I’m glad to hear I’m not alone with the “getting stuck on stupid stuff” thing!
My favorite brand of wasted effort is when I’m reading a technical text, the text says something that I feel doesn’t make sense, I spend half an hour backtracking and trying to figure it out, until I finally move on—and realize that if I had just kept reading, they would have explained it in the very next paragraph. Anyone else do that?
Yes, I’ve definitely experienced that quite often—despite having been exposed to Ian Stewart’s good advice in Letters To A Young Mathematician that your first tactic when you don’t understand something should be to just keep reading.
Yeah, sometimes, though I remember more cases where I was “wait a minute, there’s a mistake here!” or “this is completely sub-optimal” and would put that in my notes, and a few paragraphs later he would explain the mistake or how to do it more optimally etc. But I don’t see it as wasted effort, more as a small opportunity to pat myself on the back at how well I understand the material—I guess it’s the difference between thinking about it five minutes versus half an hour.
This is why I read through at least the whole chapter first, and mark paragraphs I don’t understand along the way. Annoyingly often paragraphs are just poorly written, and make sense only when you’ve learned the whole concept elsewhere.
I’m glad to hear I’m not alone with the “getting stuck on stupid stuff” thing!
My favorite brand of wasted effort is when I’m reading a technical text, the text says something that I feel doesn’t make sense, I spend half an hour backtracking and trying to figure it out, until I finally move on—and realize that if I had just kept reading, they would have explained it in the very next paragraph. Anyone else do that?
IIRC, Feynman once said “read until you can’t understand anything, and then start from the beginning”
Yes, I’ve definitely experienced that quite often—despite having been exposed to Ian Stewart’s good advice in Letters To A Young Mathematician that your first tactic when you don’t understand something should be to just keep reading.
Yeah, sometimes, though I remember more cases where I was “wait a minute, there’s a mistake here!” or “this is completely sub-optimal” and would put that in my notes, and a few paragraphs later he would explain the mistake or how to do it more optimally etc. But I don’t see it as wasted effort, more as a small opportunity to pat myself on the back at how well I understand the material—I guess it’s the difference between thinking about it five minutes versus half an hour.
This is why I read through at least the whole chapter first, and mark paragraphs I don’t understand along the way. Annoyingly often paragraphs are just poorly written, and make sense only when you’ve learned the whole concept elsewhere.