How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries

https://longreads.com/2020/08/20/how-to-learn-everything-the-masterclass-diaries/

by lxm • 6 years ago

236 58 6 years ago

roywiggins• 6 years ago

MasterClass is an exclusive online education platform that costs $180 annually to learn (relatively ordinary skills) from A-list celebrities. masterWiki is the direct adaptation of MasterClass' video courses translated into wikiHow-style how-to guides, made available at no cost to you.

holyjaw• 6 years ago

The posted article is a fun and interesting read about the author's relationship to themself and their family as impacted by their viewing of various classes.

I struggle to find a relevant comparison here, other than that both the article and your link (of a parody / theft of another company's intellectual property) are related to MasterClass.

kd5bjo• 6 years ago

It actually serves as a nice contrast in some ways. Compare the article’s description of the experience of going through the classes with the takeaways from a sample of the wiki entries.

The real benefit of having true experts teach something is all the tacit knowledge you get from hearing how they think about and approach their craft, not the explicit instructions they might give.

bergstromm466• 6 years ago

theft of another company's intellectual property

Seriously? "Theft"? Most of these millionaire 'celebrities' teaching on Masterclass are from the USA, which is the 'king' of 'intellectual property.

The 'intellectual property' system, by driving artificial scarcity of information, is the root cause for global heating and social inequity. Imagine if everything was open source and we'd have Open Value Networks that measure actual material flows, instead of a 'medium-of-exchange' that is backed and enforced by the military-industrial-complex.

We need Commons-based peer production and Protocol Cooperativism, and the end of Rentier Capitalism, through the use of MetaCurrency's distributed computing pattern (Holographic chain). We need it now.

okamiueru2• 6 years ago

I chuckled at the "Go Premium" button. I wont spoil it for you.

phobosanomaly2• 6 years ago

I've personally found that a necessary prerequisite to listening to an expert talking about something (at least for myself) is to read some books on it. It's boring, and it sucks, and it takes forever, but that repetition of just jamming things in your head and then going over them over and over again is a necessary prerequisite to being able to really 'get' what someone is saying at a master level.

For example, I wouldn't pay to see Gordon Ramsay teaching something without first working through Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and The Food Lab. And by the time I've worked through the books, I know if I'm actually interested in the subject, or if it's just something that I've convinced myself is interesting based on seeing someone doing it on YouTube.

That's just my own philosophy on it. You gotta chop the mesquite before you can smoke the ribs.

superhuzza• 6 years ago

I think I'd prioritize doing the actual thing over reading books, whenever possible.

For your Gordon Ramsay example - Let's say you can prepare by spending 5 hours trying to cook 5 really nice dishes. Or, you can spend 5 hours reading about cooking. I think the cooking approach to preparing will make you much more "ready to learn" than the reading approach.

Obviously in some cases you can't easily do it at home, but there's often a better proxy than reading, even if that's just a conversation about the topic with someone more knowledgeable than yourself.

phobosanomaly2• 6 years ago

I 100% get what you're saying.

I guess where I differ is, I've been cooking food my entire life. Most of it sucks. I still eat it. But if you were to ask me how to make one of the foods I cook any better I really wouldn't even know where to start.

However, if I picked up one of the those books, all of a sudden I would start to understand how meat cooks, the different ways you can tweak the process, and how to achieve the best results.

From there, I would be prepared to actually start cooking well. But without reading, I would still be shooting in the dark with the same terrible dishes I've been cooking terribly for decades.

ponker• 6 years ago

What you’re saying is that the more you know the more you can learn from the world’s best. That is in fact what a masterclass is — a class for experts by a master.

powersnail2• 6 years ago

This is why the original concept of master class --- a master giving class to musicians/artists --- are only opened to the brightest high-level students. It's sort of pointless to hire the top talent in the field and let them coach complete newbies.

