Quotes About Learning

My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.

They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads

So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.

Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just "more robust.

what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you've learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.

If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don't attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity…or get another job.

The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.

What I learned on my own I still remember.

A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.

In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.

Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.

T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper.

Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.

I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting).

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent "studying" the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.

avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.

Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized.

If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.