Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On learning difficult things, published by So8res on the LessWrong. I have been autodidacting quite a bit lately. You may have seen my reviews of books on the MIRI course list. I've been going for about ten weeks now. This post contains my notes about the experience thus far. Much of this may seem obvious, and would have seemed obvious if somebody had told me in advance. But nobody told me in advance. As such, this is a collection of things that were somewhat surprising at the time. Part of the reason I'm posting this is because I don't know a lot of autodidacts, and I'm not sure how normal any of my experiences are. (Though on average, I'd guess they're about average.) As always, keep in mind that I am only one person and that your mileage may vary. Pair up When I began my quest for more knowledge, I figured that in this modern era, a well-written textbook and an account on math.stackexchange would be enough to get me through anything. And I was right. sort of. But not really. The problem is, most of the time that I get stuck, I get stuck on something incredibly stupid. I've either misread something somewhere or misremembered a concept from earlier in the book. Usually, someone looking over my shoulder could correct me in ten seconds with three words. "Dude. Disjunction. Disjunction." These are the things that eat my days. In principle, places like stackexchange can get me unstuck, but they're an awkward tool for the job. First of all, my stupid mistakes are heavily contextualized. A full context dump is necessary before I can even ask my question, and this takes time. Furthermore, I feel dumb asking stupid questions on stackexchange-type sites. My questions are usually things that I can figure out with a close re-read (except, I'm not sure which part needs a re-read). I usually opt for a close re-read of everything rather than asking for help. This is even more time consuming. The infuriating thing is that answering these questions usually doesn't require someone who already knows the answers: it just requires someone who didn't make exactly the same mistakes as me. I lose hours on little mistakes that could have been fixed within seconds if I was doing this with someone else. That's why my number one piece of advice for other people attempting to learn on their own is do it with a friend. They don't need to be more knowledgeable than you to answer most of the questions that come up. They just need to make different misunderstandings, and you'll be able to correct each other as you go along. The thing I miss most about college is tight feedback loops while learning. When autodidacting, the feedback loop can be long. I still haven't managed to follow my own advice here. I'm writing this advice in part because it should motivate me to actually pair up. Unfortunately, there is nobody in my immediate circle who has the time or patience to read along with me, but there are a number of resources I have not yet explored (the LessWrong study hall, for example, or soliciting to actual mathematicians). It's on my list of things to do. Read, reread, rereread Reading Model Theory was one of the hardest things I've done. Not necessarily because the content was hard, but because it was the first time I actually learned something that was way outside my comfort zone. The short version is that Basic Category Theory and Naïve Set Theory left me somewhat overconfident, and that I should have read a formal logic textbook before diving in. I had basic familiarity with logic, but no practice. Turns out practice is important. Anyway, it's not like Model Theory was impossible just because I skipped my logic exercises. It was just hard. There are a number of little misconceptions you have when you're familiar with something but you've never applied it, and I found myself having to clean t...