Notes on: Ultralearning by Scott Young
I.
Definition: Ultralearning is strategic, self-directed, intense learning.
The central ethos of ultralearning is taking responsibility for your education.
What are alternatives to ultralearning?
Formal education.
The benefit of formal education is that it imposes external goals and deadlines, which can be helpful for people who struggle with self-direction. It also offers credentials which may be helpful for a future career.
The downside is that you may be required to spend time/effort learning material that isn’t specifically tailored to your goals. The pace of learning may be too slow. And the materials offered may not be ideal for your learning needs.
Casual habits.
The benefit of learning through casual habits is that there’s less pressure. Maybe you just like painting as a hobby, and you don’t mind if you’re not learning as quickly as possible. Learning in a more casual way can preserve your enjoyment of the process.
Why might a person want to try ultralearning?
Competence feels good.
Successfully learning something quickly can give you confidence in future domains.
Becoming exceptionally skilled in a domain can lead to outsized returns. E.g. A person who’s 10x better at computer programming might receive much more than 10x the financial compensation.
II.
What are the 9 principles of ultralearning?
1. Metalearning
Know why you’re ultralearning. A mistake people make is learning things that aren’t super-relevant to their goals. To avoid this mistake, talk to others who have already reached your goal and ask them to evaluate your study plan. Experts are often much more receptive to giving advice than people expect.
Spend a significant amount of time finding the best materials and strategizing about how to learn. Devoting a few hours upfront can save a lot of time later on.
2. Focus
Challenge 1: Starting to focus (i.e. procrastinating)
People procrastinate because they either don’t want to do the task or they want to do some other task.
Tactics to get over procrastination:
a) Prepare materials in advance to lower the mental strain of starting.
b) Make studying playful, rewarding, or gamified.
c) Dive in and get past the first few minutes of discomfort.
d) Use a calendar to block out hours for your work.
e) Spread out studying over time rather than cramming.
f) Break up your work into small manageable tasks.
g) Have someone hold you accountable.
Challenge 2: Sustaining focus (i.e. getting distracted)
Sources of distraction:
a) The environment. Make sure there’s minimal noise, your phone is away, and no one interrupts your studying.
b) The task. Some tasks intrinsically require more concentration. Don’t beat yourself up if it’s difficult. Recognize that you’ve lost attention, and gently return your mind to the task.
c) Your mind. If you’re experiencing negative emotions or life issues, consider dealing with them first.
3. Directness
Practice the skill in the way it will actually be used. Trying to transfer a skill from one domain to another is difficult.
Strategies to consider:
a) Create a project that uses the skills you’ll be using in the future.
b) Immerse yourself in an environment that requires the skill.
c) Learn in public to get brutal feedback.
d) Find a way to simulate the conditions in which you’ll be using the skill.
4. Drill
Break apart a skill into sub-skills that you can repeatedly practice. Especially focus on areas that might be bottlenecking your progress.
Because drilling sub-skills may conflict with direct practice, consider alternating between the two. Drills can also become more meaningful if you recognize how they’re connected to the larger whole.
How to isolate sub-components:
a) Time slices. Example: Measures in musical pieces.
b) Cognitive components. Example: Speech recognition vs reading in language.
c) Copy someone else’s work. Example: Try to paint exactly the same thing someone else did. And by repeating what many other people have done, you can find what works and develop your own style.
5. Retrieval
Test yourself frequently. Merely rereading or reviewing are less effective at creating enduring memories.
Testing can be helpful even if you’re not familiar with the material. Don’t wait until you’re “ready.” Testing can identify potential areas to focus on and help improve your memory for those unfamiliar ideas.
Usually, the harder the better: Unprompted recall > recall with hints > multiple choice recognition.
Testing tactics:
a) Find practice tests online.
b) Flashcards—make an attempt at answering before flipping the card
c) Free recall—try to recall all the important details that you can after reading the material
d) Feynman technique—try to teach someone else the material
e) Generate challenges for yourself
f) Questionbook technique: Before engaging with the material have a list of questions ready. While engaging with the material try to recall those questions and see if you can answer them.
6. Feedback
Feedback should be immediate, intense, and accurate. Having a mentor can be helpful. Monitoring your rate of learning can be helpful. Comparing your rate of learning under different study methods can be helpful. Good feedback will often be hard to predict.
Some feedback is undesirable. It can be misleading or demotivating, especially if the target of feedback is you as a person. Both positive and negative feedback can be demotivating. Positive, because you may become over-satisfied with yourself. Negative, because you may feel shame at yourself.
To desensitize yourself to feedback, consider getting high intensity, rapid feedback. Stings at first, but helps you progress faster in the long run. This can also help you learn when to ignore feedback.
Types of feedback:
a) Outcome—information that you’re failing
b) Informational—information about what you’re failing at
c) Corrective—information about how to fix what you’re failing at
If you fail too often, consider making your task easier. If you fail too rarely, consider making your task harder.
7. Retention
Mnemonics have limited use besides memorizing large lists of facts.
Don’t cram, space out your learning. Consider using spaced repetition systems, like Anki.
Overlearning: continuing to practice a skill even after you have reached adequacy. Overlearning paired with spaced repetition can be especially helpful to retain your knowledge.
Procedural knowledge is often more durable (e.g. riding a bike). Consider drilling the core essentials of a skill until they become procedural.
8. Intuition
How can you develop a deep intuition for a domain of knowledge?
a) Spend time struggling with hard problems.
b) Try to derive things from first principles. Beware the illusion of explanatory depth—you might think you know something until you’re asked to explain it.
c) Expose yourself to a large volume of concrete examples so that the abstract principles stick better.
d) The Feynman technique: Teach the materials to others.
e) Create analogies/visualizations to connect the material to what you already know.
9. Experimentation
Experimentation involves regularly experiencing failure. Get comfortable with it.
Why experiment?
a) As you become more advanced you may have to experiment, since there will be fewer and fewer people with your skillset.
b) Experimenting prevents stagnation of older skills.
c) Some domains reward originality.
How to experiment?
a) Copy others’ styles/techniques to see what works for you.
b) Find a hybrid of different skills that synergize.
c) Compare different methods side by side.
d) Consider the extremes of a skill.
e) Introduce new constraints.