What are you learning?

I'm working through a group theory / analysis syllabus to remedy my gormlessness with proofs. If anyone else is gormless with proofs, we could form a Remedial Proofs Club, where we all fruitlessly push variables round a page for three quarters of an hour before giving up. It'd be like a secret handshake.

I've also been sitting on the Daniel Solow and Polya books with minimal motivation to work through them. Remedial Proofs Book Club, maybe?

I'm studying very basic Lie group theory by working through John Stillwell's Naive Lie Theory. The end-goal in this direction is to acquire the basics of modern differential geometry. If I make it to the end of this book, I've got Janich's Vector Analysis (differential manifolds, differential forms, Stokes' theorem in the modern setting, de Rham cohomology) and Loomis & Sternberg Advanced Calculus (all this and more, starting from basic linear algebra and multivariable calculus in a principed way). Not decided yet which of them I'll try to work through or both.

Independently of this, I would like to refresh probability and acquire statistics in a mathematically rigorous way. I tried Wasserman's All of Statistics that is sometimes recommended, but it's too dry and unmotivating for me. I like the look of David Williams's Weighing the Odds, which seems to be both suitably rigorous and full of illuminating explanations, but I haven't really tried reading it yet.

I want a deep understanding of elliptic curve cryptography. This led me to study algebraic geometry, which led me to study category theory. I think I'm ready to go back to algebraic geometry now.

I'm trying to learn Linear Algebra and some automata/computability stuff for courses, and I have basic set theory and logic on the backburner.

Not sure this counts as a math problem, but I've been inconsistently playing go for about four years, and my current rank is 13 kyu. In the KGS server I'm username Waleran.

I've been working on relearning calculus, after noticing that I had forgotten most of what I learned in high school. I'm doing this with a text-book someone send me a pdf of (in a bunch of other books for learning about AI). The theory is going pretty well, but I find that I have some trouble actually getting the problems solved. I've been told this would get better with practice.

Some statistics, especially confidence interval calculation for hypergeometric and binomial distributions. While not really necessary, adding proper confidence intervals to graphs of population samples of certain natural language phenomena makes the graphs look more professional (and fitting more rigorous).

Learning as in "want to understand what's going on and which equation to use", not as in "being able to derive the equations with paper and pencil without external help".

I'm writing a novel about metafiction: Some of the characters are aware that they are fictional, or rather that they live within a simulation where the laws of physics seem to follow a narrative. Unlike other metafiction stories, however, this isn't a comedy and the ontological and practical implications are treated seriously. Also, the main character is basically following timeless decision theory, but since it operates on very different timescales than humans, this has quite strange implications.

I find working on the background, the setting, characters and plot quite easy and captivating, but I hit a writer's block whenever I want to transform my notes into complete chapters. This has reached the point where I have far more notes than actual story.

I'm making an effort to read more fiction, read about writing fiction, critique others' amateur fiction, and write my own.

I am specifically practicing writing non-fiction, in the form of articles/blog posts. Any advice specific to non-fiction would be welcome.

So far I've found that rushing out a short article is better than obsessing over it.

I'm currently a beta for In Fire Forged, thanks to an EY recommendation. Going over someone else's writing with a fine-tooth comb, looking to correct anything that's subperfect turns out to be an excellent way of improving. Also, we have a truly fantastic beta community (6 betas plus the original author); I've learned lots from them too. We're not looking for more betas, but if you're at a level where you're not getting better by writing your own stuff (ie. you can see that your writing isn't as good as you'd like, but can't make it better because your writing level is too low, and you can't level up since you effectively can't edit your own writing because your writing level is too low...), I could probably get you on the team. PM me if interested.

Also, I'm taking a writing course, but it's certainly not helping and may even be making me a worse writer. It's also, unfortunately, very required. In general, I'm extremely skeptical about improving writing in anything vaguely resembling a traditional classroom (putting the words down initially is an individual process, and improving a draft starts breaking down past 3 editors at a time; I've had several top-tier writing teachers and still haven't seen an effective way to teach writing to a class), so take that as a data point about where to not look to learn writing.

