Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently

If a book exists in PDF on the web somewhere, I estimate a 90% of chance of finding it by at least one of the following four methods, which altogether take only a few minutes if you're practiced at it:

1. Search library.nu. (You'll have to sign up for a free account the first time.)
2. Search Library Genesis.
3. Search Scrapetorrent.
4. Use a custom Google search and keeping clicking through links until you find a filesharing site link for the book - one that isn't broken yet.

I take strong issue with the entire field in two weeks claim. As a practicing "autodidact" for more than ten years post-university, I have assimilated many fields from the standard sciences (biochemistry, medicine, neuroscience, pharmacology, chemistry, physics, electronics, math, statistics, programming) to postgraduate level, to some arts (design, writing & drawing comics) and business topics.

Retrospectively fields like neuroscience were quite simple after learning biochemistry, and I would believe your two weeks claim for a specific aspect (i.e. LTP in hippocampus), but not for the entire field. For math it took me nearly two years of rigorous study to be able to talk to Math Phd's on a slightly lower level, and that was considered quite fast by my mentors (mathematics prof's).

Often I will want to know more about a specific part of a subject, e.g. antenna design. This took me over six months to get to grips with, even after all of my combined experience.

So, either I'm just a slow learner, you are some kind of super genius, the topics you are tackling aren't actually outside your domain knowledge or you are only learning superficially. Even reading enough to cover a field would take me two weeks, full time, let alone do all the exercises required to truly master it.

My suggestion to you (which I use as a reference point): download a universities postgrad exams for your topic. If you can't answer at least 50% of them correctly, you haven't mastered your subject area.

What I do is to try to obtain as much information as possible in written form (this is also why I generally avoid lectures and colloquia unless I feel like they're the only source of information on something). That way, I can refer to it months after I initially read it, and can also search for it (in my hard drive) as well. Furthermore, reading is faster than hearing someone say something, and you can always skip ahead if you want to.

This is also why I generally prefer email to real-life conversation, although I recognize that most professors prefer the latter right now (or they're more responsive if you're talking to them one-on-one).

I also try to post as much online as possible with my unique internet name (with my archiving utilities ready to archive them all) since it makes me easy to google what I've written. It also makes it easier for other people to find me, and sometimes they bring up things that I might have forgotten years ago. I'm not a scholar yet, but I can definitely imagine the potential for crowdsourcing if I become one.

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I do appreciate tools like CliffNotes and SparkNotes. Other intelligent people may see those as signals of "low intelligence", but my time is extremely important to me, and if I can learn something faster with those (or with a dummies book), then so be it. In fact, I do believe that a lot of things are deliberately inefficient just to sort out the "highly intelligent" from the "less intelligent", but those things often impose an efficiency cost on the highly intelligent.

What's often important is humility (and a consideration that some people may think you less intelligent). Oftentimes, for the sake of being efficient, you will have to ask stupid questions that are asked (mostly) be less intelligent people.

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Also, forum debates are oftentimes useless, but sometimes, they actually give you the drive to explain+defend your position more clearly than you would on your own. Maybe your explanation will be lost on the other side (and on everyone else for that matter), but what ultimately matters is that you made it, and can use it somewhere else.

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If you want more time, you can take it out of your sleep with modafinil. But this is risky, and I wouldn't do it more than a few times a year until we know more about the connection between amyloid beta and sleep deprivation and alzheimers (there was a nature article about it last year that I can show later)

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I'm not especially organized though, and that's another thing to take into consideration: I rarely delete things, so I have to find creative ways to organize them (certain types of software really help though). But this is something I'm trying to find a solution to. Sometimes I'll just create a folder (or section) that's labeled "DUMP". Sometimes I even put them at the end of my papers or powerpoint presentations. On occasion (probabilities of 1% build up over time), you might actually find a researcher who's actually INTERESTED in what you've put in your DUMP.

