I'd also STRONGLY recommend Polya's "How To Solve It"[0]

It really is about teaching you how to solve arbitrary problems. It teaches how to think. You can read pages xvi and xvii (in [0]) which will give you a good sense at what the book teaches. Half the first chapter is available too (this is an easy book to find online).

It's also technically a math book, but treating it as a standard math book is missing the point (honestly, missing the point of math altogether). It is really about how to solve problems, which that's what math is about. Math is really a collection of logics (plurality intended) that can be used to solve problems. Thing is, this is usually done in the abstract as mathematicians are usually interested in solving the general form of a problem. (The other part being that math is a high precision language, which is another thing it shares with programming languages). People might be scared off by the math notation in it, but I'd wager that anyone who can write anything more complicated than a hello world program is smart enough to make it through this book[1].

You do not need to be a mathematician to benefit from it, nor need to know much math at all. I'll make the strong claim that every single programmer, and anyone doing anything related to STE(A)M will benefit. If the "A" is surprising, I think you'll understand after reading a bit.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Mathematical-Princeton-Scie...

[1] Variables in math are no different than in programming. The main difference is math is terse because it's typically hand written. I'd add that programming also has types but most people are writing with languages that do duck typing.

Thank you ever so much for this recommendation. I'm already through half of his upskilling document. It is as if he wrote the book exactly for me. I've been studying first thing in the morning off and on for a while now, and I'm happy to find that he advocates for that. Other than that, his focus on a) maths, b) coding and, c) domain expertise fit in line with where I want to head. I'm also happy to see that he has written much on his blog that I could dig into later.

I looked through the google docs version 0 on my phone, it’s pretty interesting. Is there an epub or PDFs versions?

0 https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/17qFY5w9uEWL4VVyJSTEm...

Also, The Profession by Isaak Asimov is entirely dedicated to the importance of learning.

https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2024/04/05/profession-b...

Irulan’s books are state propaganda! The true Paul Atreides is only revealed in Leto II’s secret diaries.

Ars longa vita Brevis by Scott Alexander also has some interesting perspectives on the art of learning and teaching:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/

> “Not infinite. Architects. Teachers. Teachers of teachers, but the art of teaching teaching is much the same as the art of teaching. Three levels is enough. Though the levels have to mix. The teacher who trains the next architect must be a master both of teaching and of architecture. I will spare you the math, but one needs a series of teachers at different points on the teaching-skill/architecture-skill tradeoff-curve. One will be a master teacher who has devoted decades to learning the textbook-writing skill, and who can write a brilliant Introduction To Architecture textbook that makes the first ten years of architecture ability seem perfectly natural and easy to master. Another will be a mediocre teacher who knows enough advanced architecture to write a passable textbook on the subject. Still another will do nothing but study pure Teaching itself, in the hopes that he can one day pass on this knowledge to others who will use it to write architecture textbooks.

I remember the same thing. That doesn't mean they knew how to teach us to "learn how to learn". Neither does it mean that the underlying education system supported that goal.

Same goes for user-centered design. Trying to make something user-friendly is one thing, successfully doing it is another. Large organizations are especially poor at user-friendly design because the underlying structures which support that goal don't exist. Organizational science is still in its infancy.

I found that emphasis to be similar to two teams building from opposite starting points, and never meeting in the middle.

The issue with "learning to learn" is that it does not include the foundational skill of "how to communicate". Far too often it is not a lack of desire to learn, it is the inability to communicate what one is trying to learn. When seeking help, not only does the seeker have difficulty expressing their situation, those trying to help are not taught how to listen and will offer solutions to an issue only starting to be explained. This difficulty is then compounded by self conversation bias that negatively spins against the person seeking. That is two very high hurdles: negative self bias, and inarticulate communications while seeking guidance.

“You have to learn how to learn” has been a phrase often repeated by teachers, but I don’t remember any of them emphasizing, for example, retrieval practice: you learn a skill or subject, move on to the next one, and leave it up to fate whether you remember anything from the first one.

It always surprises and saddens me that, despite having been an excellent student throughout my years of education, I remember practically nothing about 90% of the subjects I studied.

  > that they won't, or can't, design a good user experience for their tools.

