Why Math Educators Should Care About Talent Development

In math, de-prioritizing talent development leads to major issues.

Dec 18, 2024

The Goal is NOT to Prove You’re Smart, it’s to Make Problems Go Away

Dec 16, 2024

How Grade Inflation Flies Under the Radar

Dec 15, 2024

Comfortable Fluency in Consumption is Not a Proxy for Learning

Dec 14, 2024

Playing Around Does NOT Speed Up the Learning Process

Dec 14, 2024

Introduction to the Expertise Reversal Effect

Beginners (i.e., students) learn most effectively through direct instruction.

Dec 13, 2024

Failure Modes in the Talent Development Process

The permastudent, the wannabe, and the dilettante.

Dec 12, 2024

Thoughts About Prerequisite Knowledge

Dec 12, 2024

Yes, you need to spin up on foundational knowledge. No, you are not an exception.

Even Ramanujan self-studied.

Dec 12, 2024

A Sanity Check for Effective Study Techniques

Dec 11, 2024

Active Problem-Solving is Where The Learning Happens

Comfortable fluency in consuming information is not a proxy for actual learning.

Dec 10, 2024

No Train, No Gain

Dec 10, 2024

3 Common Areas of Confusion in Talent Development

(especially in math learning)

Dec 8, 2024

Schooling vs Talent Development

Schooling and talent development are completely different things.

Dec 8, 2024

The #1 Trick for Super-Productivity

… is interleaving a wide variety of productive work that you enjoy.

Dec 8, 2024

The Best Neural Nets Textbook That I’ve Seen So Far

“Understanding Deep Learning” by Simon J. D. Prince

Dec 8, 2024

You Are a Car

Dec 8, 2024

Don’t have a passion? Go create one.

Dec 7, 2024

How To Get a Full Time Software Job During College (5-Step Roadmap)

I worked full time in data science during my last 2 years of undergrad and I’m pretty sure the process to pull this off is reproducible.

Dec 6, 2024

Prereq Yo’ Self Before You Wreck Yo’ Self

If you hammer prerequisite concepts/skills into your long-term memory, get it really solid and easy to retrieve, then you can lessen the load on your working memory, keep it below capacity, avoid getting “broken,” and keep up with the game.

Dec 5, 2024

There Are No Shortcuts in Talent Development

Dec 4, 2024

It’s not about how much you put in, it’s about how much you get out.

Dec 3, 2024

Progress is Enjoyable In Itself

Dec 3, 2024

Self-guaranteeing promises

A self-guaranteeing promise is verifiable and non-reversible. It does not require you to trust anyone.

Dec 3, 2024

Schooling and Talent Development are Completely Different Things

Dec 2, 2024

The Image I Want to Put in People’s Minds When They Think About Edtech

People acquiring impressive skills so quickly that it’s mind-bending.

Dec 2, 2024

The Vicious Cycle of Context Overload

Why jumping the gun on complexity leads to compounding struggle.

Dec 2, 2024

Actively Doing is the Key to Alpha

Lots of people consume. Fewer people actively do. Even fewer people attempt challenging things. And even fewer people than that build up the foundational skills needed to succeed in doing those challenging things.

Dec 1, 2024

The Magic You’re Looking For is in the Full-Assed Effort You’re Avoiding

When someone fails to make decent progress towards their learning or fitness goals and cites lack of time as the issue, they’re often wrong.

Nov 30, 2024

It’s Amusing How Fake Some University Syllabi Are

Nov 29, 2024

How to Get High on Math

Nov 28, 2024

Top 3 Skills

Math, coding, communication.

Nov 27, 2024

Competition Math is NOT an All-Encompassing Holy Grail of Math Learning or General Problem Solving

Skill development all comes down to building domain-specific chunks in long-term memory. The way you increase your ability to make mental leaps is not actually by jumping farther, but rather, by building bridges that reduce the distance you need to jump.

Nov 26, 2024

How I Would Go About Learning an Arbitrary Subject Where No Full-Fledged Adaptive Learning System is Available

I’m using an LLM to learn biology. My overall conclusion is that IF you could learn successfully, long-term, by self-studying textbooks on your own, and the only thing keeping you from learning a new subject is a slight lack of time, THEN you can probably use LLM prompting to speed up that process a bit, which can help you pull the trigger on learning some stuff you previously didn’t have time for. BUT the vast, vast majority of people are going to need a full-fledged learning system. And even for that miniscule portion of people for whom the “IF” applies… whatever the efficiency gain of LLM prompting over standard textbooks, there’s an even bigger efficiency gain of full-fledged learning system over LLM prompting.

Nov 26, 2024

On Writing Good Code

It’s kind of amusing how some (novice) devs will boast/revel at how many lines of code they wrote while simultaneously cramming each line full with as much complexity as they can hold in working memory.

Nov 26, 2024

Start simple. Whatever gets the ball rolling.

Nov 26, 2024

You Can Use Pre-Learning to Kick Off a Virtuous Cycle

Even if you aren’t a genius, you appear to be one in everyone else’s eyes, and consequently you get a ticket to those opportunities reserved for top students.

Nov 25, 2024

At some point, doing the hard thing becomes easier than making the hard thing easier.

And that’s when you have to muster up the willpower to overcome whatever friction is left over.

Nov 22, 2024

The Pursuit of Real Life Superhero Training

I just want to build a thermodynamic machine that makes people insanely skilled as efficiently as possible.

Nov 22, 2024

How To Get Stuff To Stick In Your Brain

Always try your best to recall it from memory. DO NOT default to looking it up.

Nov 21, 2024

The One Skill You Can Acquire By Passively Consuming Information

The ability to say things that sound smart on the surface without actually knowing what you’re talking about.

Nov 20, 2024

How to Mitigate Intellectual Body Dysmorphia

Compare the capabilities of your present self to your past self. That should make the growth obvious.

Nov 19, 2024

It’s Memory All The Way Down

At the end of the day all learning is memory.

Nov 19, 2024

Automaticity is the Road to Intuition

Nov 18, 2024

What Math To Learn for Skill Stacking

Nov 18, 2024

Learning Advanced Math/Coding Opens Doors You Don’t Even Know Exist

Nov 17, 2024

Efficient Lab Activities are About Demonstration, Not Discovery

Nov 16, 2024

It’s Not About the Type of Motivation, It’s About the Total Amount of Motivation

Appreciation of mathematical beauty gets held up on too high a pedestal as the “correct” source of motivation in math learning.

Nov 14, 2024

How Math Academy Creates its Knowledge Graph

Nov 13, 2024

If You’re Asking Someone to Be Your Mentor then You’re Doing it Wrong

It should look less like them helping you and more like you helping them.

Nov 12, 2024