I think there’s a lot of the intuitions and thought processes that let you come up with new discoveries in mathematics and machine learning that aren’t generally taught in classes or covered in textbooks. People are also quite bad at conveying their intuitions behind topics directly when asked to in Q&As and speeches. I think that at least in machine learning, hanging out with good ML researchers teaches me a lot about how to think about problems, in a way that I haven’t been able to get even after reading their course notes and listening to their presentations. Similarly, I suspect that autobiographies may help convey the experience of solving problems in a way that actually lets you learn the intuitions or thought processes used by the author.
I think there’s a lot of the intuitions and thought processes that let you come up with new discoveries in mathematics and machine learning that aren’t generally taught in classes or covered in textbooks. People are also quite bad at conveying their intuitions behind topics directly when asked to in Q&As and speeches. I think that at least in machine learning, hanging out with good ML researchers teaches me a lot about how to think about problems, in a way that I haven’t been able to get even after reading their course notes and listening to their presentations. Similarly, I suspect that autobiographies may help convey the experience of solving problems in a way that actually lets you learn the intuitions or thought processes used by the author.