It's pretty hard to do this design but I think anyone who's played these games will both admit it is frustrating but rewarding. I think that's true for any learning. The advantage with a videogame is you can provide nearly immediate feedback as well as design feedback delays. I'm highly educated in both math and CS and I think that's actually one of the key differences. When programming there's quick feedback loops. Your program runs or doesn't[1]. Whereas in math you finish a proof and aren't even sure if it is right or not. This does end up teaching different and useful skills, but it sure does create a higher barrier to entry (barrier isn't intelligence, it is persistence).

I think my main concern today (having taught hundreds of college students over the last 5 years) is a lowering in this resilience. I mean I feel it in myself too. We've definitely generated a world where we have quick feedback mechanisms, yet this is impossible to create in more advanced education. It can take weeks, months, or even years to see the real fruits of your labors. I found that in classes where we had autograders or provided students with test cases[2] that often these ended up hurting the students more than helping. They became over-reliant on them, outsourcing their thinking to what we were providing as aids. I watched ChatGPT come out during this time and was not surprised that this only furthered the problem. I was only a grad student, so most classes I did not have good control and sometimes not much of a say, but if I were to do it again I'd try to push the aids out more slowly[3]. The most common problem was that students wrote to the test, not to the requirements. It's actually not a uncommon outside school, and I see a lot of people do quite similar things in industry. Thinking that passing tests is sufficient. But writing to tests will only result in you being as complete as the tests. It's a failed paradigm, you'll never have full coverage.[4]

There's definitely other problems with the education system and I don't want to dismiss them. There's no cureall, but I think this might be something most people might want to think about. Despite saying these words, they are still something I need to reinforce. Good habits are hard to maintain and it is only becoming easier to unknowingly slip into bad ones.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0esIfiOGFA

[1] Well there's the secret third option which is the most common: it runs, but doesn't run like you think it runs.

[2] We always stated that these were incomplete, that they should write additional ones. There probably wasn't a single office hour I held where I hadn't mentioned that one can never have complete coverage through tests.

[3] I don't know the full answer but here's something I would try. We had autograders and allowed students to submit as many times as they wanted. I'd keep these, but re-implement to have an exponential backoff (until say 2hrs before the assignment was due. I honestly never marked anyone late unless it hadn't been submitted by noon the next day). After a few failed submissions, pass them a subset of test cases. Then repeat. This definitely puts a lot more work on our end as the educator, but it would put students into a position where they need think about the problem first. That's a critical self-learning strategy. The struggle is necessary for success. Too often people just want to jump to the end, assuming a well defined answer already exists. They'll find something that looks appropriate, implement it, and declare success while missing the devil hiding in the details. Too early of feedback only reinforces that strategy.

[4] I'm certain someone will read this believing I am suggesting no tests. I assure you, if this was your interpretation then your interpretation is wrong. Trust me, it is my thoughts I'm trying to convey.

Thing is, this has nothing to do with UX or even AI at the end of the day. Over the years I have adjusted the way I handle interviews when I'm on a hiring panel to focus on critical thinking, problem solving, and lifelong learning above all else - because they are the #1 indicator that a hire is going to be successful in a position, even if that means they need a lot more training before they become productive.

I can teach somebody who finished a 6-month coding bootcamp Go, all the internal tooling, go over the business with them, etc. if they have these skills and end up with a productive mid-level engineer who gets shit done in a few years. What I can't teach is the drive and ability to learn, that's a much longer process and if you don't already have it then I'm not prepared to develop it.

Hell, outside of looking for signs of obvious bullshit I stopped giving a shit about resumes. Your work history does me no good, your education doesn't matter to me, and your references are useless beyond making sure you aren't straight up lying to me about your employment history. Every single time I have hired somebody who has 5 years of "experience" working with technologies I bullet pointed on a JD they ended up fumbling the moment they had to do something new. Doing leetcode, pair programming sessions, take-home assignments, whiteboarding system designs, etc. for SWE positions did nothing to really improve this; for SRE/DevOps roles I tried trivia questions (how are containers implemented - like what kernel technologies do they use and what do they do, how would you go about investigating why a service is consuming 100% CPU time), throwing them at broken VM's and more take-home assignments.

