Why Gould Is a Waste of Time

Thomas Sowell criticized Newsweek for not giving a careful analysis to the ideas in "The Bell Curve" when they attacked it and its authors. Unfortunately, many so-called scientists, like Stephen Jay Gould, also presented criticisms of the book that looked as though they had never read it. There is more to read and do than I will ever have time to get to, there is no way I am going to waste time reading the writings of someone who has proven to be too prejudiced to write accurately. If someone, like Gould, has written nonsense where I can recognize it, how can I trust
anything he writes where I might not be able to recognize the nonsense.

Overcoming Bias and Learning from the WWW

continuation of "The Web Is Still Not Adequate for Serious Study"

The theme of Overcoming Bias is more comprehensive than the name suggests. It is about improving, or at least not dis-improving, the future. Overcoming bias is only one of the means it discusses. Transhumanism, idea futures, friendly AI, all fit neatly into this more inclusive theme.

Robin Hanson writes about textbooks for satisfying reading in a comment to
Recommended Rationalist Reading.
"My general advice for undervalued reading: textbooks. Go to your nearest college bookstore, sit in the aisles, and browse and read textbooks on your main subjects of interest. Until you've read and understood textbooks, why bother with anything else?"
- - Posted by: Robin Hanson | October 01, 2007 at 07:36 PM

The WWW is diametrically opposed to that sort of reading and learning. Like television, but even more so because you are interacting with it, it encourages a scatterring of attention. Bored, or don't feel like working out the meaning of a difficult section? Click a link or Google a keyword - maybe you'll find an easier explanation, but at least you won't have to keep working at it.

I don't agree with much in Steve Talbott's book The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, but he has a few good ideas, that's where I originally saw the "scattering of attention" criticism.

Training

Steady, regular training does far more good in skill acquisition than occasional intense sessions. Sporadic practice often does no good at all in acquisition - though it can be enough to maintain skills that you rarely use, but don't want to lose.

Systematic and progressive training is the only way to safely achieve heavy physical training. Spradic heavy physical training can actually cause injury. Plateaus in physical training are often caused by trying too much too quickly, that is, by overtraining, heavy training with inadequate recovery cycles.

For either skill training or physical training, keep to a regular schedule of steady practice - without rushing or becoming impatient, or losing motivation.

Books on Self-Learning

My earlier post "Learning Journal and Record" besides my experience draws from The Independent Scholar's Handbook and This Way Out. And the opening quote from "Why Learning" is from the Prologue to The Independent Scholar's Handbook.


This way out;: A guide to alternatives to traditional college education in the United States, Europe and the Third World, John Coyne & Tom Hebert, 1972.

This book is divided into three sections, this review covers only the first, since the second and third, Experimental Colleges and Foreign Study, are too dated to be useful. The first section, Independent Study, is the best single source I have found on self education. It is geared more towards college age students (hence the title) with several chapters on moving out and for parents, but most of it deals with the nuts and bolts of learning and is applicable for everyone. As far as I can remember, it doesn't even mention computers, not surprising given its age.

The learning system in This Way Out is built around doing projects, though they also discuss tutorials and other ways to organize your study. I also found the brief description of an experimental program tried at MIT in 1968 interesting; instead of multiple regular classes per semester, they tried concentrated study, one class at a time, each for a solid month.

Two good quotes:

"Write lots of short papers. Long papers kill tutors and students alike. Write lots of short papers. It will teach you to write and that, as we will demonstrate later is essential."

"This is the big one. If you don't like to read, you'll have to stay in college. A college's faculty presumes that students don't read without threats of failure,. . . But if you like to read, if your natural desire to read wasn't thwarted in grade school, your education will take place, despite everything."


LIFELONG LEARNER (Touchstone Books), 1977, and The Independent Scholar's Handbook, revised edition 1993, both by Ronald Gross.

