Reading, of course, is one of the most important ways to acquire knowledge but that comes with its own problems.  Figuring out what to read, how to get answers when the text is not sufficient and a general methodology for self-study by reading is definitely not straight-forward or easy.  It you have this figured out, you probably are well ahead of the curve.  However, for those of us still developing that methodology, the interweb (unlike in many cases) provides the solution: Khan Academy.

The site started by former hedge fund analyst with degrees from MIT and Harvard Business School, Sal Khan, makes short online videos teaching the fundamentals in a wide variety of subjects (e.g. mathematics, finance, biology, computer science, physics, current events…) — just the type of place for one to start acquiring worldly wisdom.  I’ve been using it for the past half year or so (32k energy points!) and I’m really enjoying it.  I’ve been particularly interested in the finance related aspects as my two courses economics really didn’t explain everything I wanted to know about fractional reserve banking or collateral debt obligations.

The beauty of the site is that Sal explains everything in simple terms, removing all the unnecessary fluff that usually gets attached when learning things formally in school.  He presents things in a more practical manner to give good intuition on the subject rather than drone on through formalities — and, trust me, I know a thing or two about unnecessary formalities (e.g. research papers).  His teaching style matches up with exactly how I believe most subjects (especially introductory courses) should be taught — focusing on understanding concepts, rather than focusing on all the little details.  It’s exactly the kind of place I would like to start when learning a new subject area.  What it is not, however, is a substitute for in-depth study.  To achieve a more useful level of knowledge, it takes much more than watching a few videos.  Actually doing some work, is usually a good starting place but that’s another subject entirely…

Learning just got a whole lot easier because of one man, his tablet and the interweb.  I’m incredibly skeptical of the yet unfulfilled revolution to education that technology promises to bring, but Khan Academy is definitely starting to turn the tide.

“No doubt the first requirement for becoming strong at go is to like it, like it more than food or drink, and a second requirement is the desire to learn.  A third requirement is to study it, using proper methods, patiently, little by little, without cramming… Rome was not built in a day.  It may not take years of devoted study to the exclusion of all else, but it does take effort piled upon effort to become strong at go.  The only ones who fall by the wayside are those, be they gifted or otherwise, who forget the word ‘effort’.” (emphasis mine)
Kageyama, Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go

Replace “Go” with any other skill and you have a fundamental law of “getting strong at things”.  It’s funny how technology tricks us into thinking that we can learn things faster — all of a sudden.  It gives us a sense that facts somehow are the same as knowledge, or that an almost endless encyclopedia is a replacement for an discerning mind, or more importantly that effort is no longer a requirement for getting strong.  Not everything is instant, not everything is digital, and not everything is easy.  Just the way I like it.

“I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood.”
Jonathan Coulton, quoted in a blog post on Coding Horror

This is the coolest quotes on parenthood I’ve heard.  It’s hard to imagine what it’s like becoming a vampire, just as I’m sure it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to become a parent (not that Hollywood hasn’t tried to make either into a movie).  I guess it’s one of those experiences that is just so hard to describe until you’ve experienced it, like falling in love or having a close brush with death (again both topics romanticized by Hollywood).  Like turning into a vampire, parenthood probably isn’t one of those things that you should take lightly.  Even though it’s hard for us non-parent youngsters to understand, it’s nice to know that there still exist some things in life we can look forward to (and deeply dread).

1. Failure #1: Exclusivity
2. Failure #2: Grades
3. Failure #3: Lectures

Much of the discussion was talking about how Udacity might correct some of these failures and usurp the traditional forms of higher education.  I respectfully disagree — at least not according to the arguments stated.  One key aspect is missing from this model that the current model of higher education does really well: playing to incentives of the stakeholders.  Let me address the three points individually.

Grades
The biggest presupposition they make with any of these new models for higher education is that most students want to go to school to learn.  This is a commendable idealism but couldn’t be further from the truth.  I strongly suspect that the main motivation of students is to get a good job (high paying, growth opportunities, good location etc.).  If this is the incentive, then we should consider what is in the best interest of companies looking to hire graduates of these institutions.  Ideally, they want to hire the best candidate with a high degree of confidence.  Obviously this is not a simple task.  This requires evaluating each candidate for using strict hiring guidelines and processes.  This just doesn’t scale well when a single job may have hundreds of applicants.  Practically, employers need some easy measure to filter out candidates.  Yes, they might miss the diamond in the rough, but they save that time in hours and hours of filtering out poor candidates.  Enter grades.  Reducing your entire education to a single number or letter average may seem disheartening to the poor student who has toiled to achieve a respectable degree, but it’s dead easy to filter out people.  Below B+, out.  A+, interview immediately.  Everyone else in between, look at their resumes.  Like it or not, the purpose of grades is exactly to reduce your talent, ingenuity and performance to a single number so that you can be binned.  It’s obviously not accurate, nor precise, not to mention rife with abuse, but it’s the trade-off for how easy it is to use.

