Nobody who knows what they’re talking about would ever suggest going to college for the purpose of getting an education. We have the Internet for that. If you need structure in your life (e.g., forced to wake up early 5x/week), or you need motivation (e.g., want to learn math but keep procrastinating), or something like that, and a degree would help you out (e.g., because you’re young and you’re looking for an entry-level position in a particular industry), then by all means, go to college. But if you just want to learn, then you’re wasting your time.
Think about it this way. Not even getting into the messed up incentive structure of the university system, just consider how random your professors are. You’re confined to a particular university in a particular location. On the Internet, on the other hand, you can go wherever you want, and find the particular niche community you need for what you’re working on. And with this, we come to a more direct answer to your question: Reading Less Wrong would probably be much more useful than taking whatever college course you would end up in on the subjects most relevant here (basic epistemology, etc), but if you want to start learning math or physics for example, then Less Wrong wouldn’t be of much use, and instead you’d want to for example check out Amazon for textbook reviews, and then head on over to a good forum on the topic (Physics Forums, perhaps?).
If you need structure in your life (e.g., forced to wake up early 5x/week), or you need motivation (e.g., want to learn math but keep procrastinating), or something like that,
Or you want someone to give you feedback on your homework and answer your questions (and hence a chance to clear up your misconceptions), or you want hands-on experience with lab equipment, or you want to socialize with other people interested in the same things, or you want to be able to legally access papers behind a paywall for free, or...
Or you want someone to give you feedback on your homework and answer your questions (and hence a chance to clear up your misconceptions)
I mentioned Physics Forums for math and physics, where you’d get all the feedback you could ever desire.
or you want hands-on experience with lab equipment
Valid point.
or you want to socialize with other people interested in the same things
Why would you need college for that? If you keep procrastinating about getting out there and trying to meet people, college is a good way to self-bind oneself into feeling an obligation to show up somewhere on a regular basis that may lead to success in that area. But otherwise you could find people elsewhere.
or you want to be able to legally access papers behind a paywall for free
Another valid point.
Overall though, I wouldn’t say you contradicted anything in my post. I absolutely did not say that going to college wouldn’t be a useful endeavor for plenty of people. It’s just that the reasons to go certainly have nothing to do with the quality of instruction or something like that, which is what the OP was about.
Socialization is qualitatively very different when you live in the same building as people who share your interests. Without this, every meeting has to be planned days in advance, and bootstrapping a friendship to the point where people are even willing to make plans with you is a huge hassle. I found this feature of college extremely valuable and many others do as well, even if you would not. (It’s true that this is really a feature of dorms, and classes themselves don’t help much with meeting people, but it’s still part of the experience, and how else are you going to concentrate hundreds of smart STEM-interested people into one or two city blocks?)
Without this, every meeting has to be planned days in advance … this is really a feature of dorms, and classes themselves don’t help much
I guess that only applies in large cities with poor means of transportation. I often meet up with people on a half hour’s notice, and there are Schelling points where we can go and meet up without even having to make explicit plans at all.
Physics forums is not an adequate replacement for putting 6 people and a pizza together in a room with a whiteboard. The internet is great and all, but it’s simply not as easy to communicate half-formed ideas, and build off someone else’s poorly-thought-out insight over the web.
I mentioned Physics Forums for math and physics, where you’d get all the feedback you could ever desire.
Communicating in meatspace with people I know personally is much more effective than over the Internet with strangers, all other things being equal (at least for me—YMMV).
But otherwise you could find people elsewhere.
Like where? Not only would I have no idea where to find half a dozen physicists hanging out together in my home town, I’m not even sure there are that many physicists at all there.
It’s just that the reasons to go certainly have nothing to do with the quality of instruction or something like that, which is what the OP was about.
What? Except possibly for the socializing thing, all the things I mentioned have to do with instruction.
It’s low status to say one could benefit from external motivation and structure, but I suspect that for the vast majority of people and general, and also the majority of LWers, external motivation and structure are hugely valuable.
Tests are valuable to give you an idea of how you’re doing with learning stuff. IIRC, some education research suggests that spending an hour taking a test is actually substantially better for your understanding and long-term recall than spending an hour studying.
