Scott Young is the ultimate adventurer in learning. He's compressed the entire four-year MIT curriculum for computer science into one year of independent learning and is now wrapping up a year's travel learning four different languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Korean through total immersion in each of the countries. Scott doesn't just study learning from an academic perspective. He immerses himself in learning at perceptively observes the results, so that we can all gain from it. So, it's a pleasure to welcome Scott Young.
Scott, I'm always excited to follow your adventures. So tell me, where are you now and what is your latest learning challenge?
Right. So, right now at the moment, I'm actually in South Korea in Seoul, not too far away from Gangnam actually, and I'm learning Korean, and this is part of a larger project where a friend and I are traveling for a year, staying three months in four different countries, so three months each, trying to learn the language of that country through not speaking English as much as possible.
Wow, I'm just so impressed just sort of a Marco Polo of learning. I was also impressed by your MIT challenge in learning. What you did was you compressed a four-year curriculum of computer science into one year of independent learning. There are a lot of questions I have for you in relation to that experience as well as your language learning experience. So first, can you tell us, how do you avoid illusions of competence in learning?
Right. Well, I'm a big fan of trying to dive into a position where you might be wrong as soon as possible. So when you're just listening to a lecture, reading a textbook, you can't ever really be wrong. There's no real check on whether you know what you know and I really like getting into problems as quickly as possible, with a language, trying to speak as quickly as possible, or if not speaking as quickly as possible, testing my listening comprehension in a strict way. So with the MIT challenge, I would work on problem sets, and I will do my best to do the problem sets without having the solutions at hand and try my best on any problem, and if I got stuck, if I couldn't finish, then of course, go to the problem and check to see the solution and learn it. But I think, only if you feel that grind of it first, if you feel that tension, that stress that you're not quite sure how to finish it, only then will you really remember how to do the problem for the future. So if you don't have that feeling of not being sure how to do it and that strain, I think it's hard to really improve your knowledge.
That goes right along with our own learning philosophy in this course which is test yourself as frequently as possible. So, one of the approaches that you have to learn that I absolutely love is that of self explanation. Can you explain to our viewers a little bit what you mean by self explanation? What is it and what kind of benefits can you get from it?
Right. Well, I got this idea of reading a biography of Richard Feynman, he was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and I forget the exact method that he used himself, but I remember him talking about being a Nobel Prize winner in theoretical Physics, he's a smart guy, and he was talking about a particular academic paper, particular concept he didn't understand, and his approach wasn't to throw his hands up and say, "Well, I don't get it, it hurts, too difficult", but he went through meticulously not only trying to understand everything that was in that paper but of the papers it sourced. He read through them very carefully and combed through them and tried to make sure he understood all the supporting ideas. So for me, I've kind of adapted that into this idea of taking a blank piece of paper out and writing as if I'm trying to teach someone else what this idea is all about or what this process for solving a particular type of problem is all about or what it means. What I find happens is that you usually get to points where you have some friction, where you have to be too vague or you can't really be as exact and precise as you want to be, and those are usually the things that you don't understand. So, you can go back to your notes, you can go back to the textbook, look up that exact spot and figure out, "Oh, this is the part I'm missing. I'm missing step three of this process. Or I don't really understand why step three works, maybe I can ask someone, a teacher or a friend." I think it's so smart to go look and intuit how other very creative people have approached their problem-solving and I always love Feynman's approach. He always said that it's very important that the first rule is not to fool yourself, but you are the easiest person to fool.
So, I just love how you're learning from other learners. One of your approaches that I really like is that of creating vivid examples. Can you give us an example of that?
