Scraping Training Data for Your Mind

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Let’s call this scraping good training data for your mind. It is an important skill. Too often neglected. When learning a new craft, it is tempting to first go after the tasks you need to master. You want to know how to structure your sentences, so you read Strunk and White. You want to figure out how to get better at searching Google Scholar, so you memorize boolean operators. This is important. But to get good at something—parenting, writing code, doing research—you also need to internalize examples of prime achievements in that field. Knowing how to find these examples is upstream of the tasks you need to master.
What you get from deep engagement with important papers is more significant than any single fact or technique: you get a sense for what a powerful result in the field looks like. It helps you imbibe the healthiest norms and standards of the field. It helps you internalize how to ask good questions in the field, and how to put techniques together. You begin to understand what made something like AlphaGo a breakthrough – and also its limitations, and the sense in which it was really a natural evolution of the field.

rw-book-cover

Let’s call this scraping good training data for your mind. It is an important skill. Too often neglected. When learning a new craft, it is tempting to first go after the tasks you need to master. You want to know how to structure your sentences, so you read Strunk and White. You want to figure out how to get better at searching Google Scholar, so you memorize boolean operators. This is important. But to get good at something—parenting, writing code, doing research—you also need to internalize examples of prime achievements in that field. Knowing how to find these examples is upstream of the tasks you need to master.