Frontiers Friday #75. The Nuts and Bolts of Becoming a Deep Learner (Part V)

This week, we have 1 brand new video, and 1 new blogpost, and 3 other wicked recommendations for you to check out.
 

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1. 📽 New From My Desk: 9 Highly Recommended Plug-ins For Obsidian to Go Further With Your Personalised Learning System (PLS)

   

   In Part III of the Obsidian videos, after going down the rabbithole of various plugins to improve my Obsidian note-taking app, I've come up with my top 9 plugins.
   (You can watch the previous Obsidian related videos here).
    

2. 📜 New From My Desk: Explain Your Ideas to An Expert-and to a Child
   Wired magazine has a video series where they get experts from various domains to explain complicated concepts—from blockchain to machine learning, music harmony to sleep—in 5 different levels
   What’s really interesting is to listen carefully how they explain these concepts at varying degrees of complexity.

   i. To an expert
   ii. To a grad
   iii. To a college student
   iv. To a teen, and
   v. To a child.
   

   The ability to explain things in both succinct and elarboative ways is a real skill, not just in terms of the depth of knowledge, but also a sense of clarity and empathy for who the listener is.
   In this ne blog, I provide the reasons why we need to develop this skill, and three exercises of how we can do that.
    

3. 📽 Watch: Genius is not about excelling at something--it's about doing thinks differently by Eric Weinstein (Big Idea)
   We want our surgeons to be excellent. We want our classical music performers to be excellent. But do we really want excellence everywhere?
   Eric Weinstein raises some important questions about excellence and expertise.

   Here are some of my key grafs:
   A. Jazz vs Classical Music

   • jazz is not really about playing something flawlessly but taking risks

   • Miles Davis Kind of Blue. almost nothing on the sheet music was written down. you can also hear a few flaws which makes it so exciting

   • Quality control can be deadly eg jazz improviser taking few risks

   B. Excellence is About Hill-climbing

   • the fabled 10000hrs

   • it is something we know how to teach

   • we want this in our surgeons

   • we want this in our classical music performers

   • but the question is, do we want it everywhere?

   C. Genius

   • kids diagnosed with dyslexia, ADHD are not designed for the excellence model of education

   • they are meant to be the innovators (note: see The Pattern Seekers by Simon Baron-Cohen by Simon barron Cohen, The Dyslexic Advantage What are the dyslexic strengths MIND

   • what we have effectively done is demonised these different learning patterns and called them "learning disabilities."
      

4. 🎧 Listen: Why Do We Forget So Much of What We’ve Read?
   I love listening to Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) and Angela Duckworth (author of Grit) chat.
   In this particular epsiode, they raise the topic of forgetting. We covered grounds about this in the Deep Learner course, which was why this piqued my interest.
    

5. ⏸ Words Worth Contemplating:

   "To learn is to form an internal model of the external world."
   ~ Stanislas Dehaene, How We Learn (2019)

Reflection:  

Take a moment to think of the following: How do you explain what you do in therapy?  
Imagine explaining that to an adult. Now explain that to a child.

(see this post)
 

P/S: For those who have signed up the Measured Course, please pardon the delays. I've got your emails and will be in touch as soon as all the ducks are lined up for you to take the course. 

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