I think whether the prerequisite is specifically to read books depends on the field. In fact, the first thing to do, in my opinion, is to ask someone already in the field what's the best way to get a taste of this activity. But the general message, "chop the mesquite before you can smoke the ribs", I agree very much on.

simsla• 6 years ago

On the other hand, my university was in the habit of using the best professors to teach the intro / first year courses. Because those are the courses where you tend to lose the most of your students.

andrei_says_• 6 years ago

It’s edutainment. They select top celebrities to teach to the widest possible audience and maximize profit.

Sometimes the celebrities are good teachers, most of the time not.

0xBeefFed• 6 years ago

This is interesting, and is reflected in some other comments, but I have always gone under the assumption that you will only learn things once so it is best to learn them the correct way. This mostly holds true in an academic situation though in my experience, and I have applied it as such.

philoclea10• 6 years ago

I think it depends on the thing learned.

In dance it's pretty important to learn the basics well from day one. If you learn wrong technique it worms its way into your muscle memory and is difficult to unlearn and replace with something else. (It's also why the most basic dance classes ought to be taught by expert teachers, but that's another hobbyhorse.) And bad technique can lead to injury.

Other fields don't necessarily have a "correct" way, or they do but it's comparatively easy to replace a mistake once we notice it. In some cases, making a mistake and then correcting it can actually fix the right way to do it in one's memory. (Think of embarrassing mistakes we sometimes make when trying to speak a foreign language!)

chiefalchemist2• 6 years ago

What you're wanting isn't simply knowledge. You're seeking understanding.

Understanding > Knowledge

And yes, it also takes more effort, more grit.

webmaven• 6 years ago

Despite the au courant reference to the global pandemic, this seems very familiar (particularly the bits about Wintour, Gladwell, & Ramsay), but I can't recall where I read it (sometime 5-10 years ago, maybe), and a cursory google search doesn't pull up anything.

Still, the deja vu was pretty darn strong. Perhaps the writer had a blog that has since been deleted, and she recycled an old post.

philoclea10• 6 years ago

Hmmm... this has me wondering. I've been writing about teaching and learning for a while (my dissertation and book were on the topic in the early Middle Ages). MasterClass has only been around for five years though, and the Wintour course came online last year. It's possible there were review pieces out. I did do a bunch of searching on MasterClass last year, because I was tempted by it but found it a bit pricey and wanted to know if there was any substance to the courses. Most of what I found were very brief reviews though.

milchek• 6 years ago

‘...By this point, I have realized that there are two kinds of teachers. Some focus on transmitting their skills. They seem to be saying to the student: “this is how to do what I do.” Others offer themselves as models to be imitated: “this is how I became who I am.”‘

This part struck me. For topics like computer science (or any science) we need more of the former, for anything related to the subjective experiences of creativity or even life, we need more of the latter. Even then, “this is how I became who I am,” can only get you so far, because you need to learn to become who you are and not someone else.

josephg2• 6 years ago

I spent a couple years as a programming teacher, and really struggled to find the right balance there.

As an example, about 9 months in I had a student ask how they should approach a problem. I'd say "What are all the ways you can think of to do it?" and together we'd brainstorm a few viable approaches. "So which one should I do?". What do I say to that? Do I tell them which approach I think is best? I was originally self taught, and I got good in part thanks to those moments. When you pick something yourself but you aren't sure if its the right choice, .. well, thats when learning happens. Next time you choose differently and over years explore the space. But at the same time, getting advice can really help a novice improve.

Despite being pushed I didn't answer the student about which approach I recommended, and I still wonder if it was the right choice. I'd like to think that my teaching approach resulted in my students spending more time gazing into the belly of the beast. But maybe I just didn't give them much as much instruction as they needed. I can't tell.

heymijo5• 6 years ago

From someone versed in teaching, here's my unsolicited analysis of your teaching:

On the spectrum from direct instruction (I tell you/show you what to do) to inquiry (I set up a situation for you to use some of your prior knowledge to learn something new) it sounds like you leaned towards inquiry here.

You experienced the power of this yourself when you were younger so it's no surprise it informed how you chose to help/not help.