Exclusivity
Like any fashion retailer knows, your brand is one of the most important assets when you are trying to sell a high end product.  The same goes for a person, a company or a school.  If you brand gets diluted, its value (deserved or not) goes down.  This is precisely why many schools are exclusive.  If MIT suddenly accepted ten times the amount of engineering students, how would the quality of their out-going students fare?  My bet is that the average performance would greatly decrease.  This causes a huge negative effect on the brand that, in the end, does the school, alumni and graduating students a disservice.  It’s like if we produced ten times the amount of diamonds, that 1 karat ring that you got your wife all of a sudden doesn’t mean the same thing (although it’s great for people looking to pick up a diamond).  Brand — and maintaining it — is an important factor that drives the incentives of everyone already affiliated with the university.  This means that for the most part, all these existing parties will want exclusivity over a diluted brand.

Lectures
As for the final failure of universities, I think the original article is spot on.  Lectures are a very limited way to convey information, but it’s still not clear if there is a scalable model(s) that works as well.  Giving an iPad to all students definitely is not the solution.  Some universities are already providing video taped lectures for students to view online but this is not the end all or be all of learning.  Most likely different types of material work best when taught in different ways.  I believe that this is an evolution that will (albeit slowly) incorporate newer technologies.  Lectures are mostly just an older model that scales well and does a decent job.  Newer methods are welcome and hopefully we can see some great innovation here.

Incentives, incentives, incentives…
Charlie Munger is one of my heroes, in part, because he has some much wisdom without any of the BS.  He’s a huge advocate of incentives and you should be too.  Most people talk about what should happen instead of what will happen.  It’s unfortunate that we don’t live in an ideal world, but that’s the reality.  The only way to make things change for the better is if we make policies, models, and rules that play off the natural human instinct to be swayed by incentives.  Of course, I haven’t talked about any solutions, I’m not sure I have any.  I’m just reminding you that regardless of whatever innovations, ideas, or ideology you have, none of it is going to have any relevance without somehow working incentives into the picture.

“However there are lots of ways round this little problem. One of them is doctoring the marks.  Except its not called ‘doctoring’ its called ‘scaling’ and its done by computer. You scale the marks until you get the nice binomial distribution of fails and firsts. You can turn a fail into a II(ii) with scaling. Probably you want to be generous because otherwise students might not elect to study your course next year and then your course will be shut down and you’ll be teaching Word for Windows. Scaling was universal and nobody except the external auditors (who were lecturers who did the same thing themselves) got to see anything but the scaled marks.”

One way to look at it is to view the system abstractly as an optimization problem.  If you have 10,000 undergraduate students per year trying to optimize their marks, all of which are funding (at least in part) the pay of the university and the professor in question, which goal is going to be optimized first?  One professor who wishes to maintain the high quality of standard, or the 10,000 (per year) undergraduates all trying to maximize marks while minimizing work?  Gone are the days when I think of university as a place solely for higher learning.  (Though it’s important not to draw broad strokes on the few who still are fighting the good fight.)

Knowing this, it’s almost crazy to think that one person can change such entrenched institutions as universities.  But perhaps that’s exactly what we need more of — crazy people:

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Think Different, narrated by Steve Jobs

So go on, get your crazy on today.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

This quote is  reminder that there is exactly one way to have a happy family — have everything go right.  On the hand, there are millions of ways in which a family can go wrong: attraction, personality, money, religion, and the list goes on.  I think this also applies more generally to what’s termed the Lollapalooza Effect where things conspire together to reach that critical mass where amazing things start happening.  Leave just one ingredient out and the magic doesn’t happen.  The corollary to this is that even if one thing is missing, there’s no rule that says you can’t fill in that gap yourself.  No one has everything going right from the start — they make it happen.