So, the mind doesn't learn abstract things very well. It works a lot better when you have something very concrete you can point to and say, "Oh, this is how it works." Math and science is often full of things that are just pure abstraction. They only connect very loosely to things we can touch and feel. So, what I try to do is find simple analogies or metaphors and try to test them or see how to make them fit with the thing I'm trying to learn. So, it's kind of like looking through your mind for examples or stories or things that you are familiar with and like fitting a jigsaw piece into a puzzle, trying to figure out what's the right piece. So, I'll give you a quick example of that. I was learning about electricity, and one of the concepts you learn early on is voltage. Now, I didn't have a good intuition of what voltage was. So, I'm trying to make a mental picture of what voltage can be and I'm thinking about an electrical circuit. Well, it's a little bit like pipes with water. So, if the electrical circuit's like pipes with water, then what are all the components? Current's pretty easy, that's like the water flowing, I can get that. But what was voltage? I was like, was it like pressure? But if you look at the equations for pressure and if you look at the equations for voltage, they don't really look alike. So, that felt wrong. I realized that if you've studied electricity, you've usually also studied the gravity beforehand and what was the same was electric potential and gravitational potential. So, oh, voltage is like height. So I can imagine in my head that the high voltage wires are like pipes that are physically higher than the other pipes. So the water, when it rushes down, when it goes down from the high level to low level, it gives off a lot more energy because it's falling and that metaphor really helped me because not only was it something concrete that I'll never forget, but it also was fairly accurate and that I tested out a couple of things like pressure and I found, okay, this is the one that works. Sometimes, this process can take a little bit of time. I'm recapping this in two seconds but it really took me about an hour to comb through the notes to figure this one out. But you can ask professors, you can ask, "Hey, is this kind of like this?" Someone who really understands it can help you out or you can just do what I did and just try to fit different puzzle pieces and see what fits, because even if you don't find a good puzzle piece, you can still learn a lot more that way. Oh, I couldn't agree more. I do find that as the years have gone by, the most creative professors who I've worked with, researchers are always the ones who have used these kinds of analogies, and the ones who are more pedantic a little bit more by the book. Often artists creative about how they approach things, so I think that's a very intelligent way of going at everything.
Can you talk to our viewers just a little bit about motivation. How can you develop a passion for learning perhaps even in subjects you think you don't have a passion for? Any suggestions for mental tools people can use to help motivate themselves in their learning?
Well, I love this question because right now I'm learning languages and I'm currently learning my sixth Language, Korean right now. We're doing it in very tight time constraints so I've gotten a few e-mails from people who have heard about the project and they said, "Well, maybe you and your friend who are doing this have this natural talent for languages, this genetic gift." I think it's so funny because I remember the first time I was trying to learn a foreign language, French, we spent about the same amount of time that I'm spending here and I barely passed the exam, I got a D. I feel like I'm a fairly smart fellow on other things. So I didn't really let it get to me, but I think it's true for a lot of subjects that being intelligent within that subject is often a factor of just how much exposure you've had to it. So, if you're not used to Math, don't take that as a sign that maybe you're bad at Math but just that you need to put more time in and you'll get more motivation. It'll be easier to motivate yourself, you have more interest once you're better at it. You can get better at it by encouraging yourself to take on little steps, little mini projects. Once you complete that project, you build more confidence. With more confidence, you can do more things, you can understand more things and it becomes more interesting.
I loved your story that you gave of learning Math because I think that's just a perfect example and it's too bad that a lot of people just don't conceptualize the world that way. One thing that I really like about your own story is, you failed but you just learnt from failure. You didn't allow that to get to you. You just shifted your strategies and figured out what strategy was more successful. I think that's a sign of the best learners is not to be set back by failure, they just learn from it.
Absolutely.
So, I love how you've developed projects for self-education. Can you tell us a little more about what you've done this way and how our viewers might go about developing their own projects for self-education.
Right. So, I actually got this idea from a good friend. He's also and I think your recommended resources Benny Lewis. He was someone who told me, I remember he told me in person one day it's always have a mission. Basically just this idea of he would pick these three month missions for learning languages because that was usually how long he could secure a tourist visa to this place to try to learn as much as possible in three months. But it really struck me how different that was from the regular approach, the regular approach of going and I'm going to just learn this and I don't really have any concrete goals and I don't really have any specific motivation, and of course it tapers off and you don't achieve that much. What I found really helpful is making very concrete projects that are exciting to me. Something that you know, this is really interesting. So, when I did the MIT challenge, just this idea obsessed me. This idea of you know would it be possible to learn the things that an MIT student would learn in school without going to MIT? Where there's language learning project you know, would it be possible to get to a conversational level or a decent amount of level through complete immersion in four different countries in a year? So, I tend to pick these grand projects but I think you could pick something very simply. You could just say, "I want to try learning this over a month and I'm going to obsess about it and make it interesting." That's often how you can turn something that might otherwise be dull into something that fascinates you because it's this specific concrete challenge.