I think if you wanted to make a serious “alternative technical college education” for yourself, one way to do it would be to work on a series of technical projects that interested and motivated you, then learn whatever was necessary to complete the projects well (see this post by Robin Hanson). Probably find some local hackerspace so you don’t have to buy equipment, you get some social pressure/networking, and you can pick up some tacit knowledge from other hackers. If your projects were impressive, they could look good on your resume to the right employer (open-minded small business owner/startup founder?)
This strategy could be difficult because most people don’t have the balls to say “I am going to complete project X in a field that I know nothing about and learn whatever I need to know in order to complete the project on the fly”. You’d run a risk of getting intimidated and giving up, I think. A certain amount of confidence in your ability to understand anything given sufficient time, effort, and pestering of knowledgeable people (online or offline) would probably be necessary to make this work (relevant rationality quote). I still think going to college is a better idea for most people.
Tests are valuable to give you an idea of how you’re doing with learning stuff. IIRC, some education research suggests that spending an hour taking a test is actually substantially better for your understanding and long-term recall than spending an hour studying.
Quick question: I have used Anki mainly for memorizing words in foreign languages—is it possible to do more complex and constructive learning with Anki than just memorizing facts?
I’ve tried it and found it easy to fall in to the habit of just answering the card without thinking too hard about the underlying concepts. Making good Anki cards for highly conceptual stuff like math and computer science requires a fair amount of effort and experience with Anki, IMO.
The goal of Anki is to avoid forgetting facts. There are subjects where you don’t need to know facts. You don’t ride a bicycle by knowing facts about bicycles but by having a skill that’s in muscle memory.
When it comes to learning science, learning facts is often useful. Whenever you encouter a new fact that seems important to you and where you think it’s important to remember that fact, create an Anki card.
The goal isn’t to write complex questions. It’s to make sure that you don’t forget the basics. When we learn a new topic we often focus to much on complex stuff and don’t recognise that we will forget most of the things we learn soon thereafter. Anki exists to prevent you from forgetting important basics and make those basics common sense.
My example cards from physiology for aldosterone:
Front: hormone(released by adrenal glands to regulate kidney function) Back: aldosterone
Do these cards tell me everything there to know about aldosterone? No, they don’t. On the other hand they show me basic facts about aldosterone. If you don’t know anything about aldosterone I think you can still understand my cards but you probably won’t remember the information a year later when you don’t put them into Anki.
All these cards I listed are made in a way where the I have to type the correct answer. I’m not 100% sure that this is optimal but I feel that it helps me. When I write down an answer it’s easier to compare the answer against the correct one than comparing one in the mind against the correct one. Less cheating ;)
It also makes it clear when I can press enter to get the answer.
When it comes to creating cards about a new topic it’s helpful to think about how the knowledge is structured.
In this case we have hormones that can belong to different types and organs that are affected by hormones.
I personally like the concept of questions of the type ?(increases/decreases)?. I have the feeling that they work better than questions that ask whether a claim is true or false that I used in the past. Again I have no good data for that recommendation.
Cards of that type are usually easy to create for many subjects.
The goal when you create cards is to create them as easy as possible. When you use Anki you don’t spend most of your time with cards that you forget from time to time.
Even for knowledge that you know there a difference between whether your brain needs 1 second or 5 to access knowledge about a given basic. Learning basics well is useful.
Thanks for a really comprehensive answer even though it was only a quick question ;) Your way of using Anki is quite creative, mine is pretty close to rote memorization and I have only applied it to foreign languages so far. Maybe I should think about using it on other subjects. In all subjects, except maybe math on some level, there are some basic facts that you just have to memorize and you can’t derive the answer from the other facts you know, so it makes sense. It has to go hand in hand with trying to understand the subject at hand though, otherwise it would be just trying to guess the teacher’s password.
Btw. I also use the method of writing down my answers because I want to know that I don’t cheat ;)
In all subjects, except maybe math on some level, there are some basic facts that you just have to memorize and you can’t derive the answer from the other facts you know, so it makes sense.
Even if you could theoretically derive an answer it’s often still good to have that work precached. If you read a complicated scientific paper you need to have a lot of knowledge precached and can’t spend time to derive facts from other facts.