These are both largely inspirational with lots of vignettes of independent learners. Both also provide some techniques and resources for learning. The Independent Scholar's Handbook has more on techniques and is more up to date, which isn't saying much since even it is 16 years old. Neither, of course, has anything on the Web. The first half of chapter 2 in The Handbook has been the most useful part for me, the sections on keeping an intellectual journal and enterring new fields. The biggest drawbacks are the author's focus on the humanities, since I'm mainly interested in science and technology, and the liberal/Leftism peaking through his writing, especially in his choice of scholars to profile (e.g., Alvin Toffler and Barbara Tuchman).


Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better, John Holt, various editions 1976 to 2004, though as far as I can tell the later editions have only different introductions.

This has some practical stuff, mostly on finding people and resources for learning, mostly it's inspirational. It also has lots of anti-schooling stuff. Holt is also pretty liberal in a sort of mushy, feel good way, fortunately it doesn't get much in the way here. Holt's later book, Never Too Late: My Musical Life Story, is worth a read even if you're not particularly into music, but is almost purely inspirational.


I have seen books on "Distance Learning" on the Web, but have found nothing good on using the Web for study, witness my last post, "The Web Is Still Not Adequate for Serious Study". If you know of any good sources, on line or books, please leave a note in the comment.

The Web Is Still Not Adequate for Serious Study

The Internet is the world's largest library. It's just that all the books are on the floor.
-- John Allen Paulos

Reading this just before I published it, I realized I should define what I mean by "serious study". Serious study is opposed to shallow reading, which is very good for exploratory learning, and the web is more helpful with, though still not sufficient. It is also opposed to directed research where you are already familiar with the area and are looking for a specific item, for which the web is very useful, though again not adequate since too much stuff still isn't on line, but it is better for this than serious study. Serious study is when you are learning a new field in depth, the equivalent of college classes. You need specific information, but even more important you need an understanding of how facts and theories relate to each other.

Scattering your attention; the Web simply has too many distractions. It's hard to study from the web for the same reason most real studying in libraries is done in carrels rather than at tables.

Very hard and time consuming to find useful information; Google is NOT adequate. Google's ranking by links is a measure of popularity not value. It could be improved for this purpose, but made harder to use, if you could restrict "links from" in some way. I've had somewhat more luck in browsing blogs related to the topic, then following links from there - but that's still time consuming following the blogs. Bruce Schneier's blog, Freedom to Tinker, and Overcoming Bias have been the most productive recently for me.

Most pages are very shallow; many others are too narrow for learning, though decent papers for those already knowledgeable in field for research. Too much emphasis on new results, but most new results are wrong, many of the rest are incomplete. There are reprints of some older papers with proven value, but they are often hard to find.

Another problem that I have, from what I've read it doesn't seem to be a common problem though, is that I read easily and quickly from the screen, but have retention and recall difficulties for what I read on screen. This is one reason I tend to concentrate on blogs, very short pieces tend to be more memorable.

Knowing Lots of Facts

Knowing lots of facts absolutely matters in the real world. Having a good theoretical framework to organize them and logic (formal, informal, probablistic, or otherwise) to manipulate them help too - but not without real facts. Facts alone are worthless, you need good judgement too, but you cannot function at all without facts.

"How emotionally entangled are you with your point of view? Test yourself - defend an opposing view, believing your life depends upon it."
-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

This is really only useful for non-factual arguments, where your emotions are more likely to interfere. You can prove ANYTHING if you can ignore disconfirming evidence. It reminds me of a point in decision making - almost all of our choices are over-determined; that is, there are always good reasons to do almost anything we may want to; to make a good decision we also have to balance the reasons not to choose particular things.

"What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" -- what are the facts and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"
-- Robert A Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long and Time Enough for Love

One must be ready to discard his own ideas and theories if new facts overturn them. I think knowing lots of facts is the simplest way to notice and correct for your own biases. You are more likely to notice a contradiction between what you have just decided and a previously known fact than you are to directly notice a bias in your thinking; even after setting the decision aside and coming back to it you are still more likely to notice a contradiction than a bias.

Why Learning

"Begin at once - not today, or tomorrow, or at some remote indefinite date, but right now, at this precise moment - to choose some subject, some concept, some great name or idea or event in history on which you can eventually make yourself the world's supreme expert. Start a crash program immediately to qualify yourself for this self-assignment through reading, research, and reflection.