I like this approach. It seems very similar to what I did with helping to create this MOOC. So, any tips on effective use of online resources? Right. So, this is I think particularly relevant to your audience because a MOOC audience you're signed up through this through Coursera and you probably know about Coursera and edX and all of the great MOOC platforms. I really think these platforms are the future because they have such high quality courses, but it's still early days and I think that there's still a lot of subjects that people would like to learn but maybe there isn't a MOOC for it. I think there's also some disadvantages to MOOCs in particular, if you want to learn something a little bit more advanced, MOOCs can sometimes be a bit harder because they tend to be written for audience with no prerequisites, no requirements. So, you might feel if you wanted to do some Physics, it isn't just an intro Physics class, this is a little bit harder because you know they are expecting that I haven't learned Calculus or I haven't learned something different. So, what I recommend is using MIT's OpenCourseWare. It's incredible. It has literally hundreds, I don't know whether it has thousands of courses, but it has just such a huge volume of courses. Sometimes the courses aren't really well-supported like they don't have videos, they don't have, it's not as hands-on as these MOOCs but I found sometimes what they'll have is you'll have the exams in the problem sets and a list of the readings and a link to a textbook. I can buy the textbook used on Amazon for 15 bucks sometimes and I get it delivered and I would do it and honestly I felt like I sometimes learn more from those courses than the video lecture courses. So, I think if you are willing to be a bit more adventurous, there's literally almost no topic you can't learn through this structured university-like format through the resources available online. It's an explosion in learning how to learn. I mean, what's available now to the public is just absolutely phenomenal and so anyone who has an interest in pretty much anything can do some great exploration.
So, as our wrap-up question here, you've written that you can learn more by studying less. What do you mean by that?
All right, so I think you've touched on it a lot in this course that you're offering, that people get caught up in low efficiency, low intensity studying habits and because they learned a lot slower with those methods, they end up spending a lot more time studying. Because they're spending a lot more time studying which is naturally more tiring, you go into less efficient studying methods. It's a little bit like exercising. It's as if you're not getting the exercise results you want so you extend your workout from one hour to two hour but now you're not working out as more intensely so you make it four hours. Now, you really can't do more than just a light jog for four hours or maybe just walking and eventually it eats up all of your time but you're not having the intensity your muscles in your body really need to get physical improvement. Similarly, I think the same is true with mental improvement. So, what I tried to do is I tried to pick specific chunks of time that I'm going to study and they don't have to be too big. So, right now I'm learning Korean over these three months and I'm actually only doing three to four hours a day of studying time which is considerably less than I would say a typical full-time students studying Korean. But I think that I've been making quite good progress just because the actual time I'm spending is highly focuses this kind of test yourself feedback so that I am using things like Anki for flashcards and I'm doing actual conversations one-on-one with the tutor and these things are very efficient but they are also very intense but the benefit of that is that you have more time and you can relax outside of it.
Great advice, and as always great advice from you. I know I've learned a lot and really enjoyed following your adventures and getting new tips on learning from you. So, I thank you so much Scott and we'll see you on the flip side. Well, thank you very much for letting me be a part of this. I really hope that the students taking this course found some value in the video I put together.