It has to go hand in hand with trying to understand the subject at hand though, otherwise it would be just trying to guess the teacher’s password.
Yes. That one of the reasons why it’s usually better to make your own cards than to use the deck that someone else created.
Wozniak’s rule number one: “Do not learn if you do not understand” and rule two: “Learn before you memorize”.
Theoretically I think that it’s possible to create good decks that other people can use, but it’s no easy project.
I’ve found that once you learn a complex concept, and then add its constituent parts to anki, you will still retain the concept as long as you review the simple stuff. You can also do it the other way: learn the parts and then play with them in your head to learn the concept. Adding some redundancy, i.e. reviewing the same facts in many types of questions helps.
Also Anki has really taught me that any “conceptual understanding” can still be reduced into simple parts.
I’ve learned more about physics from school than I would have learned on my own, and I think your comment is pessimistic. University has advantages over the internet, even if your goal is simply to learn material.
Why did you learn more about physics from school than you would have on your own? Was it because of the external motivation? Or was it because the quality of instruction was better than if you had made use of whichever textbook got the best reviews on Amazon, and then asked questions on Physics Forums?
External motivation is a huge part. Part of it is just the fact that my entire job right now is to learn physics and impress professors. Much of my learning happens in class, but much of it also happens in the labs that I work and from the grad students that I bother. Another overlooked advantage is the enormous group of peers who are learning the exact same material as me at the same time as me. Physics forums doesn’t even come close to this utility. (edit edit: ##physics on freenode is pretty good source too)
This all combined is well worth the price tag to me. For others it may not be; I’m just one data point after all ;)
edit: lots of people don’t take advantage of their university of course, but they tend to be the sort on the bottom end, not the top, which is who I think you’re addressing.
Another overlooked advantage is the enormous group of peers who are learning the exact same material as me at the same time as me.
Exactly. The peer pressure. It’s not the same if those peers are merely online; and sometimes you don’t even have that.
Perhaps one day we will have something analogical to coworking… colearning. I could imagine colearning “schools” where people come to learn from online materials, and then discuss with their peers. But there would have to be many people doing this in the same area, so that you could always find people learning the same thing as you do.
What sealed my decision to spend my last two years of high school at the state Math and Science school instead of the same public high school I’d been attending was the realization that I was learning more from the internet than I was in classes, with the exception of a few chemistry concepts that I never thought of looking up.
When I graduated, I realized that even the Math and Science school didn’t catch up with what I’d learned from the internet until the final semester. I’d still say it was worth it, and I decidedly did not optimize (mostly because I was still thinking of science more as “stuff scientists discovered” than “an insanely useful method that you should pay attention to outside of science fairs”), but college? Not so much. There were benefits, sure (I think the main one Crux left out that I completely failed to even try at is networking with professionals in a broader sense than work experience), but the most important things I learned while at college were things that came entirely from the internet or experiences on holidays. There were quite a few things I stubbornly tried not to believe (mostly things about human psychology) that were thoroughly demolished by the internet (especially when I finally got to LessWrong, but by then it was a bit late and I was already in the “No, I’m not doing this anymore” phase of college.).
In spite of all of this, I’m still frustrated with my timing; college really could have been an outstanding opportunity had I, say, read the sequences a year earlier. Attending college is an incredibly easy way to access resources like labs, equipment, experts and cheap labor (especially if you can turn a project into academic credit, which I totally could have at my college; I would have gotten credit for this terrible virtual series had I just finished the blasted paperwork. (*mumbles something about a RATIONAL! rewrite*)). For example, when it manifested that Senseg might have been overly optimistic with their predictions on getting their tactile technology on shelves early in 2013, I found myself frustrated that the technology is so simple that I could toss together a simple example over an afternoon if I had any of the resources I had since my junior year of high school, but I wound up not learning about this until the cost of going back was way too large for way too small a benefit and my resources had largely dried up.
So I absolutely agree: you can get a college education by only taking courses with Dr. Google. Other professional goals, skills, or structure-based needs might be satisfied by college, but there’s no point in spending thousands of dollars just for the data in the courses.
