Low-Noise and High-Quality Learning Resources
For many decades -- or centuries --, the rate at which scientific knowledge is being built -- and made available -- has far outpaced the ability of any single human to consume and comprehend all of it.
The simple fact is: there is way more things that one can learn and know about than there is time in a single lifetime.
As a consequence, choices have to be made, and prioritization -- deciding what not to invest effort into -- is inevitable.
Below is my short list of heuristics to decide whether any resource is worth the time investment to go through it.
1. Prioritize for Fundamentals and Timelessness
Technologies and applications come and go with time as trends surface and go away. Trade-offs that made sense often have to be reevaluated in the light of new facts and situations.
One time investment that never ceases to pay off is to have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. Some truths are timeless, and some approaches cross subject knowledge boundaries.
2. Prioritize High-Effort Media
For example, books are written on the course of years and represent a significant time investment on the author's side. This more likely than not means there's a higher standard of quality.
Scientific articles are also good, but -- at least for me -- they take a large time investment. Textbooks by academics in the field usually strike the balance of having a wide coverage of fundamentals and high-value high-signal information.
3. Prioritize Authoritative Voices
There's a myriad of voices in any knowledge field, but for topics that were settled beyond a few decades ago, the larger authorities have already been decided.
If we are looking for extracting the greater amount possible from a reasonable time investment, following the “classical” and the “well-accepted” this is the place to look at.
This does not mean popular -- which often means a cult-following -- but instead well-regarded and well-respected authors as judged by their own peers in the field.
4. Keep in Touch with Practicality
It's easy to fall into a rabbit hole of learning for learning sake. While there's joy in that, I think that only half of the effort should go into learning, while the other half of the effort should go into thinking of how to convert this into real-life benefit or gain.
For example, there's no gain in having encyclopedic knowledge of time-managing guru fluff if you yourself don't have a grasp of your own time.
If you are reading non-fiction -- not only for enjoyment sake --, questions such as “how does convert to real-life action?” and/or “how do you measure success?” should be at the back of your mind while reading.
5. Refuse Noise
Opinion is noise. Often it is the case that arguments can be made just as convincingly when the case is made for either position. Hearing a well-defended opinion piece of how things ought to be is not interesting to me.
I want to hear about results: what was the reasoning, what was tried, and finally what came out of it. I want to hear about methodologies: how hard did you think about the setup and what the challenges were to ensure the results were valid.
Fairly represented experiences are valuable, as you can gain from the span of years of someone else in a fraction of the time by reading through their written thoughts.
Pre-packaged opinions without the chain of reasoning that led to them can only be agreed upon or disagreed upon. Arguing about how that opinion can be arrived at -- departing from observations or experiences both parties can agree on -- is far more interesting and insightful in my opinion.