Learning Techniques

How do you actually get good in messy, real world domains? This tag covers practice, pedagogy design, theories of expert cognition, and the very cutting edge of expertise research.

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Tacit Expertise Extraction, Software Engineering Edition

One software engineer's story of extracting expertise from the heads of 'a tiger team of senior software engineers'. Useful to anyone who might want to accelerate their own skills.

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One Definition of Wisdom

Charlie Munger’s biggest business mistake, and what it tells us about wisdom.

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Mental Strength in Judo, Mental Strength in Life

Results of a four month accelerated expertise experiment in Judo. Or: "I expected to learn about deliberate practice but instead learnt a ton about my mental shortcomings."

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Creating New Drills for Deliberate Practice

A lesson from a four month accelerated expertise experiment. Or: why creating new drills for a deliberate practice training program isn't as difficult as you might think.

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An Expertise Acceleration Experiment in Judo

I relocated for a three month expertise acceleration experiment in Judo. These are my notes from two months in: what I learnt, what was hard, and what deliberate practice actually feels like.

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Focus on the Cases

Professor Rand Spiro on why (and how!) business cases are more important to learn from than synthesised business concepts.

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The Most Useful Question to Ask About Expertise

What a question about growth marketing tells us about expertise — and why expert-novice differences are so useful to probe if you're a practitioner.

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How to Hunt for Concept Instantiations

If you read history for concept instantiations, then: a) how do you hunt for cases for each concept, and b) how do you identify new concepts from the history you read? We look at answers to both questions.

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Don't Read History for Lessons

Learning from history is often problematic — history is context and path dependent, and it doesn't repeat itself. But what if there is a better way to read history, one that sidesteps these problems?

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Ability to See Expertise is a Milestone Worth Aiming For

Good news: we have a neat, universal milestone on the journey to mastery. What that looks like, and how to use it.