Other professional goals, skills, or structure-based needs might be satisfied by college,
As you pointed out earlier in your response, Internet learning (and LW in particular) could have been particularly useful before attending college. I would go one step further and suggest that attending college and learning from the internet should not be mutually exclusive for those who are interesting in learning and making a potential college social life trade-off.
I currently believe that most students attending college realize that the degree itself is of primary signalling importance, even if they’re not able to explicitly articulate why.
I would go one step further and suggest that attending college and learning from the internet should not be mutually exclusive for those who are interesting in learning and making a potential college social life trade-off.
I don’t think that college is ideal for social life. If you go to meetups you can meet like minded people whether or not you are in college.
Nobody who knows what they’re talking about would ever suggest going to college for the purpose of getting an education. We have the Internet for that. If you need structure in your life (e.g., forced to wake up early 5x/week), or you need motivation (e.g., want to learn math but keep procrastinating), or something like that, and a degree would help you out (e.g., because you’re young and you’re looking for an entry-level position in a particular industry), then by all means, go to college. But if you just want to learn, then you’re wasting your time.
Think about it this way. Not even getting into the messed up incentive structure of the university system, just consider how random your professors are. You’re confined to a particular university in a particular location. On the Internet, on the other hand, you can go wherever you want, and find the particular niche community you need for what you’re working on. And with this, we come to a more direct answer to your question: Reading Less Wrong would probably be much more useful than taking whatever college course you would end up in on the subjects most relevant here (basic epistemology, etc), but if you want to start learning math or physics for example, then Less Wrong wouldn’t be of much use, and instead you’d want to for example check out Amazon for textbook reviews, and then head on over to a good forum on the topic (Physics Forums, perhaps?).
Or you want someone to give you feedback on your homework and answer your questions (and hence a chance to clear up your misconceptions), or you want hands-on experience with lab equipment, or you want to socialize with other people interested in the same things, or you want to be able to legally access papers behind a paywall for free, or...
I mentioned Physics Forums for math and physics, where you’d get all the feedback you could ever desire.
Valid point.
Why would you need college for that? If you keep procrastinating about getting out there and trying to meet people, college is a good way to self-bind oneself into feeling an obligation to show up somewhere on a regular basis that may lead to success in that area. But otherwise you could find people elsewhere.
Another valid point.
Overall though, I wouldn’t say you contradicted anything in my post. I absolutely did not say that going to college wouldn’t be a useful endeavor for plenty of people. It’s just that the reasons to go certainly have nothing to do with the quality of instruction or something like that, which is what the OP was about.
Socialization is qualitatively very different when you live in the same building as people who share your interests. Without this, every meeting has to be planned days in advance, and bootstrapping a friendship to the point where people are even willing to make plans with you is a huge hassle. I found this feature of college extremely valuable and many others do as well, even if you would not. (It’s true that this is really a feature of dorms, and classes themselves don’t help much with meeting people, but it’s still part of the experience, and how else are you going to concentrate hundreds of smart STEM-interested people into one or two city blocks?)
I guess that only applies in large cities with poor means of transportation. I often meet up with people on a half hour’s notice, and there are Schelling points where we can go and meet up without even having to make explicit plans at all.
Physics forums is not an adequate replacement for putting 6 people and a pizza together in a room with a whiteboard. The internet is great and all, but it’s simply not as easy to communicate half-formed ideas, and build off someone else’s poorly-thought-out insight over the web.
Communicating in meatspace with people I know personally is much more effective than over the Internet with strangers, all other things being equal (at least for me—YMMV).
Like where? Not only would I have no idea where to find half a dozen physicists hanging out together in my home town, I’m not even sure there are that many physicists at all there.
What? Except possibly for the socializing thing, all the things I mentioned have to do with instruction.
It’s low status to say one could benefit from external motivation and structure, but I suspect that for the vast majority of people and general, and also the majority of LWers, external motivation and structure are hugely valuable.
Tests are valuable to give you an idea of how you’re doing with learning stuff. IIRC, some education research suggests that spending an hour taking a test is actually substantially better for your understanding and long-term recall than spending an hour studying.
