to a technical friend”, not “be able to implement a transformer from scratch with no references”).