I'm studying and trying to learn about Alzheimers disease: the causes and potential therapies. Please get in touch if you are interested in this as well, or aging more generally.

Last night, for the first time in my 31 years of life, I had a second date. Thank you, OKCupid matching algorithm.

I'm using The Charisma Myth, Neil Strauss' Rules of the Game, Nonviolent Communication, some other books and quite some LW posts to improve my social skills with good results. Apparently I made quite a good impression on my last job. I'm careful to clearly use only non-dark techniques (I avoid any that involve lies; The Game actually involves lots) and to stay authentic.

I use a program I wrote over the last couple of months to improve my productivity and enforce habits in myself via conditioning. Whenever I hear of an interesting productivity trick or a useful habit, I add it to the program. So far, I think it's working, but there is so much overhead because of the sheer quantity of near-useless tricks that it will take some pruning before it actually becomes a strong net win.

I am re-learning negotiating by teaching it.

Max L.

I'm using the Ultimate Geography Anki Deck to complete my knowledge of countries.

I was motivated to do so my this LW Comment::

A few months ago I started using the Ultimate Geography Anki deck after performing quite abysmally on some silly geography quiz that was doing the rounds on Facebook. I now know where all the damn countries are, like an informed citizen of the world. This has proven itself very useful in a variety of ways, not least of which is in reading other material with a geographical backdrop.

This I fully second. Knowing some lesser known *istan countries has already been helpful in GJP.

I took a few university courses, but ultimately I found it more efficient to just browse wikipedia for its lists of heuristics and biases. Then of course there is the book 'Thinking Fast and Slow', which is just great.

What other sources can you recommend?

I recently discovered that a question which had obsessed me during my entire life, and which I had never been able to put into words, is actually being studied by a philosophy professor. I'm currently reading his paper, "Against egalitarianism" (no socioeconomic implications intended; it's about theory of consciousness).

Reading Nature's God, by Matthew Stewart. Stewart argues that many of the American Revolutionary figures held a particular world view at odds with what we would consider orthodox Christianity, with roots going back to Epicurus, and transmitted to them via Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Locke and other figures from the rationalist period leading up to what we call the Enlightenment. Stewart studied many of the original writings from the period, and he says he found references to what he calls"space aliens" everywhere, even in the freethought book published by the relatively unlettered Vermont hillbilly Ethan Allen. The Revolutionary figures who wrote down their thoughts on the matter took the Epicurean doctrine of the infinite universe and the plurality of worlds seriously, and they postulated that these other worlds must have rational species similar to humans living on them, even if they had no way to observe them.

I don't see how this differs from the Christian belief in the unobservable, populated realms of heaven and hell; yet the advocates of this extraterrestrial belief apparently considered it "rational" by the standards of the time. These speculations might have influenced Joseph Smith a couple generations later when he came up with the Kolob doctrine in Mormonism. Despite the Enlightenment culture of the Revolutionary generation, Americans became more conventionally religious in the early 19th Century.

Reading Stewart's book made me wonder why more of the Enlightenment figures with resources didn't try to secure their gains. They managed to lock in their political ideas to some extent in the U.S. Constitution, of course. Thomas Jefferson worked to establish the University of Virginia to teach Enlightenment values. And the French immigrant banker and trader Stephen Girard, who also read Enlightenment books and named his merchant ships Voltaire and Rousseau, left his fortune in trust to establish a secular school for orphans. But other Enlightenment figures with money, like Voltaire himself and the Baron d'Holbach, didn't think of doing this to improve the odds of making the Enlightenment sustainable. If they couldn't have done this in France for political reasons, they certainly had the ability to send money to other countries, and even to the early United States, with instructions to carry on the Enlightenment project.

Currently enrolled in:

• Cryptography - Coursera (Stanford)
• Computational Investing - Coursera (Georgia Tech)
• R Programming - Coursera (Johns Hopkins' Data Science Specialization)

Also, submitted my application to Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science in Computer Science program for Spring 2015

Haskell. I know C, Python, Octave and some Java, but this is my first encounter with a functional programming language. I went through the introduction at learn you a haskell, now I'm trying to translate some of my previous simpler projects and mostly using the haskell wiki and stackexchange for help as I go along.