You used a mix of collaborative and cognitive questioning to both engage the learner in the problem and help them think through it. ------------------------

Next I'd like to ask you some questions to help you think through two important teaching concepts: 1) Productive struggle 2) Feedback

Was the student at a complete loss with what to do? Given time to take a break, maybe even sleep, and revisit the problem, do you think they still would have been at a loss?

If no, then give them time and space to think through it on their own or use cognitive questioning as you did to help them think through it.

This gets us to the concept of productive struggle. It is just as the name sounds. This concept has well researched benefits for learners.

If the student had no idea what to do and you suspect would merely get frustrated then that's struggling and its not productive. It's the kind of situation that leads to poor first order outcomes and has second order outcomes like making someone hate the thing you are trying to help them learn.

In that event it would be best to either help them through the problem with advice or find a different problem for them to work on that they have enough prior knowledge to productively struggle with.

Next up is feedback...

Did the student get any feedback after they made their choice? If it was programming could they run their code and see if it worked? Was it a binary right/wrong?

If it didn't work did the student have enough prior knowledge to work around any roadblocks they might encounter?

These questions take us back to the concept of productive struggle.

1) productive struggle is good 2) feedback or advice should be timely and based on what a learner needs to keep them from struggling unproductively

There are related ideas...some lessons you may have a focus and so you tell the student certain things that aren't the focus of the lesson instead of putting them in an inquiry situation. This is another skill needed for effective teaching: creating, selecting, and sequencing a curriculum.

Implied in all of this is the importance of knowing the content, how you want to teach, your learner's prior knowledge, and how they are reacting to the problem.

greggman3• 6 years ago

According to this person there is plenty of research saying you should tell them how to do it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ

I think she makes a good point. We don't hand people a guitar and say "figure it out on your own". Cooking shows don't generally show the final dish and say "if you want to make this yourself figure it out on your own".

You might say computer programming is different but I suspect for most people here you were taught things like sorting algorithms, database queries, lexers and parsing algorithms, etc. You were not made to figure them on your own. Sure maybe you were self motivated and looked up the topics by yourself but likely you mostly learned by looking at existing code and over time figured out how to see what it was doing and how to modify it or apply the same ideas.

powersnail2• 6 years ago

I don’t really see Master Class being a thing for computer science. To be honest, I don’t see it being a thing for most engineering subjects.

The knowledge here is mostly objective and non-personal. The best classes are not necessarily those carried out by “masters”, but by really good educators. Sometimes the two aspects overlap (e.g. Feynman), but most of the time they don’t. And what’s more, it is actually okay to learn engineering with a teacher who is dry, accurate, but not necessarily the top engineer of the field.

For art and music, on the other hand, the deeper you learn, the more personal it gets. So, the subjective experience of a master is of great value. That’s where the this kind of class really shines.

smabie2• 6 years ago

I've been lucky (not really, keep reading) enough to take a few classes with professors who are probably the best in the world at what they do and found them really awful. You could tell they didn't want to be there and didn't really give a shit about anyone learning anything. Moreover, I think being really good at something makes it harder to teach, not easier. TAs are usually much better teachers. After all, they can still remember what it was like to not understand the material.

Some of the best teachers I've had were at a community college, actually. I ended up taking community college classes for a couple years instead of going to high school and had a much better experience than at the "real" college I attended when I was older. That could have been a function of age though (by the time I went to a real college I was much more interested in girls and partying than learning anything).

jamestimmins• 6 years ago

A really lovely read. I appreciate how naturally she frames her own growth in the face of professional and personal setbacks against different masterclass courses.

I love seeing this kind of writing on Hacker News.