Scott Young 是一个终极的学习冒险家。他将整个四年的麻省理工学院计算机科学课程压缩到一年的独立学习中，并且目前正在通过完全沉浸在每个国家中来完成一年的语言学习旅行。Scott 不仅仅从学术角度研究学习，他将自己沉浸在学习中，并敏锐地观察结果，以便我们都能从中受益。因此，很高兴欢迎 Scott Young。
“Scott，我一直很兴奋地关注你的冒险。所以告诉我，你现在在哪里，你最新的学习挑战是什么？”
“是的，目前我实际上在韩国首尔，离江南区不远，我正在学习韩语。这是我和朋友为期一年的更大计划的一部分，我们在四个不同的国家停留三个月，每个国家三个月，试图尽可能少说英语来学习那个国家的语言。”
“哇，我对这种学习方式感到非常印象深刻。我也对你在麻省理工学院的学习挑战印象深刻。你所做的是将四年的计算机科学课程压缩到一年的独立学习中。关于这个经历以及你的语言学习经历，我有很多问题要问你。首先，你能告诉我们如何避免在学习中的错觉吗？”
“是的，我是一个喜欢尽快进入可能出错的位置的人的粉丝。当你只是听讲座、阅读教科书时，你永远不会真正犯错。没有真正的检查来确定你是否知道你所知道的，我真的很喜欢尽快进入问题，用一种语言尝试尽可能快地说话，或者如果不能尽可能快地说，以严格的标准测试我的听力理解能力。所以在麻省理工学院的挑战中，我会做习题集，我会尽力在没有解决方案的情况下做习题集，并尽力解决任何问题。如果我卡住了，如果无法完成，那么当然会去解决问题并查看解决方案并学习它。但我认为只有当你感受到那种磨练的感觉时，当你感到紧张、压力和不确定如何完成时，你才能真正记住将来如何解决问题。所以如果你没有那种不确定如何去做的感觉和那种紧张感，我认为很难真正提高你的知识水平。”
“这与我们自己在这个课程中的学习哲学相吻合，即尽可能频繁地测试自己。所以你学到的一种方法我很喜欢，那就是自我解释。你能向我们的观众解释一下你所说的自我解释是什么意思吗？它是什么以及你可以从中获得什么好处？”
“好的。我有个想法，读一本理查德·费曼的传记，他是一位获得诺贝尔奖的物理学家，我忘了他具体用的是什么方法，但我记得他在谈论成为理论物理学诺贝尔奖得主时，他是个聪明的家伙，他谈到了一篇特别的学术论文，一个他不理解的概念，他的处理方式不是两手一摊说，‘哎呀，我不懂，太难了’，而是仔细地不仅试图理解那篇论文中的所有内容，还研究了它的来源论文。他非常认真地阅读和梳理这些论文，并努力确保自己理解所有的支持理念。所以对我来说，我已经把这种方法融入到这个观点中，拿出一张白纸写东西，就像我在尝试教别人这个观点的全部意义或解决某一类问题的过程是什么，或者它意味着什么。我发现通常你会遇到一些困难点，你必须变得太模糊或者不能像你想要的那样精确和准确，这些通常是你不理解的东西。所以，你可以回到你的笔记上，回到教科书上，找到那个确切的地方并弄清楚，‘哦，这是我缺少的部分。我缺少这个过程的第三步。或者我真的不明白为什么第三步有效，也许我可以问别人，老师或朋友。’我认为去看看其他非常有创造力的人是如何解决他们的问题是非常聪明的，我一直喜欢费曼的方法。他总是说第一条规则很重要，不要欺骗自己，但你最容易被自己愚弄。”
“所以，我喜欢你从其他学习者那里学到东西的方式。其中一个我真的很喜欢的方法是你创造生动的例子。你能给我们一个例子吗？”