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Minimizing commute time is also EXTREMELY important (not to mention that commute times intensely increase stress). If you can read on the bus, then take the bus rather than drive (although I've taken the bus before, and I've found transfers to be IMMENSELY stressful since they disrupt my reading because I always have to look at what the bus is doing). Try to live as close to work as possible. There was a period of time when my parents forced me to commute to school rather than to live in the dorms, which wasted a significant amount of time due to the length of my commute (so I ended up only registering for "skippable" classes and often slept overnight in the undergraduate library)

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Also, putting less emotional weight on things that don't matter/things that can get others unnecessarily angry. So I put low emotional weight on most political issues of the day (and religion), even though I do have my views of what is "better"/"more effective"

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Anyways, if anyone else wants to discuss strategies, feel free to PM me (or email me, or visit my page at http://bit.ly/lX4Tiu). This is something I actively think about (as a polymath who is also studying multiple fields, although I'm still younger and have less experience than most of you), and will ultimately write something about.

What i ultimately hope to do is to introduce forums as the primary mechanism of scientific discourse, rather than real-life. There are so many interesting and productive conversations that are now permanently inaccessible because they were communicated verbally, rather than online.

Just note that people sometimes don't like my unorthodox routes (they even offend some people, so trying to avoid offense by ANYTHING is another important part of rationality). For example, I frequently skip class because it's inefficient and prevents me from working on some of my other side projects. I've written more at http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-literature-that-one-should-read-in-order-to-get-a-broad-scientific-background/answer/Alex-K-Chen

One thing that I've found quite frustrating in my own experiences with academia is that rather than encouraging efficient scholarship, political expediency often requires one to be inefficient. One of my professors who has a pretty good record for getting students published taught us that it's usually best to try to name drop everyone working in the same narrow field you're trying to publish an article in, both to demonstrate comprehensive familiarity with the literature, and to flatter the egos of the people reviewing your paper, who're likely to be among the specialists in that field.

This generally requires scholarship well beyond the point of diminishing returns for learning useful, relevant information about the topic at hand, and I suspect the effort barrier contributes strongly to the insularity of many sub-fields.

One might be underestimating the value that video lectures offer to certain people like myself. Reading a textbook demands to be proactive. If you are easily distracted, or don't really enjoy the subject, you have to force yourself to keep reading. In the case of video lectures you only have to bring yourself to start the video. Once the video is playing, your attention is naturally drawn to the ongoing action, whereas text is just inactive and has to be animated actively by the reader. Videos exhibit a tractive force, videos drag you along as they play.

My main worry about autodidactism is that it seems dangerously easy to mistake a specific, technical term for its everyday meaning and get a twisted understanding of something. Take for instance the subtleties involved in the concept of "heredity", which have at times confused even co-authors of books on the subject:

These issues are pathetically misunderstood by Charles Murray. In a CNN interview reported in The New Republic (January 2, 1995), Murray declared "When I - when we - say 60 percent heritability, it's not 60 percent of the variation. It is 60 percent of the IQ in any given person." Later, he repeated that for the average person, "60 percent of the intelligence comes from heredity" and added that this was true of the "human species," missing the point that heritability makes no sense for an individual and that heritability statistics are population-relative. In a letter to the editor in which Murray complains about being quoted out of context (January 30, 1995), Murray quotes more of what he had said: ". . . your IQ may have been determined overwhelmingly by genes or it may have been - yours personally - or overwhelmingly by environment. That can vary a lot from individual to individual. In the human species as a whole, you have a large genetic component." The Bell Curve itself does not make these embarrassing mistakes. Herrnstein, the late co-author, was a professional on these topics. But the upshot of part of this essay is that the book's main argument depends for some of its persuasive force on a more subtle conflation of heritability and genetic determination. And Murray's confusion serves to underscore just how difficult these concepts can be, even for someone so numerate as Murray.

There are also plenty of other subtle concepts which are easily and frequently misunderstood, even by people with degrees and publications in the field. (Just look at some of the statistics-related criticisms here...) Are there any good ways for an autodidact to avoid making such mistakes?

One thing you should avoid doing is cite an article when you've only read the abstract.

Here's a question: does learning to read faster provide a net marginal benefit to the pursuit of scholarship? Are there narrow, focused, and confirmed methods of learning to read faster that yield positive results? This would be beneficial to all, but perhaps moreso to those of us that have full time jobs that are not scholarship.

