Optional Interview with Scott Young, a "Marco Polo" of Learning

Scott Young is the ultimate adventurer in learning.

He’s compressed the entire four year MIT curriculum for computer science into one year of independent learning, and is now wrapping up a year’s travel, learning four different languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Korean through total immersion in each of the countries.

Scott doesn’t just study learning from an academic perspective.

He immerses himself in learning and perceptively observes the results so that we can all gain from it.

So, it’s a pleasure to welcome Scott Young.

Scott, I’m always excited to follow your adventures.

So tell me, where are you now and what is your latest learning challenge?

Right.

So right now at the moment I’m actually in South Korea, in Seoul not too far away from Gangnam actually.

And I am learning Korean.

And this is part of a larger project where a friend and I are traveling for a year.

Staying three months in four different countries.

So three months each trying to learn the language of that country through not speaking English as much as possible.

Wow.

I’m just so impressed.

You’re sort of a Marco Polo of learning.

And I was also impressed by your MIT challenge in learning.

What you did was you compressed a four year curriculum of computer science into one year of independent learning.

There are a lot of questions I have for you in relation to that experience as well as your language learning experience.

So first, can you tell us, how do you avoid illusions of competence in learning?

Right.

Well, I’m a big fan of trying to dive into a position where you might be wrong as soon as possible.

So, when you’re just reading a lecture, reading a textbook, you can’t ever really be wrong.

There’s no real check on whether you know what you know.

And, I really like getting into problems as quickly as possible with a language, trying to speak as quickly as possible.

Or if not speaking quick as quickly as possible testing my, my listening comprehension in a, in a, in a strict way.

So, with the MIT challenge I,I would work on problem sets.

And I would do my best to do the problem sets without having the solutions at hand.

And try my best on, on any problem and if I got stuck, if I couldn’t finish, then of course go to the problem and check to see the solution and learn it.

But I think only if you feel that grind a bit first, if you feel that tension, that stress that you’re not quite sure how to finish it only then will you really remember how to do the problem for the future. So if you don’t have that feeling of not being sure how to do it and that strain, I think it is hard to really improve your knowledge.

But that goes right along with our own learning philosophy.

In this course which is test yourself as frequently as possible.

So, one of the approaches that you have to learning that I absolutely love is that of self explanation.

Can you explain to our viewers a little bit what you mean by self explanation?

What, what is it and what kind of benefits can you get from it?

Right, well I got this idea reading biography of Richard Feynman.

He was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and I forget the exact method that he used himself, but I remember him talking about, you know, being a Nobel prize winner in theoretical physics.

He’s a smart guy, and he was talking about a particular academic paper, a particular concept he didn’t understand.

And his approach wasn’t to throw his hands up and say, well, you know, I don’t get it or, it’s too difficult.

But he want through meticulously, not only trying to understand everything that was in that paper, but of the papers it sourced.

He read through them very carefully and combed through them and, and tried to make sure he understood all the supporting ideas.

So, for me, I’ve kind of adapted that into this idea of taking a blank piece of paper out and writing as if I’m trying to teach someone else what this idea is all about.

Or what this process for solving a particular type of problem is all about.

Or what it means.

And what I find happens is that you usually get to points where you have some friction, where you have to be too vague or you can’t really be as exact and precise as you want to be.

And those are usually the things that you don’t understand.

So you can go back to your notes, you can go back to the textbook, look up that exact spot, and figure out, oh, this is the part I’m missing.

I’m missing step three of this process.

Or I don’t really understand why step three works, maybe I can ask someone, a teacher or a, or a friend.

I think it’s so smart to go look and intuit how other very creative people have, have approached their problem solving.

And I always love Feynman’s approach.

He always said that, that it’s very important that, that the first rule is not to fool yourself, but you are the easiest person to fool.

So I, I, I just love how you’re, you’re learning from other learners.

Can you, can you one of your approaches that I really like is that of creating vivid examples.

Can you give us an example of that?

So, the mind doesn’t learn abstract things very well.

It works a lot better when you have something very concrete, you can point to it and say, oh, this is how it works.

And, math and science is often full of things that are just pure abstract, abstraction, they, they only connect very loosely to things we can touch and feel.

So what I try to do is find simple analogies that are, are metaphors and try to test them or see how to make them fit with the thing I’m trying to learn.

