I don’t feel that near instant access to information has significantly sped up my learning, but it seems that it should have.
I’d like to learn how to learn faster and better. Maybe this is an unrealistic goal, but it at least seems doable to better calibrate how fast (and deep) I learn. What follows are my notes and thoughts on accelerated learning. My first walkthrough this subject is from Timmothy Kenny’s “Accelerated Learning Cannon” Youtube playlist, a good overview of some of accelerated learning’s key thinkers and literature
I’ll update this article with further sources as I dig into them, but, for now, here’s a list of the sources Kenny goes over in his playlist:
- “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler
- “20 Rules of Formulating Knowledge” by Piotr Wozniak
- “Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm” by Gary Wolf (Wired Magazine)
- “Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning“” by Gwern Branwen
- “The Janki Method” by Jack Kinsella
- “The MIT Challenge” by Scott H. Young
- “Deep Work” by Cal Newport
- “Mental Models” from Shane Parrish’s Farnam Street
- “2 High-Utility Study Techniques” by Dunlosky
- “Evidence-Based Accelerated Learning” by Ali Abdaal
- “Augmenting Long term Memory” by Michael Nielsen
- The Anki Plugins “Image Occlusion”, “Heatmap”, and “Cloze Overlapper” by Glutanimate (an Anki Developer)
- “The Feynman Technique” explained by Scott H. Young
- “The Persistence of Neuromyths in the Educational Settings: A Systematic Review” — (39 Neuromyths that Learning “Experts” Still Teach)
- “The Dictionary of The History of Ideas” by Philip P. Wiener
“How to Read a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler
First, what even is accelerated learning? Let’s just call it faster than normal learning.
An glaring problem with my quick definition is that there’s no baseline learning speed—not for an individual, nor across groups of people. Good luck even trying to find a normal distribution of learning speeds. It varies wildly from person to person and even just for you, it’ll vary wildly from topic to topic.
You might learn probability faster than you learn Russian literature (or vice versa). And within probability, you might breeze through Poisson distributions while lumbering through Monte Carlo simulations; within Russian literature, you might fly through “The Brothers Karamazov” while slugging through “War and Peace.”
So, when I say faster than normal learning, the emphasis is on faster than what’s normal for you on some specific subject or concept. Accelerated learning can be tossed into the broader “meta learning” (learning how to learn) bucket. The emphasis is speed (relative to your average learning speed) but many accelerated learning concepts help with learning aspects beyond speed (e.g., improving recall, note taking, and information consumption are helpful, even if you like chewing your cud).