I think if you wanted to make a serious “alternative technical college education” for yourself, one way to do it would be to work on a series of technical projects that interested and motivated you, then learn whatever was necessary to complete the projects well (see this post by Robin Hanson). Probably find some local hackerspace so you don’t have to buy equipment, you get some social pressure/networking, and you can pick up some tacit knowledge from other hackers. If your projects were impressive, they could look good on your resume to the right employer (open-minded small business owner/startup founder?)
This strategy could be difficult because most people don’t have the balls to say “I am going to complete project X in a field that I know nothing about and learn whatever I need to know in order to complete the project on the fly”. You’d run a risk of getting intimidated and giving up, I think. A certain amount of confidence in your ability to understand anything given sufficient time, effort, and pestering of knowledgeable people (online or offline) would probably be necessary to make this work (relevant rationality quote). I still think going to college is a better idea for most people.
That’s why you use Anki ;)
Quick question: I have used Anki mainly for memorizing words in foreign languages—is it possible to do more complex and constructive learning with Anki than just memorizing facts?
I’ve tried it and found it easy to fall in to the habit of just answering the card without thinking too hard about the underlying concepts. Making good Anki cards for highly conceptual stuff like math and computer science requires a fair amount of effort and experience with Anki, IMO.
The goal of Anki is to avoid forgetting facts. There are subjects where you don’t need to know facts. You don’t ride a bicycle by knowing facts about bicycles but by having a skill that’s in muscle memory.
When it comes to learning science, learning facts is often useful. Whenever you encouter a new fact that seems important to you and where you think it’s important to remember that fact, create an Anki card.
The goal isn’t to write complex questions. It’s to make sure that you don’t forget the basics. When we learn a new topic we often focus to much on complex stuff and don’t recognise that we will forget most of the things we learn soon thereafter. Anki exists to prevent you from forgetting important basics and make those basics common sense.
My example cards from physiology for aldosterone:
Front: hormone(released by adrenal glands to regulate kidney function)
Back: aldosterone
Front: organ(aldosterone production)
Back: adrenal gland
Front: hormone.type(aldosterone)
Back: steroid
Front: organ(aldosterone increases ion reabsorbtion)
Back: kidney
Front: aldosterone ?(increases/decreases)? reabsorption in the kidney
Back: increases
Front: aldosterone ?(increases/decreases)? blood pressure
Back: increases
Do these cards tell me everything there to know about aldosterone? No, they don’t. On the other hand they show me basic facts about aldosterone. If you don’t know anything about aldosterone I think you can still understand my cards but you probably won’t remember the information a year later when you don’t put them into Anki.
All these cards I listed are made in a way where the I have to type the correct answer. I’m not 100% sure that this is optimal but I feel that it helps me. When I write down an answer it’s easier to compare the answer against the correct one than comparing one in the mind against the correct one. Less cheating ;) It also makes it clear when I can press enter to get the answer.
When it comes to creating cards about a new topic it’s helpful to think about how the knowledge is structured. In this case we have hormones that can belong to different types and organs that are affected by hormones.
I personally like the concept of questions of the type ?(increases/decreases)?. I have the feeling that they work better than questions that ask whether a claim is true or false that I used in the past. Again I have no good data for that recommendation. Cards of that type are usually easy to create for many subjects.
The goal when you create cards is to create them as easy as possible. When you use Anki you don’t spend most of your time with cards that you forget from time to time.
Even for knowledge that you know there a difference between whether your brain needs 1 second or 5 to access knowledge about a given basic. Learning basics well is useful.
Thanks for a really comprehensive answer even though it was only a quick question ;) Your way of using Anki is quite creative, mine is pretty close to rote memorization and I have only applied it to foreign languages so far. Maybe I should think about using it on other subjects. In all subjects, except maybe math on some level, there are some basic facts that you just have to memorize and you can’t derive the answer from the other facts you know, so it makes sense. It has to go hand in hand with trying to understand the subject at hand though, otherwise it would be just trying to guess the teacher’s password.
Btw. I also use the method of writing down my answers because I want to know that I don’t cheat ;)
Even if you could theoretically derive an answer it’s often still good to have that work precached. If you read a complicated scientific paper you need to have a lot of knowledge precached and can’t spend time to derive facts from other facts.
Yes. That one of the reasons why it’s usually better to make your own cards than to use the deck that someone else created.