I'm doing "Learning Python the Hard Way". The first part was a slog, but rather easy. I've finally reached boolean logic, so I hope things will get more interesting now.

Javascript, MEAN stack, SQL, RegEx, Git... I just started Fullstack Academy today, see here for more info on the curriculum.

Once it's over I want to learn more about algorithms and data structures and stuff.

Still working my way through the Ruby codeacademy course

Working through the Odin project, about a half hour a day.

Come on, that's like a super specific category, how would you expect people to have stuff to put in there!

... anyway, I've been prototyping game mechanics in AngularJS and more generally learning about that framework, so I can use it to make/prototype web-based or mobile games. I haven't been putting huge amount of time in it yet though.

Working on my first serious project using AndEngine (a game that's a cross between Recettear and Night Shift). The joy of puzzling code out without any documentation. I'm at the stage where I can display the shop and have customers come in and wobble around, without there being any actual gameplay.

I am interested in both Android Java programming and Unity programming.

I already did a very simple demo "Relax Bubbles", now I am working on Sudoku. The next project will be a simple 3D game in Unity, which already provides the physics and 3D, so I just have to design some levels.

I've been involved in a few LW learning cooperation efforts, and it's been my experience that they rarely lead to anything. These have mostly taken the form "hey, we're all learning [subject]! Let's make a discussion group and discuss it", and very little discussion actually takes place.

I'd be keen to hear if anyone has the opposite experience, and what form their cooperation took.

As an interested denizen of 2015, It might be cool to make this a regular (say, monthly?) thread, with a tag for the archive.

Learning German atm via Duolingo + Anki, already speak Esperanto and am reasonably good at Japanese.

Spanish. Though I am making half a year pause by now due to increased workload. I tried (as an experiment) small group lessons taught by a native speaker, and it really bumped forward my communication skills. Though I have been slowed down a lot by a lack of accessible Spanish language TV. I plan on investigating habssvpvny fngryyvgr cnl GI erprcgvba.

I'm learning French via Duolingo, Anki and UnlockYourBrain.

Out of curiosity and because of the interest of my brother who has gift for languages we started to learn E-minimal. As its name suggests it is a quite minimal artificial language suitable for studying language properties. Above all it is small enough to aquire it quickly for real use.

I have created an Anki deck for E-minimal to learn the language and succeeded to aquire the complete vocabulary and grammar within about 50 hours (according to Anki). I'm relatively fluent in writing by now (I exchange mails with my brother in it).

I speak (some) Chinese, but I've always had a problem with remembering tones. So I found a list of characters sorted by frequency, wrote a python script to parse it and massage it a bit to generate an anki deck of "character -> pronunciation (definition)" mappings (and for characters that have several pronunciation, it's "character (definition) -> pronunciation"; so far I've been reviewing that deck for the past couple of months, but as it has several thousand entries it'll be years before I'm done with it (if I feel like it's getting old I'll stop reviewing it). When I encounter a character I don't know how to write I also add it back as a separate entry in another deck.

For studying German and Japanese, I have a Grooveshark playlist with a few Disney songs, and I also have some google docs with the lyrics which I occasionally read/try to translate (I haven't put much time in this apart from listening to the songs while I work; I haven't entered anything into Anki yet).

We used to have a regular German lunch on thursday at work, but the organizers quit and nobody picked up; I would usually add a few entries to Anki each time (and I still review them). I might organize a Japanese lunch eventually.

I have a "Mafalda" comic book in Spanish in the restroom, along with a Spanish-French dictionary, and usually read one strip (looking up unknown words) each time. Nothing in Anki, and I don't study any Spanish outside of that.

I am improving my Arabic via private lessons. I have tried this several times over the years; I'm still not very good.

Some years ago I started Japanese, but the kanjis have been a nightmare.

I'm also interested in Dutch.

I'm interested in learning German and Russian to translate technical literature. I started working through an old German book I bought in high school while simultaneously going through a large Anki deck, but I had to stop due to lack of time. Still reviewing what I covered, though.