Scott Young on Learning: Insights from 'Get Better at Anything'

Scott Young, bestselling author and long-time learning blogger, recently released a new book titled "Get Better at Anything". In a wide-ranging conversation, Scott shared insights from his latest work and discussed key issues in learning and skill development.

Why Write Another Book on Learning?

Scott explained that while his previous book "Ultralearning" focused on intensive learning projects, he felt there was still much more to explore:

"There were so many ideas that didn't fit in that framework that I wanted to explore. I started researching and I was getting interested in writing another book and I just kept researching and researching."

He saw this book as an opportunity to do a deep dive into the research and bring together ideas in a way that would be accessible to readers who aren't going to read hundreds of academic papers themselves.

Key Insights from the Research

One area that surprised Scott in his research was how much learning depends on other people:

"How much we're kind of dependent on other people for learning... I've always come at it from the opposite perspective - if you're sort of self-motivated and you want to learn something, then one of the big problems is like you don't know what you want to learn. So how do you solve this bootstrapping problem of learning it?"

He found the work of researchers like John Sweller and Paul Kirschner challenged some of his previous assumptions about the importance of struggle and practice in learning. Their research highlights how lack of knowledge can make learning extremely inefficient if students have to work too hard to acquire basic information.

The C-D-F Framework

Scott's new book is structured around a framework he calls "C-D-F":

• C: See/Observe
• D: Do
• F: Feedback

He emphasized that this shouldn't be seen as a rigid step-by-step process, but rather as broad factors that influence learning:

"I really meant the concepts a lot more broadly... These are kind of like factors that influence learning and so you have to think about like how optimized are those different factors."

For example, the "C" factor encompasses things like:

• Learning best practices in a domain
• Having access to high-quality examples and explanations
• Building up prerequisite knowledge

The "Do" factor relates to how practice affects learning, including both positive effects like automaticity and potential pitfalls like reinforcing bad habits.

"Feedback" covers all the ways information coming back from the environment can be helpful or harmful.

Common Misunderstandings

Scott noted that readers often try to impose a step-by-step process even when that's not appropriate:

"People want the step-by-step and because there is no step-by-step they impose one on the structure that I'm providing even though literally every single skill is going to be a little different."

He emphasized that his goal is to provide mental models for thinking about learning, not rigid procedures:

"What we want is a good conceptualization of what's going on in the learning process. So not a procedure, not a list of study tactics, not a slogan, but some kind of mental picture of like what has to go on in your brain for learning to work, what are the factors that are influencing it."

The Challenge of Understanding Deep Conceptual Knowledge

Scott highlighted that while there's a lot of research on skill learning and memorizing facts, we still don't have a great understanding of how people develop deep conceptual knowledge in complex domains:

"When you deal with like complex conceptual subjects, which is like much of what we're trying to do in academics... there's I think just sort of like a much weaker understanding of what that actually is, what that actually involves."

He noted that this is an area where more research is needed to really understand how experts develop their mental models and deep understanding.

The Connection Between Learning and Problem Solving

Scott emphasized the intimate connection between learning and problem-solving:

"Problem solving has to be related to learning because learning is how to solve problems. That's all learning is... If you don't understand problem solving, you can't understand learning at all."

He sees understanding problem-solving as fundamental to making sense of how learning works.

Key Takeaways

1. Learning often depends heavily on guidance from others, not just individual struggle and practice.

2. Effective learning involves optimizing multiple factors: observing/understanding, doing/practicing, and getting useful feedback.

3. Beware of overly simplistic step-by-step approaches. Learning is complex and context-dependent.

4. We need better ways to understand and teach deep conceptual knowledge, not just skills and facts.

5. Problem-solving and learning are intimately connected. Understanding one helps illuminate the other.

Scott Young's "Get Better at Anything" offers a research-grounded but practical look at how we can improve our learning across diverse domains. By providing mental models rather than rigid procedures, it aims to help readers develop a more nuanced and effective approach to acquiring new knowledge and skills.

Article created from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLoZ2w1QEOY