Learning About Learning

I had my first intervention at 8 years old, and it probably changed my life.

Everyone knows the cliché story of the smart kid who almost gets held back and then gets tested, so I will spare you another retelling. But there was also a parent-teacher conference around that time, and that was something else entirely. I was sat down to discuss why my test scores were att odds with my class participation, and why I had trouble with certain subjects.

I was a very dogmatic child up until this point. If a grownup told me something, it was so, and if I couldn’t grasp it that was my fault rather than theirs. It was somewhere in the middle of the brainstorming session in that meeting when I realized that teachers are human too, and therefore they could be wrong about things, including things presented as ‘facts’. It opened a door in my brain that I didn’t even know was there, and I started questioning everything. About facts, about mnemonics, about ‘good ways to think about’ a concept, which are good for some but confusing for everyone else.

Over the next few years my learning style evolved into hypothesis checking. I would focus more on the examples the teachers gave and less on their unboxing of those ideas, and instead come up with my own models and then compare them to subsequent examples, modify or abandon that theory. Sometimes I would see the potential flaw and ask, “what about” questions to see if I was on track or hallucinating. By the end of grade school I already had a tidy little lock on Theory of a System, though I didn’t hear that term for another ten years.

Hypothesis testing is essentially the Scientific Method, but it’s also one of the twin pillars of debugging (the other being cost-benefit analysis). Theory of a System is architecture, it’s project survival, and it’s how you get to be a Staff, Principal, or Lead engineer. It’s how I as a part-time employee and undergrad ended up being sent to all of the planning meetings for my first project, sometimes instead of my boss, who was the PM.

I found myself getting into tutoring and then mentoring as an accident. I would overhear another kid say they didn’t understand something the teacher said and I would butt in and say things like, “that didn’t make sense to me either, until I thought about it like this…” Sometimes it would stick, sometimes they’d go away just as confused. There is a lot of power in acknowledging someone’s complaints before trying to solve their problems, but that’s a lesson I would learn and forget a few times before it ever stuck. By the middle of college I ended up tutoring my roommate and gaming partner for more than a year because we couldn’t play games until he turned in his CS homework. So I would power through my own homework and then seek out the line between tutoring him and giving him the answers.

I worked on software while still at school, which changed my relationship with classes from pure pupil to information consumer. I was about learning things I expected to need as a professional, which meant I sometimes snoozed through half hour rambling discussions about things coworkers had already told me were BS, only to latch onto a two sentence aside like a starving man to a crust of bread. Things that weren’t goind to be on the test but were going to be on the test that is life. Mistakes were made, but the majority of the time that served me very well.

The Five Stages of Learning

There’s a now-infamous paper that lays out five stages of learning, beginning with rote memorization and ending with generalization/improvisation - being able to reason about new scenarios that you haven’t seen before and accurately predict what the outcome will be.

This paper has been picked apart by many people with proper credentials, but for my money, the thing that immediately bothered me about these complaints is that none of them saw what the most obvious flaw was to me: being able to talk about learning as a process is unarguably itself a stage of learning. Which is to say, the paper they wrote about the 5 stages was itself a 6th stage, and then applying that paper to learning new things is, in by opinion at least, a 7th stage. 5 out of 7 ain’t bad, but it isn’t great either.

Great Artists Steal

As I said in Branching Out, there are a lot seemingly independent disciplines that should inform each other. A lot of human progress ends up being presented as anecdotes about some guy whose parents were goatherds and he found some way to apply goat herding theory to… making candy canes. Lightbulbs. Project Management. Whatever.

This is not an accident. These silos monopolize human progress into narrow domains that can be just as useful or perhaps more so in others. DNA tests are built on a foundation of elements of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform from the field of data compression - and they aren’t using it to compress the data, they’re using it to reassemble proverbial shredded paper back into complete DNA sequences.

Domains Are Not as Special as We Pretend

But more than that, how you learn about compression can also be how you learn about genetics. I think this is the thing that so-called polymaths (of which I consider myself to be a poor example, but an example nonetheless) understand that the rest of us have had beaten out of us. You can systematize the study of a new topic using the skills you developed learning another.

This doesn’t always translate. There are probably still classifications of learning, and some domains contain multiple classes. You can’t intellectualize your way through learning taijiquan or meditation for example, but once you know one of those, you can apply the lessons to learning about self-care, mental health, physical therapy, running, swimming. And if you can do that, you can apply some of them to project management, training, documentation, and, believe it or not, how to run a War Room. It applies to figuring out when to put down a problem, walk away, and come back in an hour with fresh perspective.

As a concrete example, pretty much any time I’m thinking about tech debt, there’s an image in my head of a crotchety ‘old’ (I think he was 28) bicycle mechanic named Bob who taught me about mis-en-place without even knowing the term, and mostly by yelling and muttering about the stupid kids he had to babysit. At the time I thought I hated Bob, but now I probably owe him an apology and a thank you, because this concept is foundational to how I approach DX and particularly Discoverability.

Expert Journeyman

About a decade back, when Stack Overflow was first getting undeniably good, there was a warning that went about the Development community about the danger of Expert Beginners - people who learn just enough of a problem domain to sound smart but be dangerous. That the false confidence of learning just a little about a domain convinces you that there’s no bear traps waiting to trip you up the moment you try to do anything in that space.

That warning was important, and I think we navigated that crisis fairly well, but that moniker doesn’t really describe a different person who has always appeared on projects. There’s some person who makes it their job to go and figure out what new tools are actually worth using, what experimental techniques we should try to bring in-house. They don’t have ten years of experience in that space. They barely have six months’ more experience than anybody else and far less than the so-called experts. They will, in another year, be experts in their own right. But what are they now?

I started to call these people Expert Journeymen, in the fashion of the Expert Beginner name. They aren’t beginners. They have enough experience to do moderately difficult tasks in a new domain. They’e figured out some shortcut to knowledge that gets them over the Expert Beginner hump into something more useful.

How do they do this? I believe it’s down to realizing the ways in which new things are exactly like the old things, and saving time and energy on those parts to focus on the little bits that are in fact new. They can combine existing knowledge with proven learning tricks to figure out its shape quickly and come up with a plan to figure it out, avoiding rework and blind alleys as they go. They have, in a phrase, learned how to learn.