A Guide to Autodidactism | Hacker News Reader

A Guide to Autodidactism

jackkinsella.ie

> I wish there were dynamic SRS decks for language learning (or other disciplines). Such decks would count the number of times you have reviewed an instance of an underlying grammatical rule or an instance of a particular piece of vocabulary, for example its singular/plural/third person conjugation/dative form. These sophisticated decks would present users with fresh example sentences on every review, thereby preventing users from remembering specific answers and compelling them to learn the process of applying the grammatical rule afresh. Moreover, these decks would keep users entertained through novelty and would present users with tacit learning opportunities through rotating vocabulary used in non-essential parts of the example sentence. Such a system, with multiple-level review rotation, would not only prevent against overfitted learning, but also increase the total amount of knowledge learned per minute, an efficiency I’d gladly invest in.

Exactly this is my side-project at the moment. Hopefully it will show up on "Show HN" in a year or two.

The world needs this. I'm eagerly awaiting your release. Free free to ping me at release.

I'm an auto-didactic. I dropped out of HS and taught myself everything I know by reading books. I have never subscribed to a system of note taking. I guess all I ever did was relate problem spaces in my head. This problem is an analog of that problem with separate variations. Perhaps that is an extreme oversimplification.

Autodidact.

A better translation of the last sentence from Goethe runs "Here I sit, for all my lore, the wretched fool I was before."

That's beautiful.

> Autodidact.

Thanks, I didn't notice the spelling error. Honestly the reason I dropped out of high school was undiagnosed dyslexia and dysgraphia. It makes me so excited when someone is willing to show me that I spelled something wrong and then call me a fool. You know. Because ability to spell is far more important than the fact that I've forgotten more about Linux than most system administrators will ever know, or that I can program in over 10 languages and am familiar with DDD, CRQS, SOLID among other design patterns. I've mentored over 50 developers, and made Principal Engineer before I turned 35 despite my lack of credentials. I worked my way up from Help Desk to PC Support to, Network Admin, to System Admin before becoming a Software Engineer. But, nah, I'm a fool because I've misspelled a word. Thank you kind stranger for pointing out my limits, it gives me an incredible sense of frisson to know people like you are out there to keep us all in check.

No criticism intended.

"Autodidactic" is the adjective, "autodidact" the corresponding noun. As you know, in English we often like to leave the noun merely implied, letting the adjective alone fill in for the noun phrase. Still, the term "autodidact" being shorter than the adjective gives it an unusual appeal. I like to imagine that readers other than yourself may welcome the suggestion.

Each of us knows a negligible part of what is known, which is itself truly negligible compared to what is yet to be known. Most of us are overwhelmed just pruning away what we thought we knew that has turned out not to be so. Don't trust anyone who is not.

My real reason for posting was to make a place to write the translation I like better.

In case anyone is interested, the German original runs: "Da steh' ich nun, ich armer Tor, und bin so klug als wie zuvor!"

I.e. in the German original Faust is standing whereas he is sitting in the English translation. And yes, Tor in this context refers to Thor, not a goal.

Out of curiosity, what areas do you consider yourself especially knowledgeable?

I don't think I consider myself especially knowledgeable about anything outside of algebra, and general IT. I have hobbyist interests in other sciences: evolutionary biology, chemistry, high energy physics, astronomy, cosmology, geology, philosophy, among others but I don't consider myself especially knowledgeable about them.

Hmm... you don't see Baskerville used on websites often.

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