So it’s kind of like looking through your mind for examples or stories or things that you are familiar with, and like, fitting a jigsaw piece into a puzzle, trying to figure out, what’s the right piece.

So I’ll give you a quick example of that.

I was learning about electricity and one of the concepts you learn early on is voltage.

Now, I didn’t have a good intuition of what voltage was.

So I’m trying to make a, a mental picture of what voltage could be, and I’m thinking about, you know, an electrical circuit.

Well, it’s a little bit like pipes with water.

And so if, if the electrical circuits like pipes with water, then what are all of the components?

And current is pretty easy.

Well, that’s like the water flowing.

I, I can get that.

But what was voltage, and I was like, what was it like pressure?

But if you look at the equations for pressure and you look at the equations for voltage, they don’t really look alike so that, that felt wrong.

And I realize that, you know, if you’ve studied electricity, you’ve usually also studied the, the, the, the gravity beforehand, and what was the same was electric potential and gravitational potential.

So, oh, voltage is like height.

So I can imagine in my head that the high voltage wires are like pipes that are physically higher than the other pipes.

So the way water when it rushes down, when it goes down from the high level to the low level, it gives off a lot more energy because it’s falling.

And that metaphor really helped me because not only was it something concrete that I’ll never forget, but it also was fairly accurate.

And then I tested out a couple things like pressure and I found, okay, this is the one that works.

And sometimes, this process can take a little bit of time.

I’m recapping this in two seconds, but it really took me about an hour to comb through the notes to figure this one out.

But.

You can ask professors, you can ask, you know, hey, is this kind of like this?

And someone who really understands can help you out.

Or you can just do what I did and just try to fit different puzzle pieces and see what fits.

Because even if you don’t find a good puzzle piece, you can still learn a lot more that way.

Oh I, I couldn’t agree more.

I do find that as the years have gone by, the most creative professors who I’ve worked with, researchers, are always the ones who use these kinds of analogies.

And the ones who are more pedantic, a little more by the book, often aren’t as creative about how they approach things.

So I think that’s a very intelligent way of, of going at everything.

Can you talk to our viewers just a little bit about motivation?

How can you develop a passion for learning, perhaps even in subjects you think you don’t have a passion for?

Any suggestions for mental tools people can use to help motivate themselves in their learning?

Well, I love this question, because right now I’m learning languages, and we’re currently, I’m currently learning my sixth language, Korean right now.

And we’re doing it in very tight time constraints.

So I’ve gotten a few emails from people who have, you know, heard about the project, and they said, well, maybe you and your friend who were doing this have this natural talent for languages and, you know, this, this genetic gift.

And I think it’s so funny, because I remember, the first time I was trying to learn a foreign language, French, I spent about the same amount of time I’m spending here.

And I barely passed the exam.

I got a D.

And I’m, I feel like I’m a fairly smart fellow in other things.

So I didn’t really let it get to me.

But I think, it’s true for a lot of subjects.

That, being intelligent within that subject is often a factor, just how much exposure you’ve had to it.

So if you’re not used to math, don’t take that as a sign that maybe you’re bad at math, but just that you need to put more time in.

And you’ll get more motivation, it’ll be even more easy to motivate yourself, you’ll have more interest once you’re better at it.

And you can get better at it by, by encouraging yourself to take on little steps, little mini projects.

And once you complete that project, you build more confidence.

With more confidence, you can do more things, you can understand more things and it becomes more interesting.

And I just, I love your story that you gave of, of learning math, because I think that’s just a perfect example and it’s too bad that a lot of people just don’t conceptualize the world that way.

One thing that I really like about your own story is, you failed, but you just learned from failure.

You didn’t allow that to get to you.

You just sort of shifted your strategies and figured out what strategy was more successful.

And I think that’s a sign of the best learners, is not to be set, set back by failure, they just learn from it.

Absolutely.

So, I, I love how you’ve developed projects for self education.

Can you tell us a little more about what you’ve done this way and how our viewers might go about developing their own projects for self education?

Right, so I actually got this idea from a good friend.

He’s also in, I think, your recommended resources, Benny Lewis.

And he was someone who told me I remember he told me in person one day, he’s like, always have a mission.

And basically just this idea of, he, he would pick these three month missions for learning languages, because that was usually how long he could secure a tourist visa to this place to try to learn as much as possible in three months.

But it really struck me how different that was from the regular approach.

