On Learning Outside Institutions

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I spent large chunks of the past few years reading math and physics textbooks outside college. Here are some of my thoughts. 1. When you’re learning outside of an institution, it’s hard to tell if you’re progressing. There are no exams, promotions, or users to tell you that you’re progressing. But ever so rarely, you get little signals that you’re actually learning things. For example, when talking with graduate students, I can teach them things that they don’t know about. Or when I went to a grad class today, I knew most of the material being taught. I’m learning something! 2. When reading a textbook, since there are no tests to give you feedback, I naturally use “what page number I’m on” as a way to measure my progress. This is bad! It disincentivizes doing exercises and looking back on old chapters that you don’t remember. The worst might be that it disincentivizes play: asking questions like “what if this assumption didn’t hold?”, or graphing functions on desmos, or trying to get d

Mar 22, 2023 I spent large chunks of the past few years reading math and physics textbooks outside college. Here are some of my thoughts. 1. When you’re learning outside of an institution, it’s hard to tell if you’re progressing. There are no exams, promotions, or users to tell you that you’re progressing. But ever so rarely, you get little signals that you’re actually learning things. For example, when talking with graduate students, I can teach them things that they don’t know about. Or when I went to a grad class today, I knew most of the material being taught. I’m learning something!…

On Learning Outside Institutions

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