That said, I'm not a social media user besides HN I guess.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172483

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

This is a silly distinction anyway. Blocking ads is an obvious first step to improving browser security.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172101

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172054

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

- Engage with what you're reading. Ask yourself what the key ideas are, which ideas are new to you, how you would define them, and how they relate to other ideas you already understand.

- Test yourself. Do the excercises at the end of a textbook chapter. Create your own questions and answer them. Quiz yourself at least once a week (on both new and old material). Check your answers and correct yourself (if you were wrong, how, and why?). Use flashcards with a spaced repetition regime (like Anki)

- Focus on your retrieval. Avoid looking things up unless you really have to. Each time you recall something you've learned, you reinforce it.

- Your first encounter with new information may need a small interval of just a few minutes or hours, but you should gradually increase the interval periods between quizzes/flashcards on something. The longer you go between recalling something the more it gets reinforced because you have to work harder for it. Build up gradually.

- Use what you got wrong in quizzes or flashcards to identify what needs work.

- Focus on the material you get wrong, but don't totally neglect things you feel comfortable with.

- Basically, use Anki/spaced repetition.

- Take some time between study sessions and quizzing. (I think of studying like kneading dough, you need to let your brain relax some before you work it some more).

- When studying a subject, interleave different but related topics.

- Topics should be complementary and reinforce one another so that insights from one lead to insights in the other. Examples: calculus and rocketry. Spherical trig and astronomy or celestial navigation. German idealism and eastern philosophy. Etc.

- Once you have a rudimentary grasp of a new type of problem, move onto something new, but make sure to return to this type of problem periodically. (Basically, add this type of problem to your flashcard deck). Don't worry about mastering one type of problem so you can do it your sleep before moving to the next thing.

Some other key things:

- Elaboration: Relate material to what you already know. Explain it in your own words. Visualize it. Imagine it in different contexts (if you're learning calculus, imagine your speed and acceleration while biking in hilly terrain in terms of derivatives, etc).

- Generation: Attempt to answer a problem before you know the solution. This excercises your creativity and gets you looking for similarities to other types of problems you already understand. Before reading new material, make a quick summary of what you expect to learn and how it will relate to your prior knowledge.

- Reflection: take a few minutes to reflect on what you've learned that day. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experience does this remind you of? What do you need to work on? Etc.

- Calibration: you need an objective measure of what you do and do not understand. Humans are pretty bad at gauging this for themselves without some sort of external measure. This gets back to flashcards.

- Consider using some mnemonic devices. They can be very effective.

- When reading a textbook, don't bother with crazy highlighter schemes. Research shows it doesn't really help. Neither does reading textbook material more than maybe twice unless you have a particular point you're confused about. What does help is spaced repetition and summarizing the material in your own words.

This all sounds like a lot of effort, but one of the key things to remember is that learning is effort. Struggle is basically necessary for your brain to optimize and form new connections, or even to reinforce old ones, and if you aren't struggling you're probably just doing what your brain is already optimized for, which means you probably aren't learning much.

Come to think of it, this is America dammit. Cops should be licensed, bonded and insured, and if their training or records aren't up to standards they don't get covered. We have higher standards for plumbers and pest control than we do police.