The regular approach of going, and you know, I’m going to just learn this and I don’t really have any concrete goals and I don’t really have any specific motivation.

And of course it tapers off and you don’t achieve that much.

And what I found really helpful is making very concrete projects that are exciting to me.

Something that, you know, this is really interesting.

So when I did the MIT Challenge, just this idea kind of obsessed me.

This idea of, you know, would it be possible to learn the things that an MIT student would learn in school without going to MIT?

Or this language learning project, you know.

Would it be possible to get to a conversational level, or, or a decent amount of level through complete immersion in four different countries in a year?

So I, I tend to pick these kind of grand projects.

But I think you could pick something very simple.

You could just say, you know, I want to try learning this over a month.

And I’m going to obsess about it and make it interesting.

And that’s often how you can turn something that might otherwise be dull into something that fascinates you, because it’s this specific concrete challenge.

I like this approach.

It seems very similar to what I did with helping to create this MOOC.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Any tips on effective use of online resources?

Right.

So, this is I think particularly relevant to your audience, because you know, a MOOC audience you’re signed up to this through Co, Coursera and you probably know about Coursera and edX and all of the great MOOC platforms. And I really think these platforms are the future because they have such high quality courses, but it’s still early days.

And I think that there’s still a lot of subjects that people would like to learn but maybe there isn’t a MOOC for it.

And I think there’s also some disadvantages to MOOCs.

In particular if you want to learn something a little bit more advanced MOOCs can sometimes be a bit harder because they tend to be written for audience with no prerequisites, no requirements.

So you might feel that if you wanted to do, you know, some physics it isn’t just an intro physics class, this is a little bit harder, because you know, they are expecting that I haven’t learned calculus or I haven’t learned something different.

And so what I recommend is using MIT’s open course ware’s incredible.

It has literally hundreds, I don’t know whether it has thousands of courses, but it has just such a huge volume of courses.

And sometimes the courses aren’t really well supported, like they don’t have videos, they don’t have, it’s not as hands-on as, as these MOOCs.

But I’ve found sometimes what they’ll have is they’ll have the exams in the problem sets and a list of the readings, and a link to a textbook.

I can buy the textbook used on Amazon for $15 sometimes.

And I’d get it delivered, and I would do it, and honestly I felt like I sometimes learned more from those courses than the video lecture courses.

So I think if you are willing to be bit more adventurous, there’s literally almost no topic you can’t learn through this kind of structured, university-like format through the resources available online.

It’s an explosion in learning how to learn.

I mean this, the what’s available now to the public is just absolutely phenomenal.

And so anyone who has an interest in pretty much anything can, can do some great exploration.

So as our, our wrap up question here, you’ve written that you, you can learn more by studying less.

What do you mean by that?

All right, so I think you’ve touched on it a lot in this course that you’re offering.

That people get caught up in low efficiency, low intensity studying habits, and because they learn a lot slower with those methods they end up spending a lot more time studying.

And because they’re spending a lot more times studying, which is naturally more tiring, you go into less efficient studying methods.

It’s a little bit like exercising.

It’s as if, you know, you’re not getting the exercise results you want, so you extend your workout from one hour to two hour.

But now you’re not working out as, more intensely, so you make it four hours.

And now, you know, you really can’t do more than just a light jog for four hours, or maybe just walking.

And eventually, it eats up all of your time.

But you’re, you’re not having the intensity that your muscles in your body really need to get physical improvement.

And similarly, I think the same is true with mental improvement.

So what I try to do is, I try to pick specific chunks of time that I’m going to study.

And they don’t have to be too big.

So right now, I’m learning Korean over at least three months.

And I’m actually only doing three to four hours a day.

Of studying time, which is considerably less than I would say a typical full-time student studying Korean.

But I think that I’ve been making quite good progress just because the actual time I’m spending is highly focused.

This kind of test yourself feedback so that I’m using things like Anki for flashcards.

And I’m doing actual conversations one-on-one with a tutor.

And these things are very efficient, but they are also very intense.

But the benefit of that is that you have more time and you can relax outside of it.

Great advice and as always, great advice from you.

I know I’ve learned a lot and really enjoyed following your adventures and, and getting new tips on learning from you.

So I thank you so much, Scott.

And we’ll see you on the flip side.

Well, thank you very much for letting me be a part of this.

I, I really hope the students taking this course found some value in it, the video I put together.