I think that an extremely effective way to get a better feel for a new subject is to pay an online tutor to answer your questions about it for an hour.
It turns that there are a bunch of grad students on Wyzant who mostly work tutoring high school math or whatever but who are very happy to spend an hour answering your weird questions.
For example, a few weeks ago I had a session with a first-year Harvard synthetic biology PhD. Before the session, I spent a ten-minute timer writing down things that I currently didn’t get about biology. (This is an exercise worth doing even if you’re not going to have a tutor, IMO.) We spent the time talking about some mix of the questions I’d prepared, various tangents that came up during those explanations, and his sense of the field overall.
I came away with a whole bunch of my minor misconceptions fixed, a few pointers to topics I wanted to learn more about, and a way better sense of what the field feels like and what the important problems and recent developments are.
There are a few reasons that having a paid tutor is a way better way of learning about a field than trying to meet people who happen to be in that field. I really like it that I’m paying them, and so I can aggressively direct the conversation to wherever my curiosity is, whether it’s about their work or some minor point or whatever. I don’t need to worry about them getting bored with me, so I can just keep asking questions until I get something.
Conversational moves I particularly like:
“I’m going to try to give the thirty second explanation of how gene expression is controlled in animals; you should tell me the most important things I’m wrong about.”
“Why don’t people talk about X?”
“What should I read to learn more about X, based on what you know about me from this conversation?”
All of the above are way faster with a live human than with the internet.
I think that doing this for an hour or two weekly will make me substantially more knowledgeable over the next year.
Various other notes on online tutors:
Online language tutors are super cheap—I had some Japanese tutor who was like $10 an hour. They’re a great way to practice conversation. They’re also super fun IMO.
Sadly, tutors from well paid fields like programming or ML are way more expensive.
If you wanted to save money, you could gamble more on less credentialed tutors, who are often $20-$40 an hour.
If you end up doing this, I’d love to hear your experience.
I’ve hired tutors around 10 times while I was studying at UC-Berkeley for various classes I was taking. My usual experience was that I was easily 5-10 times faster in learning things with them than I was either via lectures or via self-study, and often 3-4 one-hour meetings were enough to convey the whole content of an undergraduate class (combined with another 10-15 hours of exercises).
How do you spend time with the tutor? Whenever I tried studying with a tutor, it didn’t seem more efficient than studying using a textbook. Also when I study on my own, I interleave reading new materials and doing the exercises, but with a tutor it would be wasteful to do exercises during the tutoring time.
I usually have lots of questions. Here are some types of questions that I tended to ask:
Here is my rough summary of the basic proof structure that underlies the field, am I getting anything horribly wrong?
Examples: There is a series of proof at the heart of Linear Algebra that roughly goes from the introduction of linear maps in the real numbers to the introduction of linear maps in the complex numbers, then to finite fields, then to duality, inner product spaces, and then finally all the powerful theorems that tend to make basic linear algebra useful.
Other example: Basics of abstract algebra, going from groups and rings to modules, fields, general algebra’s, etcs.
“I got stuck on this exercise and am confused how to solve it”. Or, “I have a solution to this exercise but it feels really unnatural and forced, so what intuition am I missing?”
I have this mental visualization that I use to solve a bunch of problems, are there any problems with this mental visualization and what visualization/intuition pumps do you use?
As an example, I had a tutor in Abstract Algebra who was basically just: “Whenever I need to solve a problem of “this type of group has property Y”, I just go through this list of 10 groups and see whether any of them has this property, and ask myself why it has this property, instead of trying to prove it in abstract”
How is this field connected to other ideas that I am learning?
Examples: How is the stuff that I am learning in real analysis related to the stuff in machine learning? Are there any techniques that machine learning uses from real analysis that it uses to achieve actually better performance?
I feel like I would enjoy this experience a lot and potentially learn a lot from it, but thinking about figuring out who to reach out to and how to reach out to them quickly becomes intimidating for me.
I think that an extremely effective way to get a better feel for a new subject is to pay an online tutor to answer your questions about it for an hour.
It turns that there are a bunch of grad students on Wyzant who mostly work tutoring high school math or whatever but who are very happy to spend an hour answering your weird questions.
