Chapter 5 of "dark time" Reading Notes-some of my study habits

5. Some of my study habits have always been with me.

(1) learning and thinking

3. Take Reading Notes. One is to summarize the thoughts (including flashings) You have read, and the other is to extract the good examples from the book. (This habit was developed a year ago and has benefited a lot .) With Google note, you can add tags to your notes to facilitate your review and understanding. In my opinion, the gap between people and people is not in terms of qualifications, but in terms of time and depth of thinking (the latter two are often related ).

4. I have a habit of thinking. When thinking about walking and eating, you must put a problem in your mind before going to bed, and get confused in thinking. It is often found that there is a lot of time to think about it without knowing it. There is another great benefit to turning thinking into habits-avoiding anxiety. Carnegie card used a whole book to explain an effective way to avoid anxiety-bottom line thinking. However, another effective approach is to invest in another task. The method of not thinking about "monkeys in the Himalayas" is not to tell myself not to think about "monkeys in the Himalayas", because there are two monkeys in the head, the correct way is to think about nothing but the monkey. With other things full of working memories, other neural activities are naturally restrained (basic facts of neuroscience ). Therefore, when you feel anxious, you may wish to think about it. You can even rationally analyze and think about the problems that lead to anxiety. You can split it up and analyze the source, without knowing it, the brain's focus shifted from the emotional module to the reasoning module, and this thinking may also solve the problem that causes anxiety more effectively :)

5. Important things are preferred (For details, refer to Stephen Covey's seven habits of high-performance people or important things first). Avoid trivial harassment as much as possible. Do not do anything that is not important. Sometimes, urgent matters often appear urgent only when the parties feel that they must finish them immediately or simply they are in a hurry for others. The worst thing is that they feel that everything has to be done in a timely manner for personal reasons, A lot of seemingly urgent things are not really "cannot be dragged on", and some simply do not need or are worth doing. There are many things that can be put first or even completely let go, otherwise it will be taken by the so-called "urgent" thing all day.

6. Create a relatively large time block for important tasks. For example, a good book or an important knowledge point should not be too trivial to read; otherwise, you may forget to read it later. Organizations and contacts that are not conducive to knowledge.

7. Read more books about psychology and thinking because they are interdisciplinary. Knowledge is divided into two types. One is what we usually call knowledge, that is, domain knowledge. Second, we have knowledge about the mechanisms by which our brains absorb knowledge. The latter may be called meta-knowledge. Although this is also a field knowledge, what is different from other fields is that it guides us to learn about all other fields.

8. To learn a knowledge, you must ask yourself three important questions: (1) What is its nature. (2) What is its first principle. (3) What is its knowledge structure.

9. What you get depends not on how much you read, but on how much you think and how deep you are.

10. Be good at using small pieces of time, that is, the "time" mentioned in "A strange life". There are several ways to use it. At the same time, it is also good at creating the whole time (such as taking priority through important tasks ).

11. What I want to say about the cultivation of habits is that it is certainly not easy to do. The so-called "Jiang Shan Yi" is hard to change its nature. The first is to recognize that the change in habits is never a day or two, and admit its difficulty. The second is that if you really want to get rid of your habits, you must always observe your behavior during the process, otherwise, the habit will affect your behavior in a way that you are not aware. There is a cognitive technique that may ease the discomfort in the process of changing habits: think of the irrational self in your heart as your own child (you need to train him ), or your opponent (you want to defeat him. In short, you cannot treat yourself as yourself, because everyone does not want to change themselves.

Here is an example of a cognitive technique: Mr. Li xiaolai's book "Treat time as a friend" (this book is also recommended by the way) he mentioned that one of his friends used another cognitive technique to overcome the boring problem of memorizing words:

Because we have to deal with 20,000 words in total, and thus the possible scholarship is about $40,000 a year-and there is no unemployment for four years in a row (the fact later was that, he won't have a doctorate degree until five years later ). At that time, the dollar exchange rate was about, so it should be equivalent to 320,000 yuan. If the annual post-tax income is 320,000 yuan, it will earn about 400,000 yuan before tax. Then, each word should be worth about 20 yuan-this is just a year's income. So he finally realized that memorizing words is very happy. He forces himself to recite 200 words every day. In the evening, when the acceptance result is reached, every time a tick is drawn in front of the words to be remembered, he needs to imagine that he had just counted a 20 yuan bill. I always feel satisfied when I go to bed every day, because I earned another 4000 yuan today!