"I don't mean the sort of expert who avoids all the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. I mean one who has the most knowledge, the deepest insight, and the most audacious willingness to break new ground."

-- Max Schuster, quoted in Ron Gross, The Independent Scholar's Handbook, p.xiv


Curiosity and Learning in Advance of need AND
Generality of Knowledge and Abilities LEAD TO
Flexibility of Means and the Ability to Make
Better Choices in the Future


The more you know, the more alternative courses of action are available to you.

Learn to broaden your capabilities, strengthen your weaknesses, and hone your strengths.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-- Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough for Love


And in fact, I can do most of these, and many more.

As I become increasingly accomplished my ability to earn, pay, and create increase.

Knowledge is nothing without judgement - how it relates to other knowledge, how it can be used, what kinds of side effects (consequences) its use may have. Wisdom commonly refers to the ability to make good judgements.

Plateaus in Learning

Plateaus in learning have 2 major causes: the first is a transition between different stages of study and depths of knowledge. Initial study for recognition level is quick and easy, memorizing for the second level is not - you seem to stop learning despite working harder. If you continue working, however, you will again begin to see progress. Then, when trying to be able to put together what you have memorized to explain it in your own words and your own way, you will again feel slowed to a crawl for a time. And yet again, when you start trying to do original work.

The second major cause of plateaus is more common - a simple waning of motivation. Sometimes, there is a good cause, like tiredness from working too hard on something. More often you tried working from enthusiasm alone or from someone else's prodding, and when your enthusiasm waned or the other person stopped prodding you, you had no firmer motivation to back it up.

A third cause of plateaus, for physical work and exercise, is overtraining. Overtraining can be a simple failure of motivation, but it can also result from not giving your body enough recovery time between significant bouts of intense exercise. When you have to do hard, physical labor every day, as I did when doing landscaping, you have to space out any physical training more than someone who is in a less physically demanding job. Fortunately, the periods of daily, hard labor were only a few weeks at a time, so I could work around them.

Learning Journal and Record

Design your own education; no one else can know your needs and desires better than you. Your goals may, probably will, change over time, especially as you learn more, but you have to start somewhere. The best place to start is wherever you are. What's most worth learning for you right now?

A learning journal helps you to keep track of where you've been and to plan where you should study next. It also helps you to learn by making you pay enough attention to what you've been doing and to what you are thinking about doing in the future to record it accurately. Record your ideas, insights, reactions, reflections, problems, and doubts. Your journal is not about what you've learned so much as for what you have thought about it. Also for the future you need to develop your project plans and experiments starting with your hopes and dreams. Also review your journal, recall how you were and how you've changed.


When you're considering a learning project ask yourself:

1. Does it advance my purpose?

2. Will it be enjoyable or will I come to dread working on it?

3. Is it economical in, that is an efficient use of, both money and time?

4. What is the opportunity cost? That is, what else could I be doing with that money and time?


Record anything you think you may find useful about your learning:

1. Maintain a record of what you are working on, what you have completed, how you felt about the projects you have done, what you have learned from them, how you could have done them better.

2. Maintain a complete portfolio of material produced. Write something significant to yourself each day. Write lots of short papers.

3. Describe the particular work done to produce the materials.

4. Keep a chronological record of how the work progressed. Note particularly which parts you think deserve more care, these can become future projects.

5. List employers, co-workers, or employees who can verify parts of the portfolio and your description of your abilities.


These records are primarily for your own benefit, to help your learning be more effective, but secondarily you can use them for potential employers should you decide to work in your field of study.

Depth of Knowledge

Depth of Knowledge refers to how thoroughly you know and understand what
you have been studying.

Recognizing information seen before but not memorized. Information is familiar and you can relate parts when both are presented separately. This is what is mostly tested by multiple-choice tests. Never mistake scoring well on most multiple-choice texts as real learning.

