Ultralearning - A Review

There is a temptation in our world to try to find a quicker, easier, and better way to do everything. How can I lose 20 pounds without actually dieting? How can I earn a huge income without working? How can I make everyone think I am more intelligent without actually studying? We are a culture of convenience that hasn’t eliminated our preference for appearance—we want microwave dinners that don’t really taste like it. It’s a form of dishonesty.

When I first picked up Scott Young’s book, Ultralearning, I expected to find a microwave dinner that advertised itself as fine cuisine. But what I actually found was a microwave dinner than that advertised accurately and notes the benefits and the drawbacks of what it is. The potatoes may be a little soggy and the meat a little tough, but it takes ok and is reasonably nutritious. A little candor is a good thing, because sometimes a microwave dinner is good enough.

Young’s book falls into the airport book genre, which I commented on in my review of Rolf Dobelli’s, The Art of Thinking Clearly. It is reasonably short, lucidly written, relies on the research of others, provides clear steps to success, and is the sort of self-improvement volume that can provide light conversation and make the reader sound intelligent.

That Young’s book is designed to sell well should not be considered a severe criticism, however, because he has put together some helpful advice in an easily absorbed presentation.

Young has done the round of podcasts and presented at a TEDx event and some other self-help, inspirational, big-idea sort of stages. His writing style, ideas, and approach fit well within that genre of thought.

The majority of what he advertises, though, is simply a way to become a better learner. The lack of originality is no sign of a lack of value. Every generation needs champions of ideas and contextualizers that can help translate older ideas for newer audiences. The weakness in Young’s approach is that he does not really recognize that what he is doing is translating older ideas, but presents much of what he offers as being derived from contemporary science, rather than simply repackaging older methologies.

Ultralearning is “a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.” It is, in essence, the process of becoming an efficient autodidact. It is an approach that Young has put to the test by working his way through MIT’s computer programming curriculum on his own and by learning four languages in a year. Ultralearning is about becoming competent quickly at a particular skill.

There are nine principles that Young recognizes for ultralearners:

• Principle #1 – Metalaerning – Figuring out the way that the subject or skill should be learned.

• Principle #2 – Focus – Zooming in on the subject to the neglect of many other things. Making a job of getting good at whatever the goal is.

• Principle #3 – Directness – Seeking to gain the information or skill in as close to the setting as it can be applied.

• Principle #4 – Drill – Figuring out where the choke points are in learning or proficiency, breaking those down, and practicing them until proficiency is achieved.

• Principle #5 – Retrieval – Using testing (of various sorts) to embed information well so that skills and knowledge are retained and progress can be made.

• Principle #6 – Feedback – Going through the discomfort of feedback so that problems can be corrected as quickly as possible.

• Principle #7 – Retention – Creating a plan to maintain important proficiencies, depending on the nature of the skill.

• Principle #8 – Intuition – Making the “why” connections on the topic to help make further learning on the subject easier.

• Principle #9 – Experimentation – Changing methods when something isn’t working, even if it worked earlier on.

As I noted, there is nothing that is truly remarkable about any of these steps for those that been engaged in the study of pedagogy. But Young packages them in a way that prevents having to dig through the literature of the field. He also shows some ways that some of the “quick fix” learning methods that are advertised are doomed to failure.

Ultralearning is not a “quick and easy” approach to becoming an expert in something. Rather, it is “hard and fast” approach to becoming reasonably proficient at something. It does not advertise cheap, fast, gourmet food. It advertises reasonably healthy, reasonably tasty, microwave food. On that front it delivers.

I think there is value in the Ultralearning approach for those that are trying to gain knowledge in a new field. For the pastor seeking to learn New Testament Greek without going to seminary, something like an ultralearning approach would probably work well. If someone could carve out three hours a day for a few months to jam through a common Koine textbook, memorize the most common vocabulary, and develop a plan to use it daily, they will be more likely to be successful than by trying to do Greek drills 20 minutes a day for years. There is a realism to Young’s approach that I find attractive.

This, of course, does not mean that someone can become an expert in something nearly instantly. While the internet tends to make people feel they can be experts on constitutional law one day, international politics another, and health sciences on the next, the reality is that most of us have a limited bandwidth to develop competencies. The ultralearning approach intentionally neglects a lot of the background work that is typical of more conventional learning approaches.

