Quotes About Learning

Looking stupid is part of learning, let it happen.

Keep in mind that getting control of any addictive-type problem nearly always requires multiple efforts. If at first you don't fully succeed, keep trying and keep learning; remember, most cigarette smokers finally quit on the eighth serious attempt.

Above all, it is necessary to recognize that knowledge cannot be pumped into human beings the way grease is forced into a machine. The individual may learn; he is not taught.

Always at the hands of people who range from the semi-informed to the uninformed.

All the years of education and learning, all the knowledge and experience in that head was destroyed in a moment by people who had achieved none of those things.

In the best classrooms, grades are only one of many types of feedback provided to students.

The single most important thing [you can do] is to shift [your] internal stance from "I understand" to "Help me understand." Everything else follows from that. . . . Remind yourself that if you think you already understand how someone feels or what they are trying to say, it is a delusion. Remember a time when you were sure you were right and then discovered one little fact that changed everything. There is always more to learn.

Receiving feedback sits at the intersection of these two needs—our drive to learn and our longing for acceptance.

get curious about what you don't know about yourself.

When competent, sensible people do something stupid, the smartest move is to try to figure out, first, what kept them from seeing it coming and, second, how to prevent the problem from happening again. Talking

It's time to shift our thinking from the old model of teaching to a new model of learning.

change forces us to learn differently.

So what frameworks do we need to make sense of learning in our world of constant change?

What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?

For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur.

If you know almost nothing, almost anything will tell you something.

Myth: When you have a lot of uncertainty, you need a lot of data to tell you something useful. Fact: If you have a lot of uncertainty now, you don't need much data to reduce uncertainty significantly. When you have a lot of certainty already, then you need a lot of data to reduce uncertainty significantly. In other words—if you know almost nothing, almost anything will tell you something.

The fact is that the preference for ignorance over even marginal reductions in ignorance is never the moral high ground.

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible. —Aristotle (384 b.c.–322 b.c.)

The first 100 samples reduce uncertainty much more than the second 100. In fact, even the first 10 samples tell you a lot more than the next 10. The initial state of uncertainty tells you a lot about how to measure it.

we know that decision makers will experience an increase in confidence in their decisions even when the analysis or information-gathering methods are found to be ineffectual. This is part of what Dawes called the "illusion of learning.

If you don't know what to measure, measure anyway. You'll learn what to measure.

When presented new information, we have no other option than to relate it to what we already know—there is no blank space in our minds within which new information can be stored so as not to "contaminate" it with existing information. —Clifford Konold, Scientific Reasoning Research Institute, University of Massachusetts

Yeah, I spent about 20 years in a dorm room. It took me a while to graduate.