Remembering information, memorizing lists & facts - building up your internal data bank. Working from memory you can present key facts and relationships that you have studied. This is a necessary foundation for deeper learning. If you cannot remember details, then you cannot reason from them. Too often this step is skimped in modern schooling; rote memorization is often necessary for real learning to take place. The most important thing to remember here is that you must PAY ATTENTION to what you are trying to remember. Repeated exposure is necessary for memorization - but you also have to pay attention to the material. The better you pay attention, the less it will need to be repeated for real learning to take place. Having a theoretical framework for the material to fit will also help since we remember mostly by association, this helps recall that. Recall is best tested by fill-in-the-blank type tests and short essay-type questions.

Because memorization is so time and effort intensive, don't waste your time memorizing things that are not important. First, you must remember the basics - arithmetic, spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. Next, you must remember things that you may need without time or references available, when you need them, first aid and various other emergency skills. While learning, you need to memorize things that further learning will depend on, the basic facts and relationships in whatever field you are studying. Finally, when actually working in a field, you need to remember frequently used information that it would waste considerable time looking up repeatedly. These are also important to keep in mind, because to keep things memorized, you need to refresh the memory periodically. The first and last categories you will actually keep refreshed, if you are conscientious in their use by using them. The hardest to keep up on is the second category, emergency skills.

In the third level of knowledge, you understand the material and are able to explain things in your own words. You can draw new relationships between facts. You need to be able to remember details to explain things in your own words - for a long time I deluded myself that I could understand the material because I could follow along with the explanation easily enough as I read it. But you do not truly understand something until you can explain it in your own words from memory.

Finally, you can use information in papers and discussions to articulate and defend what you know. You know the subject well enough to do independent, original research. Here you are learning in your subject primarily by working in the field rather than from others.

Stages of Study

Stages of Study refers to how far into your current particular item of study, essay, article, textbook chapter, classroom lecture you have gotten or intend to get.

Initial Study

First stage of study - acquiring the information that you intend to make your own. At the completeion of initial study you will have acquired recognition depth of knowledge. The other three depths of knowledge are not coordinated with the stages of study.


There are two types of pre-reading: skimming and scanning. Skimming is for well organized material, such as textbooks; read section headings and the study questions for chapter and study vocabulary list before reading the text. Scanning is for less well organized material, such as essays, and is similar to speed reading, where you go through the material quickly looking for general structure and organization and for keywords, basically, you're trying to pick-out of the text the sort of things, section headings and vocabulary lists that are explicitly presented in textbooks.


Outlining provides brief record of information gained by skimming. A good outline condenses the material, organizes it for learning, helps you to separate what you already know with what still requires work, and helps you to avoid the mistake of thinking you know something to the recall or understanding level when you are actually at the recognition level. The most common error when outlining is to write down too much.


Read through the text noticing arguments and supporting information for the points you made note of in the pre-reading and outlining. Mark after you read, not while reading. Mark only the important points - never whole sentences. Use the same mark or symbol for the same purpose throughout the text. Try to use consistent marking throughout all of your studying, it will make reviewing your studies in the future easier.


Notetaking: where possible take notes in text as a complement to underlining. If you can't take notes in the book, you need to copy or summarize enough of the context that your notes will make sense when you come back to them. Summarizing the context is important - there is little that is more irritating than coming back to your notes a year or more later only to discover you can't remember what, specifically, they are refering to.


Attending Class is an essential step in reception involving classes. Always do the required reading; in class look for added insights and information. It's a waste to take class notes on what's in the text. For new material you need to take detailed class notes, for example, if the class isn't using a text, the instructor is developing a new approach, or there is a lot of new material expanding on or updating the text. Rework your class notes as soon as possible after class to fix the information in your mind.

Organizing Information

Putting the material you gathered in Initial Study into shape for learning it in Internalization. The most important factor in internalization is repeated exposure to and paying attention to the material. Many forget the "paying attention" part. When organizing the material for study, you need to keep it in mind, and build the organization of the materials to be reviewed so that it will help hold your interest.

Vocabulary building is extremely important. You need to notice new words, organize them for study, and learn them. Almost all fields have distinct vocabularies, including words that look like common words but have distinctive meanings within that field.


