Mental Pivot #82: Learning How to Learn

A handful of online resources for becoming a better lifelong student.

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics…”

—T.H. White, The Once and Future King (1958)

Now onto this week's recommendations…

---

Thinking Tools:

• How to Like Things: Matt Gemmell muses on the advantages of liking something rather than disliking it outright. To accomplish this, he suggests a few ways of fostering a sense of appreciation for the things we don’t care for or are ambivalent about. “With a bit of work and dedication, you can shift your view, and turn a pain into an unexpected pleasure.”

• How We Learn Versus How We Think We Learn: UCLA professor Robert Bjork surveys the research on key aspects of human learning in this hour-long video recording from 2016. There are fascinating insights on the efficacy of interleaving (practicing multiple topics or skills simultaneously), the value of tests, the essential role of forgetting, the danger of conflating performance for learning, and the importance of varying practice contexts.

• Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn: Barbara Oakley is an engineer and academic best known for her books on learning (A Mind for Numbers) and her MOOC—massive open online course—“Learning How to Learn.” The preceding link is an hour-long talk she gave at Google. It’s a good overview of what she teaches: focused vs. diffuse brain states, blocked learning, how to read effectively, and much more. If you find her content interesting, enroll in her free MOOC on Coursera.

• Lesswrong: Learning How to Learn: Not so much a coherent article, but rather a list of effective learning strategies covered in the aforementioned videos. Consider it a supplement “show notes” to those links.

---

Reading Enrichment:

• The Art of Bidding How I Survived Federal Prison: Eric Borsuk served seven years for a rare book heist (known as the “Transy Book Heist”). He vividly details the culture of prison life as well as the many cruel twists and turns while incarcerated. To give his life meaning, he found his “bid”—a raison d’être, a sense of purpose—which set him on a journey of self-discovery. Prison life is foreign to most, but the notion of finding your bid is universal.

• The Assumptions Doctors Make: It takes a healthy dose of humility and maturity to admit that you don’t have the full picture when you’re wrong about something. Physician and author Ricardo Nuila reflects on his shortcomings in this extract from his new book, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine. In school, he learned the science of medicine, but in the field he grew increasingly aware of the financial and varying personal contexts as well—factors he overlooked that led to poor initial diagnoses.

• The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing: WIRED contributor Vauhini Vara chronicles the evolution of an idealistic community meant to facilitate the sharing of free stuff between neighbors (the titular “Buy Nothing” Project). Started by two women in Bainbridge Island, Washington, the organization quickly gained a nationwide following through a combination of top-down leadership, grassroots efforts, and an enthusiastic user-base on Facebook. But when the founders decided to monetize the service and migrate from Facebook, the community revolted. The ensuing tale is a microcosm of big themes including management vs. labor, the messiness of democratic governance, and the blurry lines of ownership for community-led platforms.

• The Internet from Rocks: A High-Level Explanation of Computers and the Internet: A helpful overview of the nuts-and-bolts of how computers work. You’ll learn about binary, boolean logic, electronic circuits, logic gates, and more. If this sort of content tickles your fancy, take a deeper dive with Paul Ford’s What Is Code? or Charles Petzold’s excellent Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. All three are accessible for the layperson, good for technological literacy, and highly recommended.

---

Odds & Ends:

• 50 Photographs that Reshaped Sport: Retrospective from The Guardian showcasing some of the most iconic sports images from the 20th and 21st centuries along with the stories behind them.

• Absurd Trolley Problems: You’ve likely heard of the Trolley Problem, an oft-cited thought experiment in which you are faced with an ethical dilemma: A runaway trolley will kill five people in its path unless you divert it; if you divert the trolley, you will kill one person instead. Neal Argarwal shares his spin on the dilemma through a series of clever variations that are simultaneously hilarious, thought-provoking, and increasingly ludicrous.

• Most Recommended Books collects book recommendations from celebrities, high-profile personalities, and “experts” via social media and other publications. The site’s most popular list is “71 Books Billionaires Read”. If you’re a fan of those handwritten book recommendation cards adorning the shelves of independent bookshops, this is a fun browse.

---

Thank you for subscribing to the Mental Pivot Newsletter. If you enjoyed it, be sure to share it with your friends and spread the word.

I want to deliver the best newsletter possible. To that end, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s working, what doesn’t, and things you’d like to see more of. You can reach me by replying directly to this email or by adding a comment on Substack.

If this newsletter was forwarded to you, visit this link to subscribe.

Lastly, I more or less destroyed my blog for a few months during my hiatus with a bad upgrade and database migration. I compounded the error with bungling my domain name records during the recovery. Suffice to say, if you’re looking for the Mental Pivot Blog these days, you can find it at www.mentalpivot.com.