As an adult learner,I should, in theory, be able to self-teach a lot of stuff. I'm currently trying to digest probability on my own, especially the Poisson Distribution.
What's annoying in self-teaching is that there is often some sort of assumed background concept ( can we abbreviate this as ABC?) that, missing, massively impedes understanding. This makes me ask dumb questions, repeatedly, to the smart people around me, which on its own is fine (I'm mathematically humble) but, with me lacking the ABC, I just stand there blankly while my friend's carefully chosen words of explanation fly past my ears, uncomprehended. I do this two or three times and then go to the library.
I was able to observe this from the other end yesterday, with me as the explainer and someone else lacking an ABC I was trying to explain the event horizon of a singularity to our lab intern, probably the smartest kid in her whole high school, and couldn't get through.
Being only in the first week of 11th grade physics she lacked experience thinking about object behavior in a gravity field (esp, say, an orbiting so-called 'weightless' satellite). Without that ABC, the rest of the argument was going to take 3 times as long and the final understanding was still going to be a pearl built up around a fundamentally flawed core. I couldn't tell her to go read sections 9.1 and 9.2 of her very basic physics textbook to learn the ABC and then her black hole question could probably be answered in about ten seconds.
In my own case I found my missing concept for knowing the Poisson Distribution more deeply. This morning, as my uptown 6 train passed Bleecker Street, I saw that chapter 4-7 (Poisson) is merely the punchline, coming after the methodical introduction of 4.3 (Expected Value) and even the crucial chapter 1-3 (Permutations). There are no shortcuts!
Feeling better now.
Slightly related: I found the best ever, free tutorial book on how to learn R (the open source bastard son of S-Plus language):go to the CRAN documentation page and scroll down to Verzani for his free PDF (110 pages, with great examples).
Learning through online forums is like this. Rarely do open-source technologies take the time to put together meaningful tutorials or manuals, so one is left to piece the basics together in a format that often frustrates both the askers, who lack the ABC's and who spend hours piecing them together on forums, and the answerers, who are tired of writing the same thing over and over.
Somehow, one moves along up the forum food chain, one sweet, small victory at a time.
Posted by: Peter | October 10, 2009 at 11:38 PM