(2) Time Management

1.In the process of learning and thinking, I often ask myself a few questions: What is your problem? (Remind yourself not to deviate from the problem .) OK. So far, what have I learned? (Remind yourself to summarize and sort out learning items from time to time ). Imagine you are talking to others. (Sound thinking; whether it can be said is the best way to judge whether it really understands ). Imagine that someone you don't understand should be told. (Forcing yourself to explore the most essential and often simplest interpretations behind knowledge ). Always reflect on and pay attention to your own thinking processes. Especially when you encounter problems that cannot be understood or solved, you need to review the original thinking process to see which part of the process is blocked. Where is the problem. And analyze which aspects of thinking habits need to be strengthened in the future so that they can not be pinned at the same or similar time. Writing down the general context of thinking is a good habit. Develop the habit of refuting your own ideas: When you have an idea, habitually refute it and ask yourself, "Is this true ?" "Are there any counterexamples or exceptions ?" "Is that true ?" And so on. (See critical thinking) human thinking is inherently easy to understand things on the surface (see Chapter 11th of Psychology of problem solving ). Do you think you have understood a problem? Ask yourself: Do you really understand it? Have you really understood the nature of the problem? What is the essence of the problem? What is my current understanding? Are I satisfied with this understanding? What kind of constructive understanding is there? And so on.

2. Focus on the essence of knowledge:ProgramThis is especially important for Members. The programmer industry has a massive amount of knowledge and is always growing and changing. Many people lament that they cannot keep up with new technologies. The only way to solve this problem is to grasp the invariant. A large number of new technologies are actually just a layer of skin, and the supporting technologies behind them are actually things that have not changed for more than a decade. The underlying knowledge is never outdated.AlgorithmThe data structure is never outdated. Basic Programming theories are never outdated. Good coding habits will never expire. The ability to analyze and solve problems is never out of date. A strong learning ability and a strong desire for knowledge are never out of date. Your brain's way of thinking will never be out of date.

3. Pay attention to the power of accumulation, and prepare for everything in advance: a longer plan will naturally lead to more preparation time. Imagine what you will do and what skills you need in a few years. Now you are ready. A 5-year plan allows you to get the 5-year preparation time from now on. Every five years, we can free up half an hour to concentrate on one thing every day. Let's look at the same direction and move a little bit each time. In fact, we should not say five years, in two years, we will find that it will have a huge effect. Friends who have subscribed to my blog for a long time must have noticed that I basically did not write anything. Generally, I wrote two articles a month, even if I had more. However, the habits of learning and thinking over a period of time have never been stopped.ArticleFor me, it is a by-product of learning and thinking. I did not write articles for writing articles.) So I wrote many things in five years. This is a simple example. You can also see things I have been paying attention to from my blog. In general, a period of time (less than half a year to one year-for example, the focus on psychology and thinking; A few years ago-for example, my focus on programming technology), during which time my spare time will be filled with a topic. Otherwise, if you do not know what the purpose is, and you do not know which direction to work hard, it is easy to produce useless work.

4.Raise your head: it is very easy for people to think that trees do not see the forest (otherwise, where does this idiom come from ?). From time to time, I looked up and looked at what I was doing and asked if you really wanted to do anything about it (for the present or the future. What did you learn? Are they important? Do you need to learn this at this time? (See article 2nd ). Your time is your resources. If you invest these resources to master the knowledge, it is very important to know what knowledge you need. Follow-up is not enough. People will become interested in many secondary things and waste a lot of time. Therefore, it is important to judge whether something is worth learning.

Miscellaneous:

1. Unsubscribe RSS: RSS reader is a time black hole. Even if Mark all as read has a large number of feeds, it will consume a lot of time. Once we subscribe to an RSS feed, we tend to refuse to unsubscribe it, thinking that there may be an important piece of information from there someday. This is actually because people refuse to "close a door (even if the income probability in the door is very small)" (see Predictably Irrational). In fact, they close a door, sometimes it can increase earnings expectations. Take a closer look at the feeds in the reader, which are truly valuable, and unsubscribe all the less valuable or even less worthy of being harassed by the reader every day. Don't be reluctant. The feeds that haven't showed up in a week will never show up. Even if possible, don't worry about missing valuable information. The real valuable information will be exposed to you from other sources. At first, my greader had a large amount of new content every day, which is more than 1000 every day. However, after a while, I found that there were not many valuable content besides information anxiety. Now, I am very happy to find myself out of this situation. I continue to unsubscribe feeds, leaving less and less content, and getting more refined, resulting in less and more reading anxiety. (By the way, we recommend aiderss for initial use. It feels useful for subscribing to a feed with a large amount of content updated every day such as Reddit ).