Long after first seeing this post, I decided to go back and upvote this and related lukeprog articles. The reason is that I've started reading Luke's draft paper The Singularity and Machine Ethics, and I'm sufficiently impressed that I now think Luke may have figured out how to do philosophy correctly. I now encourage everyone to take what he says about philosophy, and scholarship in general, extra-seriously.

How do you record your findings for future use, and how do you make sure you don't forget the important parts?

There are three things I do that save hours a week each, giving me more time for scholarship: 1) voice-recognition software: most people can talk a lot faster than they can type, even including corrections 2) reading while riding a stationary recumbent bike: can transcribe highlighted sections later, or even read from a computer and copy and paste 3) phone headset: do housework or exercises on the phone

I also have a list of tips that save minutes a week each, if people are interested.

I'm a slow reader, so one of the most exciting things about the future of scholarship for me is the huge increase in video lectures on youtube. This is a really exciting time to be an autodidact.

Anyone who is studying technical material on their own should be aware of the stackexchange.com network of sites and mathoverflow.net. These sites are incredibly useful for getting answers for questions which aren't answered in the textbooks. And if you aren't automatically coming up with those kinds of questions regularly while reading the material, you're doing it wrong.

EDIT: Corrected typo.

How do you keep track of PDFs of studies?

Do you have any particular recommendations on how to do this while you still have a day job?

You're freaking right about reviews being the holy grail! Every source they cite (at least in the ones I've looked at) has had a downloadable pdf at the top of the google search that mentions the name. Sometimes even with just the year and last names of the people involved.

Those who love independent study may wish to support the kickstarter project Don't Go Back to School.

Question to lukeprog: Do you have any efficiency recommendations for more technical subjects? Stuff on the lines of Eliezer's quantum physics sequence (aiming more than that, but at least that much). The thing that weighs on my mind most when dealing with such subjects is testing my own competence ... and so it takes me a considerable about of time.

As an autodidact who now consumes whole fields of knowledge in mere weeks, I've developed efficient habits that allow me to research topics quickly. I'll share my research habits with you now.

Mmmm... me want!

(Which is to say: Nice lead-in!)

While I'm all for spending time and effort on research, I'd like to add to the above post that finding sources that fit one's research topic doesn't add up to good scholarship. It's close reading and critical thinking that do the deal when it comes to evaluating sources. The contribution above lauds the article "The nature of procrastination" (2007) by Piers Steel as a time-saving, thorough review article on the issue of procrastination. That article, however, even though it apparently was written by a published author of a self-help book on procrastination, is a pretty good example for bad, if not spurious, scholarship (and writing).

Look at these examples:

• "Continued research into procrastination should not be delayed" -- From the abstract -- is this a joke?
• "Ferrari, Johnson, and McCown's (1995) book on the topic is extensive but focused primarily on measurement and theory, with less emphasis on empirical findings." -- Are measurements not empirical findings too? (p. 65).
• Under the heading "History of Procrastination" the author mentions several hoax reviews or books on procrastination, including some that were never finished (p. 66). -- Why even include this information in a supposedly scientific article on procrastination?
• The entire historical section aims to establish the extremely vague claim that procrastination "has long been a prevalent problem" without establishing the meaning or even actual prevalence of procrastination in its historical context. A vague, sweeping historical claim is made on the basis of random text snippets.
• Steel discusses sources such as Roberts, Chernyshenko, Stark, and Goldberg (2005) to make claims about procrastination (p. 67) even though Roberts et al. does not even mention procrastination. The author's arguments are frequently extremely badly reasoned and not presented in a way that allows readers to actually evaluate the arguments presented.
• All the effort spent on reviewing a large number of sources amounts to an insight that any freshwo_man could have formulated and that, in its generality and vagueness, is nearly meaningless: that procrastination has always been with us, is a major problem now and will most likely increase -- due to the temptations of modern life such as the internet.

I've picked only a few examples, can't see that the article presents any kind of useful review of the literature on procrastination.

Great post. With respect to your final statement, I was wondering if using the results of your research to contribute to Wikipedia isn't the obvious thing to do? Not speaking to you specifically, lukeprog, but concerning the general topic.