Wozniak’s rule number one: “Do not learn if you do not understand” and rule two: “Learn before you memorize”.
Theoretically I think that it’s possible to create good decks that other people can use, but it’s no easy project.
I’ve found that once you learn a complex concept, and then add its constituent parts to anki, you will still retain the concept as long as you review the simple stuff. You can also do it the other way: learn the parts and then play with them in your head to learn the concept. Adding some redundancy, i.e. reviewing the same facts in many types of questions helps.
Also Anki has really taught me that any “conceptual understanding” can still be reduced into simple parts.
I’ve learned more about physics from school than I would have learned on my own, and I think your comment is pessimistic. University has advantages over the internet, even if your goal is simply to learn material.
Why did you learn more about physics from school than you would have on your own? Was it because of the external motivation? Or was it because the quality of instruction was better than if you had made use of whichever textbook got the best reviews on Amazon, and then asked questions on Physics Forums?
External motivation is a huge part. Part of it is just the fact that my entire job right now is to learn physics and impress professors. Much of my learning happens in class, but much of it also happens in the labs that I work and from the grad students that I bother. Another overlooked advantage is the enormous group of peers who are learning the exact same material as me at the same time as me. Physics forums doesn’t even come close to this utility. (edit edit: ##physics on freenode is pretty good source too)
This all combined is well worth the price tag to me. For others it may not be; I’m just one data point after all ;)
edit: lots of people don’t take advantage of their university of course, but they tend to be the sort on the bottom end, not the top, which is who I think you’re addressing.
Exactly. The peer pressure. It’s not the same if those peers are merely online; and sometimes you don’t even have that.
Perhaps one day we will have something analogical to coworking… colearning. I could imagine colearning “schools” where people come to learn from online materials, and then discuss with their peers. But there would have to be many people doing this in the same area, so that you could always find people learning the same thing as you do.
What sealed my decision to spend my last two years of high school at the state Math and Science school instead of the same public high school I’d been attending was the realization that I was learning more from the internet than I was in classes, with the exception of a few chemistry concepts that I never thought of looking up.
When I graduated, I realized that even the Math and Science school didn’t catch up with what I’d learned from the internet until the final semester. I’d still say it was worth it, and I decidedly did not optimize (mostly because I was still thinking of science more as “stuff scientists discovered” than “an insanely useful method that you should pay attention to outside of science fairs”), but college? Not so much. There were benefits, sure (I think the main one Crux left out that I completely failed to even try at is networking with professionals in a broader sense than work experience), but the most important things I learned while at college were things that came entirely from the internet or experiences on holidays. There were quite a few things I stubbornly tried not to believe (mostly things about human psychology) that were thoroughly demolished by the internet (especially when I finally got to LessWrong, but by then it was a bit late and I was already in the “No, I’m not doing this anymore” phase of college.).
In spite of all of this, I’m still frustrated with my timing; college really could have been an outstanding opportunity had I, say, read the sequences a year earlier. Attending college is an incredibly easy way to access resources like labs, equipment, experts and cheap labor (especially if you can turn a project into academic credit, which I totally could have at my college; I would have gotten credit for this terrible virtual series had I just finished the blasted paperwork. (*mumbles something about a RATIONAL! rewrite*)). For example, when it manifested that Senseg might have been overly optimistic with their predictions on getting their tactile technology on shelves early in 2013, I found myself frustrated that the technology is so simple that I could toss together a simple example over an afternoon if I had any of the resources I had since my junior year of high school, but I wound up not learning about this until the cost of going back was way too large for way too small a benefit and my resources had largely dried up.
So I absolutely agree: you can get a college education by only taking courses with Dr. Google. Other professional goals, skills, or structure-based needs might be satisfied by college, but there’s no point in spending thousands of dollars just for the data in the courses.
As you pointed out earlier in your response, Internet learning (and LW in particular) could have been particularly useful before attending college. I would go one step further and suggest that attending college and learning from the internet should not be mutually exclusive for those who are interesting in learning and making a potential college social life trade-off.
I currently believe that most students attending college realize that the degree itself is of primary signalling importance, even if they’re not able to explicitly articulate why.
I don’t think that college is ideal for social life. If you go to meetups you can meet like minded people whether or not you are in college.