Diagramming visually organizes facts, helping you to fit them into a framework for remembering and understanding them:

a) Hierarchal or Family trees

b) Time or Life Line - historical or functional (for example, biographical or laying out an experiment)

c) Concentric Circles - diagrams of software and operating systems commonly use concentric circles

d) Geometric Shapes - triangles, squares, cubes, etc - phase diagrams in chemistry and thermodynamics are an example using triangles.

e) Symbolic Representations - maps, graphs, figures, et cetera


Lists of facts can be treated similarly to vocabulary when individual items are more important or as one-dimensional diagrams when the relationship between items in list is more important.

Internalizing Information or Acquiring Knowledge

Internalization is the step of making the information yours. Converting information from books and lectures into your knowledge.

Methods of internalizing information depend on the depth of knowledge you want to acquire. Recognizing is a lot easier than remembering; which is easier than explaining or using.

The most important factor in internalization is repeated exposure to and paying attention to the material. As in organization many forget the "paying attention" part. The deeper the knowledge you need of your subject, the more important "PAYING ATTENTION" becomes. I have a good memory and can usually reach basic recognition level simply by reading through the material once. Being able to use information, to make it my knowledge takes a LOT more work. For a long time I deluded myself that I could understand the material because I could follow along with the explanation easily enough as I read it. But you do not truly understand something until you can explain it in your own words from memory.

Summarizing the material in your own words or by diagramming the material or discussing it with others who have also been studying, or have studied, it also helps you to make it yours.

Trying to come up with questions about the material is probably the best way of internalizing the information.

Aphorisms are useful and important, not as a "substitute for thinking" which is what many disdain them as (and some people actually do use them as), but as reminders and prods. For getting things done, aphorisms are even more useful than most of the other techniques people have developed, because they are more likely to be recalled when you are ready to flake than more complicated systems and formulas. You can also come up with mnemonics, acronyms, or visualizations to help internalize your studies.

Demonstrating Knowledge

Demonstrating your knowledge by transmitting it (teaching or writing) to others or by using it to construct a working device. Taking tests works when nothing else is available. Sometimes even when you can use other means of demonstrating your knowledge testing is useful, for example, standard tests more easily let employers compare you to other applicants.

The Value of Mistakes: Mistakes and Learning

Learning from your mistakes is the bedrock of learning. If you are learning something new you will make mistakes. Figure out why you made a particular mistake, and you will learn more from it than you would have if you had gotten the correct answer.

Don't fear to make mistakes. The harder your studies, the more mistakes you will probably make, because you are pushing the envelope harder, and learning more. If you are doing original research, mistakes are even more important. If you are doing original reseach and are not making mistakes, you are deluding yourself, either about not making mistakes or about the originality of your research.

You can learn more from mistakes - from things that go wrong - than from successes. Success can always be the result of accident or coincidence, things outside of your control. Sort of how it's easy to make money off the stock market when most stocks are going up or in an occasional year; but making money from stocks consistently (as a result of your knowledge and intent) is far harder and less common. Some people claim it is effectively impossible to beat the market index, that those with good long term results are mostly just luckier than others.

Since you are trying to succeed, however, a mistake is a definite sign that something in your knowledge of the situation or in your technique needs refinement or even to be completely re-thought.

Learning from others is less painful than learning from your own mistakes, so you should learn that way whenever you can, but if you don't learn from the mistakes you do make, the pain will be for nothing, and worse you may make the same mistake with same pain again.

"Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn from no other"
-- Benjamin Franklin.

This doesn't mean that learning from experience is the sign of a fool, rather that experience is the only way a fool learns. Everyone learns from experience.

"The study of history offers that opportunity [to learn from others experience] in the widest possible measure. It is universal experience - infinitely longer, wider, and more varied than any individual's experience." - B H Liddell Hart, Why Don't We Learn from History?.

The same is true of all of the sciences and engineering where the body of knowledge is accumulative.

"While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior."
-- Henry C Link

Don't fear mistakes, use them.