The best way to learn? learning wrong first
- in
- blog (draft)
- date
- 3/22/2022
What do the following have in common?
Don’t answer. I will tell you. The best way to learn each one of these things is to learn the wrong way first. What does this mean?
In skiing, first we teach students how to control their speeds with a wedge. The problem with the wedge is that it’s simply not a good way to ski. In a wedge, the skier becomes fatigued very quickly. This is unsurprising, due to how much work the body must excrete to slow down. That’s not the only issue, at a certain point, the work becomes too much. It is very limiting by nature, there is only so much one can do in a wedge, so much speed one can go. As a result, right after one learns the wedge, the instructor begins attempting to burn that wedge. Surprisingly, or perhaps actually not, a dependence develops very quickly that is hard to break. This is because the skiier is not in a state of comfort yet. I have overheard other instructors talking about this… problem, if you call it one. Is it really best to teach a useless skill first?
When learning rust, I made a fatal mistake first. I learned it before C. It’s common sense that rust is C but better, so it seems counterintuitive to learn something inferior first. Thinking about it though, rust builds upon many concepts of C. C is almost like a gentle introduction to rust (if you could call anything C related gentle)
And Pijul, the future of version control. Is it right to just jump in, without knowing what it was built upon? The answer is no. With Pijul, there is a certain level of understanding expected. It is not a “consumer product”, yet.
Point is, to learn the right things we learn the wrong things first. It’s easy to be frustrated by the indirect path of learning, but it provides foundation and progression.