alt Hacker NewsOne thing I wish this emphasized more is that adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning, which is why my useful rule has become: if I'm not producing errors, I'm probably not practicing yet
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>adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning
True, and even more insidious than that can be consuming the actual learning material (e.g. textbooks), but not doing the required work to integrate it. I find that I need to do projects to properly learn something. Once I actually start doing things, I quickly identify the parts I knew in theory from reading about them but had never put to the test by solving real problems.
I love this take. I built some feature and then when I tried to layer new features on top, I saw all the bad decisions surface and errors appear. Its beautiful to walk back and have it "click"
Also engaging with others learning the same thing within the overall community is also tremendously helpful and accelerates learning. Though you need to get over the fear of asking silly or obvious in hindsight questions in the wrong Discord channel sometimes.
Knowing is input and skills are output. If you can't produce some kind of output in response to input, you've got a nice imagination but no skills.
Excellent motto, too good to pass a genuine appreciation comment
Meta learning can be useful, but I take your overall point. You can get lost in the weeds trying to figure out the "best" way to learn something. Autodidacts do have some up-front costs: they have to figure out how to best teach themselves a thing, which usually means researching and trying various pedagogical approaches to find something that might work for them.
Language learning, for example is a huge category. You can get completely mired trying to sort out "grammar translation" versus "direct method" or "comprehensible input" approaches, the pros and cons of spaced repetition vs extensive/intensive reading, phonology & minimal pairs, picking a textbook/grammar/dictionary -- it's a lot. I imagine there are some people who are broadly interested in language learning, and don't actually use that information to actually learn a language. It might be more fun to prepare to learn a language than to get into the challenging and less fun work of actually doing it. I see the parallels with "Gear Acquisition Syndrome".