First, there’s generic advice. The kind that fills books and graduation ceremonies. It represents the advice-giver’s accumulated wisdom, but it’s not directed to an individual. Confucius shared general principles of good living, not just advice for one person. Steve Jobs spoke to the entire Stanford convocation, not just one graduate. The advantage of generic advice […]
Archives for December 2011
Thoughts on Learning a Degree, Without Going to School
It’s been slightly over two months since I started the MIT Challenge, and I’ve already passed the one-year mark for classes completed so far. Now that I’ve finished a significant chunk of the courses, I wanted to share my thoughts so far on the tradeoffs I’ve noticed from taking this rather unconventional approach to learning […]
Swimming Upstream Against Your Destiny
The heritability of IQ increases with age. If this doesn’t surprise you, it should. What it means is that as you have more experiences, they matter even less for your overall intelligence. One explanation for this bizarre fact is that intelligence has a compounding property. If you’re slightly smarter as a child, due to innate […]