“所以，大脑不太擅长抽象事物的学习。当你有一个非常具体的东西可以指出来说，‘哦，这就是它的工作原理’时，它会更好地工作。数学和科学经常充满了纯粹的抽象概念。它们与我们能触摸和感受到的事物的联系非常松散。所以，我尝试做的是找到简单的类比或隐喻并尝试测试它们或看看如何使它们适应我正在尝试学习的东西。所以这有点像在你的脑海中寻找例子或故事或你熟悉的东西并试着将拼图的一部分放入拼图中，试图找出正确的部分。所以我会给你一个快速的例子。我在学习电学时遇到了一个早期就要学会的概念是电压。现在，我对电压没有一个好的直觉。所以我试图在脑海中形成一个关于电压可能是什么样的画面并且我在想一个电路。嗯，这有点像水管里的水。所以如果电路像水管里的水一样，那么所有组成部分是什么呢？电流很容易理解，就像水流一样。但是什么是电压？我觉得它像压力吗？但是如果你看看压力的公式和电压的公式，它们看起来并不相似。所以感觉不对。我意识到如果你已经学过电学，你通常会事先也学过重力并且相同的东西是电位和重力势能。所以哦，电压就像高度。所以我可以在脑海中想象高压线就像比其他管道更高的管道一样物理上的更高。当水流下来时从高处到低处时它释放出更多的能量因为它在下落而这个类比真的帮助了我因为不仅是一个我不会忘记的具体事物而且它也相当准确而我测试了一些东西比如压力然后我发现好吧这是有效的有时这个过程需要一点时间我现在在两秒内回顾一下但它实际上花了我大约一个小时来梳理笔记以弄清楚这一点但是你可以让教授问你可以说嘿这个像这样吗？真正理解它的人可以帮助你或者你可以做我所做的事情只是试着将不同的拼图块放在一起看什么适合因为即使你找不到一个好的拼图块你也可以通过这种方式学到更多的东西哦我再同意不过了随着岁月流逝我最合作的最有创意的教授研究人员总是使用这些类比的那些更书呆子气一点的人往往艺术家对他们如何处理事物很有创造性所以我认为这是对一切事物的非常聪明的方法”
“你能和我们的观众谈一谈动机吗？你如何在那些你认为你没有激情的科目中培养学习的热情？人们可以使用哪些心理工具来帮助他们在学习中激励自己？”
“嗯，我喜欢这个问题，因为现在我正在学习语言，目前正在学习我的第六种语言——韩语。我们的时间非常紧张，所以我收到了一些人的电子邮件，他们听说了这个项目，他们说：“嗯，也许你和你的朋友在做这个项目时有天生的语言天赋，这是基因的礼物。”我觉得这很有趣，因为我还记得我第一次尝试学习一门外语——法语的时候，我们花了和我在这里差不多的时间，但我勉强通过了考试，得了D分。我觉得我在其他事情上是个相当聪明的人。所以我真的没有让它影响到我，但我认为对于很多科目来说，在这个科目上的智力通常是你接触它多少的一个因素。所以，如果你不习惯数学，不要把它当作你可能在数学上不好的标志，只是你需要花更多的时间，你会有更多的动力。一旦你做得更好，你就会更容易激励自己，你对它更感兴趣。你可以通过鼓励自己接受小步骤、小迷你项目来变得更好。一旦你完成了那个项目，你就会建立更多的信心。有了更多的信心，你就可以做更多的事情，理解更多的事情，它就会变得更容易。
“我喜欢你给出的学习数学的故事，因为我认为那是一个完美的例子，很遗憾很多人并没有以这种方式概念化世界。关于你自己的故事，我真正喜欢的一件事是，你失败了但你只是从失败中学习。你没有让那影响到你。你只是改变了策略并找出了哪种策略更成功。我认为最好的学习者的标志之一就是不被失败所挫败，他们只是从中学习。”
“绝对的。”
“所以，我喜欢你如何为自我教育制定项目。你能告诉我们更多关于你是如何做到这一点以及我们的观众如何为自己制定自我教育项目吗？”