Rolpa• 6 years ago

"I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at."

https://m.xkcd.com/874/

johnnujler3• 6 years ago

This was beautiful! In fact, a note to all the YouTube productivity gurus who think they are giving us a master class on productivity or VCs on twitter who sell their (obvious but apparently profound) wisdom thinking they are doing a service to humanity. At least IMO things that are best learned in the form of a class are vocational stuff and hard sciences, anything other than that like a course on confidence, productivity, loving yourself, learning to learn etc should be f*cking banned into oblivion.

nefitty• 6 years ago

If someone else has figured it out, I’d rather just get their take on the thing than try to figure it out myself, especially if it’s something like productivity or learning. I want to spend my time mastering software engineering, not reinventing the pomodoro technique.

johnnujler3• 6 years ago

Seriously? You put on a 25 minute timer every time you sit for work? Dude, I know I shouldn’t have generalised, but tell me that these things are anything but homeopathy of the mindset problem? I understand that these things can be reassuring/calming/satisfying but so can be the superstitious rituals in religion or the words of a healer, do we not condemn those when we see the fraudulent nature in them. I’ve seen with my eyes how these guys concoct stuff they call productivity hacks right out of their a and slap a polished 4K video to sell it.

I understand that all our wants differ, For instance I only want to have a decent grasp over software engineering to sustain a livelihood, but even if I wanted to master all of computer science, I don’t know if I would equate using a timer(pomodoro) or recalling the answer without looking at the answer(active recall) to mastering compiler design. I don’t about you, but to recall the answer without looking at the answer while preparing for a test or studying for a stipulated time before losing focus didn’t need a overly sophisticated term at least up until a couple years ago. Most of us did pretty well through our schools and colleges. What is this all of a sudden now, if not money grabbing, avarice, charlatanry, fraudulence? In fact, I would’ve conceded if the benefits of these sophistication were extraordinary, they are not even marginal. Anyway man, be well:)

smabie2• 6 years ago

Or you could just, like, not watch/read those videos/posts/tweets if you don't like them?

Also, there's a lot more academic fields than the "hard" sciences and vocational stuff.

johnnujler3• 6 years ago

Cute!

How do you say you don’t like a video/post/tweet without reading/watching those videos/posts/tweets?

Yes there’s a lot more academic fields than the “hard” sciences and vocational stuff, add them to the list too. That was not a treatise on teachability/learnability of a subject.

I seriously didn’t get your point, you thought of being sarcastic and bitter because I ranted about how I disliked VCs and Productivity gurus? Thanks, got your point, be well.

sowbug• 6 years ago

Now we put eggs in water with a tiny mechanical device that plays “Killing Me Softly” to let us know they are soft-boiled. You could say our standards have fallen.

For those of you who had to stop and shop at this point, here's what I found:

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/BrainStream-Beep-Egg-Timer/dp/B001U...

US but unfortunately not featuring the Roberta Flack classic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDE24G4/

roel_v2• 6 years ago

I had one of those many years ago, but they're not very good. The sound is muffled a lot by the water and it's just not accurate all together. The Android app 'Egg Timer' gives much better results.

I do still see the appeal of the singing egg, though.

philoclea10• 6 years ago

I didn't have space for this in the essay, but the mechanical egg also plays "The Final Countdown" when the eggs are supposed to be hard boiled.

It's honestly not a great way to cook eggs, but don't underestimate the joy of hearing those opening notes in the morning...

comeondude• 6 years ago

Play. That’s how.

glaberficken• 6 years ago

Learning anything for me always follows this sort of structure (I'm sure someone will tell me there's some well known name for this because it seems so "self obvious").

Step0: Select the simplest achievable task in the domain of the new thing you are trying to learn.

Step1: Gather all the stuff you think you will be needing to accomplish the task (tools, materials, software, instructions, time!, etc).

Step2: Hit a road-block. It can be the lack of an indispensable tool or a lack of knowledge of a particular detail.

Step3: Fix the blocker (fill the knowledge gap about the new detail, buy/borrow the missing tool). If multiple roadblocks: Solve the one that seems most fundamental first; If stuck at blocker: seek help from others, sleep on it, give up (some things are too hard with your present knowledge).

Step4: If task still not completed GOTO Step3; If task completed: Select a new more advanced task and GOTO Step2.

fxtentacle3• 6 years ago

My way of learning is the opposite. I pick a task that is incredibly cool and motivating and surely way out of my skill set. Then I try to find examples by true masters of things that turned out similar. Then I try to imitate what I can from them. In the end, my result is very so-so in comparison with the masters, but I still feel happy about having learned many useful things.

How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries

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