If you want to be able to paint something you find attractive and don’t expect to become a stellar artist, then it can be helpful to learn to paint from Bob Ross. If you want to become more proficient at a skill or in a limited area of knowledge that can develop you personally or improve your career options, then Scott Young’s approach is beneficial. In neither case will you be the best at something or the expert in a field, but it can certainly add tools to a toolbox that can make a huge difference.

Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

By Young, Scott

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The Art of Thinking Clearly - A Review

If there is one skill I would like to improve in time on this earth, it is thinking well. Our affections and our actions follow what we think. Additionally, in the information-saturated world in which we live, individuals and companies are spending billions of dollars every year to keep us from thinking well.

In this quest to think better, I picked up Rolf Dobelli’s 2013 book, The Art of Thinking Clearly. The title makes it sound like it has some methods to clearer cognition, but as Dobelli announces in the introduction, “This is not a how-to book.” Instead, it is an illuminated list of biases and fallacies that people commonly buy into.

This book falls into the category that I like to categorize as “airport books.” These are the trade books that you will see if you browse one of the bookstores or newsstands in any American airport. The writing is clear, with simple language and frequent illustrations, but usually very skimmable. The chapters tend to be short and well titled so that one can pop in and out easily or simply skip some chapters and still understand the main flow. The books are designed to be read in about the time it takes to wait for and endure a domestic flight. The content is usually something in the self-improvement vein (usually with a business bias), alternative view of history, or interesting but lesser-known aspect of humanity.

Authors of this genre of book include Malcolm Gladwell, James Clear, Bill Bryson, Nassim Taleb and others. They are usually popularizers whose gift is in researching a topic, synthesizing some of the ideas, and writing about in a captivating way. Some of the books are quite good, and some even include very helpful ideas, but they are always derivative, typically non-controversial, and intended to make the reader look and sound more well-informed than he or she really is.

As I’ve fallen into a well of these books while reading on various topics, I’ve also come to discover that there is a lot of self-reference within the genre. For example, Dobelli probably should have listed Taleb as a contributor to his volume, given how frequently he cites him. There are many instances of each of them citing each other—whether in print or a Ted Talk someone else gives. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, it’s simply something that is evident when you read a clump of the books published around the same time.

Dobelli’s book is helpful in many ways. Each of the ninety-nine chapters covers a distinct error in thinking or method of misrepresentation we ought to watch out for. He tells us to watch out for mistakes in true remembrances, the paralysis of excessive options, attempts to attribute attitudes to an author based on characters in their novel, the psychological effect of scarcity, and more. There really area lot of different ways that we can think incorrectly and there is value in understanding how we might get tricked, so we can watch out for it.

The book seems to take a humanitarian approach by offering for the cost of a restaurant meal tips that could change your life and improve society. But the nature of social improvement is not entirely altruistic. As Dobelli notes, “If we could learn to recognize and evade the biggest errors in thinking––in our private lives, at work, or in government––we might experience a leap in prosperity. We need no extra cunning, no new ideas, no unnecessary gadgets, no frantic hyperactivity––all we need is less irrationality.”

Of course, what exactly constitutes irrationality in Dobelli’s mind? He does not state it, but it is clear from the text that he writes that irrationality is assumed to be any belief or idea that does not reduce all value to instrumentality and all reality to the material.

When considering causality, he dismisses the possibility of the supernatural. Those who believe in God’s intervention have simply been fooled by the randomness of the world and pieced together a fairy tale based on ignoring the details. At another point he dismisses as foolish someone holding onto a car he had refurbished when selling off possessions to pay a debt. There can be no value other than the dollar value in his mind.

None of these views are surprising. They are not atypical. However, they reflect the biases of his own thinking, which oddly enough he does not highlight as one of the fallacies. They are reflective of how people need to continually interrogate the baseline assumptions of authors as they read a book. Having assumptions does not invalidate the contents of a volume or its arguments, but it can inform us and help readers sift through the wheat and the chaff.