2. Do you have time? Summarize the latest knowledge. In general, some things I learned during a period of time will always go around in my mind during this period of time, and they will pop up as soon as there is a gap (such as walking or eating, encourage me to further think and summarize. Never think that you have a deep grasp of a knowledge. The feeling of "Understanding" is often an illusion. It is of great value to learn how much knowledge you have actually grasped. (How to ask questions, as mentioned in the previous summary ).

3. Do you have time? Read this book. (Traditional) reading and thinking are always better than learning new knowledge on the Internet. The latter is often superficial, unsystematic, or even worthless.

4.Make a brief reading plan: select the books most valuable to you recently. First, let's take a look at them and decide the reading sequence (which chapters can be read first ). Then you can check it every day. We also use walking, eating, traveling, or other content that is not suitable for reading with books and pens to summarize the content, establish a knowledge structure, extract the essence of knowledge, and establish a connection with the previous knowledge in the brain. (See "A strange life")

 

(3) reading methods

 

This article mainly describes some basic learning methods (especially reading.

1. When I am enthusiastic about one thing, I will stick to the most difficult stage at the beginning of everything. Everything is difficult at the beginning, because it is a time of soaring new knowledge that never understands the basic facts. At this time, it is the greatest difficulty. Some people can't get through it. If they think it's too difficult, they will give up. However, fanatic interests can offset the feeling of difficulties, so it is important to start a good start when you are enthusiastic about one thing. (Of course, this does not mean that perseverance does not matter ). Of course, this may vary from person to person. For me, I will be very focused on learning when I am very interested in one thing, and I will do a lot of groundworks. It will be better later.

2. Access the subject based on the topic, rather than the topic. I used to read a book before. I saw a book in my eyes. Now I read a chapter or even a section, what I see in my eyes is not a book, but a pile of chapters, a topic of knowledge, and reading by topic, you will find that when you read a book, you will not read another book honestly, but will jump from one book to another frequently, from one item to another, so as to obtain how different people explain the same topic. For example, I recently found that I checked 10 pieces of data when reading the Monte Carlo algorithm, including three or four paper and six or seven books. This is because even a classic book, you cannot expect that the introduction to each topic is perfect. Some books have a better introduction to a topic (knowledge point), and some books have a better introduction to other knowledge points. Sometimes a compact paper is better than a book. Books on my hard disk are classified by topic. Each topic contains a pile of books. When I need to learn the knowledge of a topic (such as Bayesian learning or Neural Network ), I will open all the books involved in this topic, index them to relevant chapters, and then read them well. So how can we determine whether a piece of information is good or bad?

3. Good information and bad information. Features of good materials: Starting from the problem, focuses on the concept behind the method (rationale), focuses on Intuitive interpretation, rather than the technical details of the method; according to the time flow of method invention (first, what problems are encountered, then how to analyze, reason, and finally find the current method ). Bad Data is characterized by the opposite of good data: the details of the method come up, as if a method fell from the sky, they often write "our definition... We name it... Let's take the following steps... ". I don't want to explain why we should use this method. People first thought of this method because of the problems they faced, how they came up with this method, and what is the intuitive idea behind the method. In fact, if a method is expressed directly in the most concise form, the vast majority of information is often lost. The lost information is the thinking process behind the problem solving. As to why most books cannot do this, I have tried to analyze it here.

4.Before learning a theme, you first need to accumulate a full sense of doubt in your brain ". That is, to find out what the problem is. Before browsing the method itself, you 'd better ask yourself what method you can think. A widely accepted fact is that the more you have doubts about the problem, the more you think about it before. The more deeply you feel when you see the answer. I remember that the textbooks in the university always put the entire knowledge structure in front of me in a simple manner. The reading process was quite cool. I nodded and soon forgot about it. Why? Because I have no questions to learn.

5. selective reading. Many people think that I have a fast reading speed. In fact, I only read it selectively. The selection here is embodied in two places. One is to select the chapters of interest in a book for priority reading. Second, you can quickly skip a book that is technically weak or has a low information density. In general, in addition to technically powerful books, the information density of most books is very low and there is a lot of nonsense. In general, we should split the content as follows: (1) What is the problem? (2) What is the solution? (3) What is the example?

