How to learn better, and what most people don't get about learning
This post was originally written on Codeforces; relevant discussion can be found here. Disclaimer: I am not an expert in the field of the psychology of learning and problem-solving, so take the following with a grain of salt. There is not much “scientific” evidence for this post, and the following is validated by personal experience and the experiences of people I know (who fall everywhere on the “success” spectrum — from greys to reds in competitive programming, from beginners in math to IMO gold medalists, and from people with zero research experience to people with monumental publications for their own fields). This post only covers one possible way of thinking about knowledge organization and retrieval that I have been using for the past decade or so, but there definitely will be other models that might work even better. Even though I just have a few courses worth of formal psychology experience, I still think the content of this post should be relevant to people involved with problem-solving. ...