Between that, and regularly reading new material in certain places, as well as looking for more information about topics I’m interested in, that’s about it for being systematic. At the moment, I’m trying to figure out how to make things more organized so things can be found more easily (the more information you store, the harder it is to find what you’re looking for, so the more benefit there is to organization, and the harder it is to add organization later). One way to fix this would be to make/use a system which automatically adds tags when you bookmark things.
I use wikipedia* and google a fair bit.
In my head:
If you want to get good in an area, practice regularly/a lot. This may be easier to do for things you enjoy more, or you might enjoy things you’re good at more***. I have habits around (some parts of) math like this. I lean more towards solving problems than keeping the solutions around (outside of my head), but I try to see how general a solution can be made. If you don’t work with an area (like probability) for a long time, it can take some reviewing to get back up to speed. (Like calculating the conditional probabilities in the Monty Hall problem, then making sure the probabilities all add up to one.)
Doing more of this for other things, specifically programming, is an area I’m trying to improve right now. The hardest part is probably getting started.
*I love this site, but the quality varies a lot. You’d think math would be empirical enough that there wouldn’t ever be misinformation, but, it’s important to pay attention to assumptions** some of the time. (Which is hard to do if you don’t understand an area.) Popularity, accessibility, and complexity can exacerbate this issue.
**Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem summarized well: “Your voting system can’t do all 5 of these things.” This might generalize.
I should really read**** that book.
Storing knowledge:
Between that, and regularly reading new material in certain places, as well as looking for more information about topics I’m interested in, that’s about it for being systematic. At the moment, I’m trying to figure out how to make things more organized so things can be found more easily (the more information you store, the harder it is to find what you’re looking for, so the more benefit there is to organization, and the harder it is to add organization later). One way to fix this would be to make/use a system which automatically adds tags when you bookmark things.
I use wikipedia* and google a fair bit.
In my head:
If you want to get good in an area, practice regularly/a lot. This may be easier to do for things you enjoy more, or you might enjoy things you’re good at more***. I have habits around (some parts of) math like this. I lean more towards solving problems than keeping the solutions around (outside of my head), but I try to see how general a solution can be made. If you don’t work with an area (like probability) for a long time, it can take some reviewing to get back up to speed. (Like calculating the conditional probabilities in the Monty Hall problem, then making sure the probabilities all add up to one.)
Doing more of this for other things, specifically programming, is an area I’m trying to improve right now. The hardest part is probably getting started.
*I love this site, but the quality varies a lot. You’d think math would be empirical enough that there wouldn’t ever be misinformation, but, it’s important to pay attention to assumptions** some of the time. (Which is hard to do if you don’t understand an area.) Popularity, accessibility, and complexity can exacerbate this issue.
**Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem summarized well: “Your voting system can’t do all 5 of these things.” This might generalize.
***Not sure which way the arrows point here.
****Or listen to.