Also, it would be interesting if your post here inspires other people here to also pursue similar research enterprises, which makes me think that this will involve a lot of duplicated effort. This is against efficiency, which makes me wonder if there's a good place for people to correspond when they are involved in similar research topics. But then I think the answer to this is also Wikipedia.

One very interesting implication. If this applies to fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence it probably applies to any field that is not so diseased that there's no there there. Thus the barriers to going from knowing nothing about a field to being able to write a publishable paper are actually relatively low in quite a few fields, particularly those where you don't need lab equipment or great mathematical sophistication.

Academic paper reading slackers of Lesswrong, to the social science and law paper writing! It'll get you into a good grad school!

Very nice approach! I like the almost algorithmic flow; Other approaches i find important: a) talking to 2-4 people for 20 mins who are working on the problem but are not too far along (so the conversation can have an informal tone) b) talking to 1-2 people who don't have an idea about it ( this gives a bird's eye view) c) going to a conference to see what kind of language people use, what are the presentations at the cusp/current edge of development are up to; this also helps form connections (maybe for use of the first two steps)

How do you determine the direction of your research?

What suggestions would you have for efficiently learning the modes of thinking from different fields? This seems important since different fields (and even different researchers) look at problems differently (often due to the nature of the subject e.g. physics vs. biology vs. computer science). Some elements of intuition seem universal but others seem to be emphasized in one field or another. While summary articles are good for the content they don't seem suited to learning how experts think about their classes of problems, similarly journal articles often obscure the intuitions and thought process which led to the conclusions by presenting only a polished conclusion. Developing intuition and thinking techniques seems to need seeing actual practitioners writing their thought, have you found good methods of doing so?

I couldn't find a better place for this, but today I learned this tip:

A book's table of contents shows you its structure, but don't forget to skim the index too, to get a second look at how its content is distributed.

What do people here think about using audiobooks for study? I have a job that let's me listen to them all day so I take advantage of that. It is possible to download video lectures as audio and listen to them as well. I also have an Ipod touch which lets me listen to them at x1.5 speed. The biggest problem with them is that it is hard to find good hard academic stuff.

Q&A services are of a great use for figuring out the terminology. I saw many answered questions of this type on Quora.

reddit/r/scholar looks like it could be a useful resource for scholarly articles. I have not used it (yet) though so I don't know how useful it is.

Heuristics for searching, specifically for history. I'm not sure how much of this generalizes, but it's a look at such questions as whether you've collected enough information, and some emphatic material (mostly in the comments) against using advanced search too early.

Searching for primary literature for use in laboratory write-ups

I may be experiencing a fluke, but it appears that my university's library's website allows any computer to use it as proxy for viewing and downloading articles from many paywalled sites (in fact, every site it gives me access to with my student login, which is a very large selection). I only discovered this by accident, and I'm hoping it isn't unintentional on their part. If anybody is interested, the address is here. If you try it and it doesn't work, please tell me.

ETA: It appears that my browser simply cached my login, and that this service is unfortunately not actually available to the general public. Sorry for any confusion.

You can save money by checking Library Genesis and library.nu for a PDF copy first...

This article is worth an upvote merely for containing this sentence. How could I not have known about these earlier?

This seems to be focused mostly on scientific research in specific fields. Do you have strategies for learning more general, lower-level skills such as essay-writing, report-writing, math, or programming?

Edit - please disregard this post

Studying in any way other than autodidactically is like rehearsing apophenia. Unless you are actively learning in a constructivist manner, which is only sustainable when self directed, you're probably wasting time.

"The fallacy is characterized by a lack of specific hypothesis prior to the gathering of data, or the formulation of a hypothesis only after data has already been gathered and examined.[4] Thus, it typically does not apply if one had an ex ante, or prior, expectation of the particular relationship in question before examining the data. For example one might, prior to examining the information, have in mind a specific physical mechanism implying the particular relationship. One could then use the information to give support or cast doubt on the presence of that mechanism. Alternatively, if additional information can be generated using the same process as the original information, one can use the original information to construct a hypothesis, and then test the hypothesis on the new data. See hypothesis testing. What one cannot do is use the same information to construct and test the same hypothesis (see hypotheses suggested by the data) — to do so would be to commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.""