learning

Mark where the argument turns, not where it arrives — conclusions are findable by flipping, inferences are invisible without your help.#annotate-the-hinge

Expert marginalia is an argument with the author — agreement marks are the signature of naive reading.#argue-with-the-author

Working memory holds about four chunks, not four items — expertise enlarges what fits in a slot rather than adding slots.#chunks-not-items

Know where the edge of your knowledge is — the boundary matters far more than the size of the circle.#circle-of-competence

Code’s second zero-cost property is experimentation — you learn faster than anyone operating in atoms.#code-compresses-learning

Self-regulation predicts later outcomes better than IQ does.#delayed-gratification-predicts

Conditions that make learning feel harder tend to make it last longer — fluency is a misleading signal.#desirable-difficulty

Notes that are never extracted die in the container that holds them, and the input loop feels like success the whole time.#extraction-or-it-dies

Producing your own sentence about an idea encodes durably; recognising someone else’s does almost nothing.#generation-over-recognition

Hold a latticework of models from many disciplines — a single-discipline mind bends every problem to fit its one tool.#latticework-of-models

For non-perishable things, age predicts survival — what has lasted a century will likely outlast what launched last year.#lindy-effect

Ideas are replicators under the same selection pressure — an idea spreads because it is good at spreading, not because it is true.#memes-replicate-too

A few of your skills drive most of your value — balanced competence spreads you across the slots that do not pay.#multiplier-skills

We compress the past into stories that feel explanatory and predict nothing — coherence is not evidence.#narrative-fallacy

The intention to learn has no power of its own — retention is determined by the operations you actually ran on the material.#operations-not-intentions

Pain + Reflection = Progress: pain is information about the gap between reality and your model.#pain-plus-reflection

You cannot identify the attempts that will matter without making the ones that will not.#paradox-of-discovery

The instrument’s presence changes posture from consumer to participant before a single mark is made.#pen-changes-reading

Surface disagreement instead of hiding it — being wrong quietly costs far more than being corrected loudly.#radical-transparency

Risk is a modern invention — for most of history the future was fate, and the idea it could be measured is only a few centuries old.#risk-was-invented

Meaning is not enough if it is left unarranged — hierarchy gives spreading activation something to travel along.#structure-before-memory

When producing code stops being scarce, the constraint moves to knowing what is worth building.#taste-is-the-new-bottleneck

A failed retrieval attempt followed by feedback beats spending the same time reading.#test-before-you-study