“好的。实际上我是从一个好朋友那里得到这个想法的。他也是——我想你的推荐资源是Benny Lewis。他曾经告诉我，我记得有一天他亲自告诉我，总是有一个使命。基本上就是他会挑选这些为期三个月的语言学习任务，因为通常这是他可以在这个地区获得旅游签证的时间长度，以便在三个月内尽可能多地学习。但这真的让我意识到这与常规方法有多么不同——常规方法是我去学习这个，而我真的没有任何具体的目标和特定的动力，当然它会逐渐减少，你不会取得太多成就。我发现真正有帮助的是制定非常具体的、令我兴奋的项目。你知道的，这是真的有趣的东西。所以当我参加MIT挑战时，这个想法让我着迷了。这个想法是你知道是否有可能学习一个MIT学生在学校里学到的东西而不去MIT吗？那么在语言学习项目中呢？是否可能在一年内通过完全沉浸在四个不同的国家中达到会话水平或相当的水平？所以，我倾向于选择这些宏大的项目，但我认为你可以选择一个非常简单的事情。你可以说：“我想试着在一个月内学习这个，我会全身心投入并实现它。”这就是你通常可以把一些本来可能枯燥无味的事情变成让你着迷的事情的方法，因为它是这样的具体挑战。”
“我喜欢这种方法。它似乎与我帮助创建这个MOOC时所做的事情非常相似。那么，关于有效利用在线资源有什么建议吗？好的。所以，我认为这对您的听众特别相关，因为您通过Coursera注册了MOOC，您可能了解Coursera和edX以及所有伟大的MOOC平台。我真的认为这些平台是未来的趋势，因为它们提供的课程质量很高，但现在还处于初期阶段，我认为还有很多人想要学习的东西可能没有MOOC可以学习。我认为MOOC也有一些缺点，特别是如果你想学习一些更高级的东西，MOOC有时可能会更难，因为它们往往是为没有先修条件、没有要求的观众编写的。所以，如果你想学一些物理，这不仅仅是一个入门物理学课程，这会有点难，因为你知道你没有学过微积分或你没有学过其他不同的东西。所以我建议使用MIT的OpenCourseWare。这是不可思议的。它实际上有数百个，我不知道是否有数千个课程，但它有大量的课程。有时课程的支持不是很好，比如它们没有视频，它们不是像这些MOOC那样实践性强，但我发现有时它们会有的是你会在问题集中看到考试和阅读清单以及一本教科书的链接。我有时会在亚马逊上花15美元买到二手教科书，我会收到它并做它，老实说我觉得有时我从这些课程中学到的东西比视频讲座课程更多。所以，如果你愿意更加冒险一点，几乎没有任何主题你无法通过这种结构化的大学式格式和在线可用的资源来学习。这是一个爆炸性的学习如何学习的时期。我的意思是，现在公众可以获得的东西绝对是惊人的，所以任何对几乎任何事物都有兴趣的人都可以做一些很棒的探索。”
“作为我们这里的总结问题，你已经写过你可以通过少学习来学得更多。你是什么意思？”
“好的，所以我认为你在你这个课程中已经多次提到过，人们陷入了低效率、低强度的学习习惯中，因为他们用那些方法学得慢得多，他们最终花了更多的时间学习。因为他们花了更多的时间学习，这自然更累人，你就会进入效率更低的学习方法。这有点像锻炼。就好像你没有获得你想要的锻炼结果一样，所以你将你的锻炼从一个小时延长到两个小时，但现在你没有进行更高强度的锻炼，所以你让它变成四个小时。现在，你真的不能超过只是轻松慢跑四个小时或者也许只是散步，最终它会吃掉你所有的时间，但你的身体肌肉没有得到你需要的强度以获得身体上的改善。同样的道理也适用于精神上的提高。所以我试图做的是尝试挑选特定的时间段进行学习，它们不必太长。所以，现在我正在学习韩语这三个月里我实际上每天只做了三到四个小时的学习时间，这与典型的全职学生学习韩语的时间相比要少得多。但我认为我已经取得了相当好的进步，因为实际花费的时间非常专注于这种自我测试的反馈，所以我在使用Anki这样的闪卡工具和我与导师一对一进行实际对话这些东西非常高效但也非常密集的好处是你有更多的时间可以在其之外放松。”
“很好的建议，一如既往地来自您的好建议。我知道我已经学到了很多并且真的很享受跟随您的冒险并获得您关于学习的新的技巧。所以非常感谢斯科特，我们下次再见。嗯，非常感谢让我成为这个的一部分。我真心希望参加这门课程的学生在我制作的视频中找到了价值。”
扫一扫
被折叠的 条评论
为什么被折叠?
到【灌水乐园】发言