Happy families may be rare, but they don’t have to be.

In graduate school, I’m a teaching assistant for a course called Algorithms and Data Structures that offers both a undergraduate version and a graduate one.  The undergraduate version is pretty vanilla with reasonable level questions that some students intuitively get but others struggle with; the usual spread between any reasonably difficult undergraduate coarse.  But the graduate version is much more insidious.  The professor purposely puts questions on the homework (and to some extent on the exam) that are not just hard but tortuous.  These are the kinds of questions that you can literally spend hours thinking about only to end up in the exact same place you started in.  It’s like a maze involving sorting, searching, dynamic programming, greedy algorithms, max flow and any other nasty “basic” algorithms you can think of.

So it’s no surprise that the students complain.  They wish it could be easier and sometimes a few ask for help on how to make it easier.  I answer them but I’m sad to say it’s never the answer they want to hear.  The answer I give them is that you really have to learn by doing.  That is, you only get good at these algorithm questions after you’ve done a lot of them.  That’s the way you build intuition, by doing — NOT by someone more experienced that you telling you all the answers.  It’s always tough to hear because I know they are stressed out with three or four other courses all with their own deadlines and of course they’re worried about their marks (even though the latter isn’t so important in graduate school).  And alas (I hope) they realize that there is no shortcut, sometimes you have to cross through the bush to get to the other side.

And here’s where my caveat comes in: the one thing that seems to be missed when touting the “learn-by-doing” strategy is that it can be really hard.  Either because it’s really scary (e.g. public speaking), or maybe just a lot of work (e.g. algorithms).  The best teachers I know intuitively understand this and make you take that key step in understanding by yourself.  It may be hard but no one said learning was easy.

“If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius.”
Michelangelo

It’s that mysterious force that seems to make the impossible real, the difficult easy, and the genius accessible.  The funny thing is that magic is only magic when you don’t know how it was done.  Once you do, it’s gone.  Forever.  And that’s why perhaps so many choose not to learn how magic works because then they can stay in their fairy tale worlds where some prince/wizard/genius will come to save the day.  That’s a nice world to live in with one caveat.  If you never know how the magic was done, you’ll never be able to make it happen.  And that, in my opinion, isn’t such a nice world.  Genius takes hard work, talent is overrated, and magic is a word people say when they don’t understand something.  Or not.  It really depends which world you’re living in.

Distractions are a plenty on any site you visit on the interweb.  Ads can be at the top of the page, bottom of the page, sides of the page, inline in the text, appear full screen before the page loads, flashing in multiple colours… you get the idea.  Not only that, there are just too many things to see on the page!  Links on the top of the page, bottom of the page, sides of the page, inline in the text, appear randomly as you move your mouse, flash in multiple colours… and so on.  And last but not least, most font sizes are horrible for reading (usually the text is way too small for my liking)!

Thankfully, I’ve found a way to deal with it (actually I found someone’s site who has found a way to deal with it).  Here’s a very useful article on how to make the web more readable: Filters for Reading on the Web.  One of the main points is to use this awesome free application/plug-in called Readability.  It basically will reformat the text on a page so that it is actually readable and distraction free.  The best part is that if you’re worried about not giving ad revenue to your favourite sites (haven’t met anyone yet like this), part of the proceeds from Readability go to the site you’re viewing (if you get the paid version).  Finally, something designed for those of us who like reading on the web but who haven’t quite figured out how to filter out the distractions.

In a perfect world, I solve interesting problems (without the monotonous stuff) that are somehow very useful and get paid a lot to do it.

In a perfect world, house chores (cleaning, laundry, dish washing etc.) are magically done whenever things gets messy.

In a perfect world, I eat whatever I feel like (without consideration for calories, fat or nutrition).

In a perfect world, I recover as fast as I did when I was a teenager.

In a perfect world, I have unlimited time to read and have access to any book I can think of.

In a perfect world, I visit any one of my friends, anywhere in the world, anytime I want.

In a perfect world, I give my friends and family any present that they would value.

In a perfect world, I find that one special person that I want to spend the rest of my life with.

In a perfect world, I am never sick.

In a perfect world, I have access to the best teachers in the world.

P.S. I  got this exercise from an essay titled “IN A PERFECT WORLD…” by Derek Sivers in the End Malaria book.  I highly recommend it, not only because it has many great essays but because with every purchase you help to end malaria.