Overall, this was a useful book. It can serve as a reference when trying to label errors in thinking that we witness. It may also provide fodder for discussions of clear and critical thinking. Whether it will result in a jump in prosperity, as Dobelli hopes, is less clear. However, it will certainly provide an amusing way to spend a few hours, if one has the time.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

By Dobelli, Rolf

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Your Future Self Will Thank You - A Review

One of the most challenging questions for Christians to ask themselves is whether they are more Christlike today than they were a year or even a decade ago. Even among those of us active in our local churches on a regular basis, this question can lead to awkward silence and, perhaps, even prevarication. If we are brutally honest, most of us cannot claim to be more Christlike today than we ever have been and that should give us some pause to think.

It’s not that we should be perpetually living on some sort of “mountain top” spiritual experience. Christlikeness has very little to do with how we feel, but it has a whole lot to do with how we live.

And the question of how we live is not a question of our avoidance of sin. Most of us don’t drink, smoke, chew, or hang with girls that do. This isn’t simply about ethics. The question of spiritual progress has a great deal more to do with the normal advance that takes place as we mature as Christians. Unfortunately, for many of us, that advance looks less like progress and more like a slow slide backward or an attempt to tread water while pretending to be moving ahead.

Every year we make new resolutions. We are going to pray more, lose weight, memorize Scripture, and be more diligent in a hundred different ways. However, it seems that a few weeks later our will-power has failed and we have slid back to where we started.

Drew Dyck’s recent book: Your Future Self Will Thank You: Secrets to Self-Control from the Bible & Brain Science, is, despite its clunky title, a very helpful book. It is a quick read, but well-written and robustly researched. This book belongs in a reading list with other books on spiritual disciplines.

The basic topic of this book, as the subtitle indicates, is self-control. This seems to set the volume up for two potential errors: legalism and self-reliance. Dyck is careful to avoid both. He does this by reminding readers that self-control is a biblical virtue (e.g., Prov 25:28, 1 Cor 9:25) and by noting that self-control is a fruit of the Spirit (e.g., Gal 5:23). We cannot earn salvation by being more self-controlled, but growth in godliness should result in greater self-restraint.

The Bible points us toward the need for self-control as a sign of and means to pursue spiritually maturity, but that leaves those of us who struggle with the virtue pondering why we can’t just be better. That’s where the science comes in.

As someone who struggles with self-control, Dyck set out on a quest to figure out why. This took him through a year or so of reading the literature available in the field of psychology and brain science. He has helpfully distilled the results in this book and carefully balanced those findings against the wisdom of Scripture. What he finds is much like the argument Christian Miller presents in The Character Gap: human character can be shaped, there are practical ways to do so, and that those practical means of forming our character look a great deal like traditional Christian devotional practices.

Having explained why we so often fall short of our goals of being more self-controlled, Dyck also helps explain how we can get better. He goes well beyond the usual Sunday School response: read the Bible, pray, and attend more church. These are all a part of the formula, but without a little more meat on the bones, such admonitions leave us asking why we haven’t gotten any holier in the past decade.

The basic formula laid out in Your Future Self Will Thank You is that we need to incrementally build new habits. Dyck sifts through research that shows that the problem with most of our self-improvement attempts is that we try to change too much too quickly and without the appropriate incentive structures. Dyck uses recent scientific research to show that will power is a finite resource. It can be developed over time. However, our self-control is subject to fatigue. When we are tired, stressed, or distracted we are much more likely to fail in our attempts at self-control. Not coincidentally, this happens to match what Scripture teaches. This is why Sabbath is built into the pattern of Scripture. This is why Proverbs focuses so much on patterns of life.

Interspersed with the explanations of why we fail, Dyck has included helpful steps to begin to develop better habits. His examples tend to focus on things that should matter to us as Christians: physical health, stronger prayer lives, more consistent Scripture reading. This is a long way from self-help book designed to unlock ten secrets to build a better you. This is a book that can help provide practical mechanisms to get Christians to develop better habits that lead us toward holiness.

Dyck’s book will benefit those who already have a good understanding of spiritual disciplines. For those that don’t, it should be paired with a book like Andy Davis’s, An Infinite Journey: Growing toward Christlikeness or Don Whitney’s, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. In fact, Dyck’s book fills out some of what is absent from traditional books on spiritual growth because it helps explain why we fail and what, practically, we can do to fail less.

Your Future Self Will Thank You: Secrets to Self-Control from the Bible and Brain Science (A Guide for Sinners, Quitters, and Procrastinators)

By Drew Dyck

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.