For example, a few weeks ago I had a session with a first-year Harvard synthetic biology PhD. Before the session, I spent a ten-minute timer writing down things that I currently didn’t get about biology. (This is an exercise worth doing even if you’re not going to have a tutor, IMO.) We spent the time talking about some mix of the questions I’d prepared, various tangents that came up during those explanations, and his sense of the field overall.
I came away with a whole bunch of my minor misconceptions fixed, a few pointers to topics I wanted to learn more about, and a way better sense of what the field feels like and what the important problems and recent developments are.
There are a few reasons that having a paid tutor is a way better way of learning about a field than trying to meet people who happen to be in that field. I really like it that I’m paying them, and so I can aggressively direct the conversation to wherever my curiosity is, whether it’s about their work or some minor point or whatever. I don’t need to worry about them getting bored with me, so I can just keep asking questions until I get something.
Conversational moves I particularly like:
“I’m going to try to give the thirty second explanation of how gene expression is controlled in animals; you should tell me the most important things I’m wrong about.”
“Why don’t people talk about X?”
“What should I read to learn more about X, based on what you know about me from this conversation?”
All of the above are way faster with a live human than with the internet.
I think that doing this for an hour or two weekly will make me substantially more knowledgeable over the next year.
Various other notes on online tutors:
Online language tutors are super cheap—I had some Japanese tutor who was like $10 an hour. They’re a great way to practice conversation. They’re also super fun IMO.
Sadly, tutors from well paid fields like programming or ML are way more expensive.
If you wanted to save money, you could gamble more on less credentialed tutors, who are often $20-$40 an hour.
If you end up doing this, I’d love to hear your experience.
I’ve hired tutors around 10 times while I was studying at UC-Berkeley for various classes I was taking. My usual experience was that I was easily 5-10 times faster in learning things with them than I was either via lectures or via self-study, and often 3-4 one-hour meetings were enough to convey the whole content of an undergraduate class (combined with another 10-15 hours of exercises).
How do you spend time with the tutor? Whenever I tried studying with a tutor, it didn’t seem more efficient than studying using a textbook. Also when I study on my own, I interleave reading new materials and doing the exercises, but with a tutor it would be wasteful to do exercises during the tutoring time.
I usually have lots of questions. Here are some types of questions that I tended to ask:
Here is my rough summary of the basic proof structure that underlies the field, am I getting anything horribly wrong?
Examples: There is a series of proof at the heart of Linear Algebra that roughly goes from the introduction of linear maps in the real numbers to the introduction of linear maps in the complex numbers, then to finite fields, then to duality, inner product spaces, and then finally all the powerful theorems that tend to make basic linear algebra useful.
Other example: Basics of abstract algebra, going from groups and rings to modules, fields, general algebra’s, etcs.
“I got stuck on this exercise and am confused how to solve it”. Or, “I have a solution to this exercise but it feels really unnatural and forced, so what intuition am I missing?”
I have this mental visualization that I use to solve a bunch of problems, are there any problems with this mental visualization and what visualization/intuition pumps do you use?
As an example, I had a tutor in Abstract Algebra who was basically just: “Whenever I need to solve a problem of “this type of group has property Y”, I just go through this list of 10 groups and see whether any of them has this property, and ask myself why it has this property, instead of trying to prove it in abstract”
How is this field connected to other ideas that I am learning?
Examples: How is the stuff that I am learning in real analysis related to the stuff in machine learning? Are there any techniques that machine learning uses from real analysis that it uses to achieve actually better performance?
This isn’t just you! See Bloom’s 2 sigma effect.
Hired an econ tutor based on this.
How do you connect with tutors to do this?
I feel like I would enjoy this experience a lot and potentially learn a lot from it, but thinking about figuring out who to reach out to and how to reach out to them quickly becomes intimidating for me.
I posted on Facebook, and LW might actually also be a good place for some subset of topics.
I recommend looking on Wyzant.
nowadays, GPT-4 substantially obsoletes tutors.
Are there specific non-obvious prompts or custom instructions you use for this that you’ve found helpful?
This sounds like a really fun thing I can do at weekends / in the mornings. I’ll try it out and report back sometime.
Thanks for posting this. After looking, I’m definitely tempted.
I’d be excited about more people posting their experiences with tutoring