If you need to explain a phenomenon (such as Black Swan), what is the phenomenon (1? (2) what is the explanation? (3) What are the reasons for supporting this explanation? (4) What is the example? In general, this may not take many words (if only one or two excellent examples are taken). A typical example of such nonsense works is "Evolution of cooperation". so why do some books clearly show the core points of view (at most a few excellent examples) but write them to death? Because people's thinking has a "Lenovo" feature, it is easy to show off the text, and the author often feels that it is awesome to extend it out, sometimes a lot of theme-independent nonsense is involved; then, the irrelevant nonsense should be filtered out selectively during reading; there is also a possibility of a large number of redundancy examples. Generally, a well-organized book contains detailed and clear directories and indexes. You can filter out a part of the contents of a sub-chapter (for example, you have read the contents of a sub-chapter before ), then sometimes the author will give a lot of redundant examples, if you have already been impressed by these examples, you can simply not read them. (Some books are very generous, and each point of view is supplemented by one or two of the most classic examples, for example, "Psychology of difference-how to face psychology", I like this book most ).

6. Why can't I understand it? If you do not understand the knowledge, there are several possible reasons: (1) You do not have enough effort. The ancients concluded that the book had read its meaning for a hundred times. Although this rule is not always true, it can be fully explained from the perspective of cognitive science. When we read it, attention tends to selectively pay attention to some of the "points", while ignoring other "points". As a result, it may be unable to understand the whole because of some omissions. Or you can simply ignore some of the details but important things. In addition, it takes a certain amount of time for the brain to understand something. The processing speed of the brain is very slow, and the neural impulse transmission speed per second is only a hundred meters. Finally, we may look at a sentence from a specific perspective due to our mindset and ignore the possibility of understanding it from different perspectives. In this case, I read it twice more carefully and try to understand it twice more! This is the case ." Suddenly realized. (2) This involves concepts that you do not understand. This is technically incomprehensible. In this case, cross reference is required. If the concepts you don't understand are used in one sentence, you can check them. Now many books are e-books, and you can search for them directly. For paper books, you can just check the index at the bottom of the book. The strange thing is that many people simply give up without analyzing why they don't understand it. Just like solving the problem, the problem cannot be solved. The first thing to do is to analyze why the problem cannot be solved, rather than directly asking for help. (3) The order in which the author tells us is incorrect. You may go on to look at it later and understand the previous one.

7. Miscellaneous. How to get a rough assessment of the quality of a book before reading it. The ability to quickly evaluate the quality of a book can save a lot of time before reading it in depth. There are several clues: (1) read the author. The books written by the author are generally good. (2) view directories and descriptions. A good catalog and introduction can reveal a considerable amount of information about the quality of this book. Whether the directory structure is clear or straightforward (rather than playing tricks) is a measurement clue. (3) Check Amazon's rating. It should be noted that, apart from the overall score, we should also look at what the people with the lowest scores say, because niche opinions may often come from people who are actually knowledgeable (except those who come to kick the pavilion ), if you don't see any really valuable counterargument In the opinion with the lowest score, it's pretty good. (4) See the following chapter. Amazon generally allows you to randomly browse some chapters to see whether the expressions are clear, whether the arguments are rigorous, and whether the content is profound. This can be seen on several pages. ,

8. How to find a good book. Several clues: (1) same author's work. (2) Amazon-related recommendations and topic-related book columns (bean columns similar to Douban ). (3) A good book (or a good document-whether it is a book or a webpage) other books highlighted in references. (4) Sometimes, for a topic, you can find reference resource guidance summarized by good people, which is the best.

 

The author recommends an article"Thoughts on reading"

Thoughts on reading

In the process of seeking knowledge, we often have to face such a temptation. 

taking reading as an example, I want to read, understand, and consolidate a classic textbook, in addition to understanding the literal meaning that the author wants to describe during the reading process, it is often necessary to establish a more solid and profound understanding through a large number of related exercises and experiments, while holding a thick book, the potential * instinct of human psychology * tends to drive itself as quickly as possible. speed to win this teaching material, * satisfies your sense of accomplishment. * , without external monitoring, it is easy to evolve into reading at the beginning and taking care of all the questions. Over time, I began to be unable to resist the temptation to quickly read books, as a result, the frequency of making questions is getting lower and lower. In the end, under the guiding principle of quickly conquering the goal, the book has been read, but the exercises have not done a few. In the course of reading, at each partial stage of reading, I seem to have understood what the author wants to convey, but I really want to combine books and ask you to have a certain section, when a chapter or even the book makes a summative review, I often feel that there are many ideas and many things that seem to be in my mind, but cannot be expressed in a smooth way. It is often impossible to solve some practical problems with the knowledge you have mentioned in the book. The root cause is that the learning process is not solid enough.