AI tools only make this skillset more important - I can throw Junie, Claude Code, or Copilot and small task and end up with...an implementation. But they still fuck up, constantly, and yet again, anything that's not already been done, regularly, requires a lot of guidance from an engineer in the loop. And with the god damned death of the web thanks to AI slop being posted anywhere, the ability to find answers and reason through problems is only going to become more important when these tools fail miserably for the third time in a row.

> We have all had days when learning seemed easier than on other days

Unfortunately it's hard to trust our feelings on this. There is a lot of literature that demonstrates an inverse relationship between how well we felt we learned and how well we actually learned.

> mental preparation for learning

This is actually really big in the learning literature. It's not meditation, though, it's priming through pretesting and prior knowledge activation. These types of "warm ups" have outsized effects on retention and understanding.

> autogenic training, a more Western and scientific version of meditative practices

Do you have any tips for learning more and getting started? I have searched a bit, but always appreciate anecdotes of those that have found success enough to speak about it.

Even though you might be joking, I think this is a very relevant point. To take it a step further, one also has to be willing to learn to learn how to learn. I wonder if intrinsic motivation for this can be nurtured, or whether it is up to chance.

School has two competing goals and this will never change:

1. Have the kids learn new things 2. Have the kids reach a desired level of competency

Learning happens where you are at, not where the teacher wants you to be. Every student is at a different place in understanding. It's impossible without 1-on-1 instruction to really maximize learning.

Competency is only determined via testing. Learning doesn't require testing at all, you can just speak to a student to get a good idea if they're making some progress, any progress. Competency? That basically demands a test, because it has a particular bar in mind.

Now students know they need to pass the bar, somehow, but the anxiety of that is going to cause issues with them just trying to learn. This is unfixable though, because the outside pressures demand students have some level of competency otherwise teachers are viewed as failures.

There's also the validity of learning methods, despite what studies may claim, there's no scientific "grand theory of meta-learning", and if ideas are misapplied/misused there's a risk of falling into scientism, which would be just as harmful as economically driven credentialism. At worst it is just the austerity version of education—learn it yourself because we can't afford the school resources to teach/coach/nurture subjects.

I'm sure it varies a lot place to place but I've experienced much more of the opposite in the tech industry. I've heard countless times that we should switch to a different tool because it's newer, from someone who couldn't name a single specific way it's better than the existing tool. I see so much busy work at my employers and in products I use where things get changed just for the sake of change, without getting any better.

I think that's a somewhat unfair framing of the issue, since it isn't a lack of effort from teachers, but rather the pressures from higher levels towards increasing test scores. LLMs don't really change that.

There's also the fact that kids are being taught the very basics, the sorts of things increasingly intelligent models are most likely to be able to solve first. I don't think there's any level of effort that can be put into designing assignments to get around this.

Similar to how teachers haven't really been able to do anything to stop kids from sticking their algebra problems into wolframalpha or other tools besides just making them do the work in class (which then cuts into teaching time).

Beyond a certain point, all that can be done is for teachers to try to instill the importance of practice into students, and for parents to be more proactive in monitoring how their kid is doing their homework.

Maybe we'll see an increase in after-school classes for kids to do homework in, under teacher supervision.

> If we're lucky, LLMs force people to put more effort into assignments and grading and then that would help kids learn to learn as well.

I'm afraid it might be exactly opposite. Having all the knowledge at hand. all the time will lead to knowledge atrophy. Just like it already happens with ability to travel without navigation.

With how rapidly LLMs are improving, I don't know how you would construct assignments that can't be solved relatively quickly by a student feeding it into a bleeding-edge LLM. Especially since teachers often aren't PhDs and are overworked, the idea of every class of students getting handed brand new problems that aren't in the training set feels far-fetched.

I hope somebody figures this out but I don't know what the solution looks like.

A lot of what people think of as "doing stuff" relies on years or decades of training and experience. When you pay someone to maintain part of your house or to create bespoke furniture or repair your car you're not just paying for labor, you're paying for labor from someone with knowledge and equipment.

I think there's an element of curiosity that is innate, and that make a huge difference. For those so blessed, learning is fun and a welcome activity (there's an entirely separate issue of actually applying any of knowledge but at least it's a start).

That said, teachers can make all the difference in connecting with students to guide them into discovery vs. cramming facts into their heads to satisfy testing metrics.

Care to say more?

Horror of horrors. Please no.