I started this blog as a freshman in college, wanting to jot down a, at the time, fascinating formula I derived to get around an asinine coding problem (which apparently, is still helpful to this day). I wrote multiple posts that essentially amounted to philosophy on how to be a good student/how not to be a good student, enchanted with the idea that I saw past the fog that no one else could.
I still think what I wrote then is true. Students, above all else, do a terrible job being honest with themselves. This goes in multiple directions, really. Poor professors and bad textbooks are just accepted without ever considering alternatives. Hundreds of textbooks are available online for any subject as well as the lecture notes and videos of other professors, yet go unused. Students also are not honest in what they do know and what they do not know, essentially wasting their time studying.
Okay. That’s the gist of it. Time to review some posts.
Talent is (often) an excuse
This still gets read to this day. I’m kind of embarrassed, because this was written for two not-so-great reasons:
- I was nearing a mental breakdown from someone that manipulated me into helping them with their assignments, and this was my way to cope.
- A plea for them to do their own assignments instead of relying on me.
I can kind of tell from the tone of some paragraphs.
I’m going to define talent as “skill that existed before working on the skill”. I also want to abstract away differences in income and resources, since that really deserves it’s own layer of analysis, which the original post did not consider.
Talent explains little
The key idea is that, if you’re trying to explain anyone’s performance, including yourself, the inclusion of talent is both a bad mindset and an incomplete explanation. I want to go through this in two different scenarios.
Scenario 1: You did well in something. You chalk it up to talent.
You assume that talent was the reason why you did well in something and is a significant factor. You clearly do not care as much of the any work you put into it, and thus disregard putting in more work, expecting your talent to carry you.
This is clearly a terrible way to think about things, because you value the thing you have less control of to explain the outcome. With less successive effort, what little initial success will have washed away in comparison to other people who have continued to put in effort.
The idea that someone can chalk something up to talent and then continue to put in effort out of gratitude or discipline is understandable, but it’s always better to just assume talent does not exist. Better to assume that something that is essentially abstract does not exist if it affects the growth of someone’s skills.
Scenario 2: You did poorly in something. You chalk it up to talent.
You assume that talent was the reason why you did not do well in something and is a significant factor. Knowing that talent is the differentiator between someone’s success and failure, you recognize you are incapable of achieving your goal in that something, and give up.
This is perhaps the silliest one, but also one of the most sensitive. People do not want to acknowledge their own ineptitude is their own fault. On the other hand, I actually find this to be the most aggressively optimistic. If it is solely your own fault that you are not successful, you are completely in control of it, and can become successful.
A frustrating instance of this is math exams. Purdue math classes have old math exams from years back, and the questions really are all the same flavor. As an upper bound, there are really only forty different questions, with different numbers and functions, and they pick 10-20 per exam.
This should be a walk in the park. Memorize forty ideas, and you win. But this rarely happens (on Reddit, when I used to use it, at least). People do poorly after having gone through 10+ exams. What gives? It’s not just doing the exams. Doing effort isn’t enough. The actual quality matters. Having the ability to introspect on someone’s methodology gives a whole new degree to better ones skill rather than just say talent.
I mean, seriously. Once you abstract sufficiently many layers, I don’t think any class is that difficult, unless your professor/textbook is just that bad (which does often happen!) Just abstract it away more.
Excuses and blind studying
Scenario 2 really went through what I wanted to say (I’m not planning out this post, lol). The extra spice is the addition of comparisons, rather than some absolute measure of “I succeeded” or “I failed”.
That doesn’t change much though. If someone is more successful than you, it’s also poor thinking to finger a difference in talent as the cause. There’s a lot of things that you’re in control of, and to pick the one thing you can’t really change is pointless. Same goes in the reverse direction.
There’s actually a point in there that I wish got it’s own post: that people like to lie about how much they study. Academic culture can be really quite toxic at times, and I think people would be a lot more friendly and be in a much better position in improving their studies if they were just honest about what they have and have not done. This honesty goes both inwards, in deciding what they know and do not know per concept, rather than some abstract sense of “I got X% on this exam” as well as asking for help.
Another way to think about this: Suppose you did 3 practice exams, and got an 80%, a 90%, then a 70%. It’s inaccurate to say you improved then worsened. The inclusion of topics likely changed somewhat between exams, and you now know what you do and do not know. Take advantage of that.
Studying Myths
This is the flipside to the other post! A bit more expanded, by challenging specific ideas.
Success is barely a function of time
I think the wording of this isn’t that great. The key idea is that methodology in which one learns and studies is often a lot more important than the actual amount of time, but the time is still an important factor. I had a classmate who would spend hours and hours on his coursework in this one class we took, but I would need far less time. Please don’t chalk this up to talent, this was a course neither of us had any exposure to. It was really just a difference in study habits. Not to say mine are good (they’re not), but they worked better for me than what his habits were for him.
It’s important to introspect and challenge the way in which you do things, especially if things are not ideal.
What not to do when studying
Space based repetition is actually crazy useful, and I think every excuse to not do it is stupid. I don’t like the idea that “this course is conceptual and not about memorization”, because the more you do memorize, the more mental real estate you have to do whatever is supposedly more important. Another perspective: the applications of concepts take various forms, and you can memorize their forms.
Seriously, just use anki. Turn every important statement in your notes/textbook, every problem/example into a flashcard on anki. It solves every single problem I wrote about.
If you don’t want to use anki, the key idea is to repeat the things you don’t know the most, but still repeat the things you do know, just not very frequently.
It’s also important to actually look at what you got wrong, rather than to just mark that you got something wrong. This is the best opportunity you have to actually see what you did not know. Find out what you did wrong, and redo the problem correctly.
What not to think when studying
Another repeat of “please stop thinking talent exists.”
Additionally, if you don’t have good study materials, ask around, look for some, or make some (anki!). Also redoing old problems/examples is helpful. Your professor is using them, after all.
The source of bad study habits
I think it’s pretty accurate to say that a lot of these issues arise from people not wanting to be honest with themselves. A key example is when people will claim that a class is hard because other people said so. This is sampling bias; the people that want other people to think a class is hard overlap with people that want other people to think a class is hard so their own performance does not look as lackluster. Sure, classes can be difficult, but students do a poor job introspecting on their own responsibility.
Conclusion
I think that’s everything. To repeat, just again, your ability to improve your skills comes from you. Take this as an opportunity, not a curse.
The smartest stupid person 