in our reading scope, there are many books that are not worth reading, especially books and materials of information nature, (especially for information on the Internet), the authors of these information sources often process the information properly during the production process out of the need for rapid dissemination of their information, to reduce the difficulty of understanding and digesting the audience. This kind of information can increase our knowledge while reading them, but it cannot improve our understanding, our understanding is equal to that of the producers of such information. (The Source producers of information certainly have a greater understanding than ordinary people in their professional fields, but in the process of making information, they have tried to use various means to reduce the understanding required for understanding information, otherwise, reading an information newspaper may take an ordinary person a day or two to think about it, and the information production institutions will soon close their doors ). However, the positioning of a classic textbook is quite different from that of information. In other words, reading information books aims to know what happened and reading classical textbooks, it is to know the mechanisms behind what happens. In other words, * the purpose of a classic textbook is to improve human understanding, this is to give people a long impression of * .

If you want to improve your understanding through the process of reading classic textbooks, you just need to use the course of reading to learn what the author has, but some of the capabilities that you have not yet possessed before reading, characteristics. Different knowledge backgrounds, different knowledge structures, different knowledge bases, and even different cultural backgrounds,It is doomed that it will not be easy for you to read a book to gain a similar understanding of the content described in this book. A large amount of thinking, exercises, experiments, and even searching for relevant materials to identify and verify each other are all important means. A good textbook may only contain500Pages, but in order to read it through, read it thoroughly, and then improve your understanding in the scope described in this book, you need to do exercises, materials to be checked, the number of notes and reading reports to be written may be larger than the number of pages. If the course of reading such books is just to help you understand the scope of the books that you are looking at in quick reading, I'm afraid I have read the whole book, you may not be able to understand the tenth of the content that the author really wants to convey, and the personal gain in understanding is limited. 

Therefore, I will try to use the following methods to read the classic textbooks: 

1.Continuous reading 

The key is*Continuous*I do not advocate"This week100Page, one week off next week, and several more pages in a week"In modern society, we are exposed to a wide variety of things that need to be handled, and the individual's processing and memory capabilities are limited, therefore, if the gap between reading a book is too long, it is very likely that you read150Page content, you will find that you have forgotten a lot of the previous content, this kind of forgetting is inevitable in the reading process, but irregular, non-sequential reading caused by the effect of forgetting much more obvious. The policy is also applicable in the course of reading. 

2. Keep thinking 

Some people have already said"Learn without thinking"Reading for a long time, but not spending time thinkingWhy and how?It will degrade itself into a knowledge storage machine, which cannot improve understanding. For books, if they are just a cloud of people, what they grasp is often superficial. Only those that have been deeply thought and scrutinized by themselves can they be more effectively integrated into their own knowledge systems.  

3. Stick to the question 

Once upon a time, I was very reluctant to answer questions. I felt that it was a disadvantage of exam-oriented education. However, after many years, I experienced some cognitive and learning dilemmas, after some detours, my current experience is that question making is a very effective way to consolidate what I have learned. However, the traditional exam-oriented education over-emphasizes the utilitarian return of the question itself, which easily stimulates the psychological rebound of the initiators. Once an individual obtains a free learning environment, this method will be preferred. Many times, when we are reading, we feel that we have understood a sentence or a specific meaning, but not necessarily. Different backgrounds and different knowledge structures mean that readers and authors often have different understandings in the same description. The intention of the author is:* *Used to clarify the intention* *The description is* B *The reader reads the description* B *The initial understanding established later may be* C *,* C *And* *There may be or not an intersection. Without thinking about the subject, it is difficult to determine whether your understanding of the author's main intent is biased. By making questions, you can often find your own deviations and blind spots in understanding, so that you can describe them.* B *The understanding is closer to the original intent that the author wants to express.* *.

4. Take Reading Notes in stages. 

I personally think that Reading Notes in stages is a few minutes"Jump out of the picture"Reading, thinking, and making questions will keep you entangled in the details of books and teaching materials, and jump out at the right time to make a summary, which will help you clarify the direction, combing ideas is not limited to a book. On the other hand, it can also consolidate what you have learned. As for searching materials, they are mutually verified, because the current energy is really limited, and it is also related to their own inertia. In the course of their own reading, they are not doing enough,(I personally feel that searching for materials for academic research is a necessary condition for mutual confirmation. It is not so urgent if you are only seeking knowledge.)However, during the four points mentioned above, I still insisted on reading classical textbooks. 

Finally, the author cited French scholarsPascalOnce said a sentence serves as the end of this post: 

*"Reading is too fast or too slow, and nothing is returned."*