alt Hacker NewsI have no idea why these sorts of posts are popular. Past college you're not going to learn physics by trying to self-study an entire university course. The best way to learn is just to pick a small part of physics you'd like to learn (preferably related to your job), i.e. how GPS work or some fluid mechanics etc... Then learn the physics you need for that. Knowledge accumulation can't be organized in a straight line, it happens non-linearly and generally builds upon small wins that are useful for you.
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Personal curriculum is a positive trend[1] IMO.
When you're forced to use AI instead of the skills you've put decades learning; it's time to learn new skills to keep the brain from becoming mushy.
I think dense personal curriculum like this is the way forward.
Let's subject that claim to some basic arithmetic.
A university would expect maybe eight undergraduate level courses, four credit hours per course, and you are expected to do three hours of study per hour of credit per week. That's 1,500 hours.
How does that compare to the "hours played" on a typical strategy game Steam review?
I'd disagree and have done exactly that. I started with a reasonable basis in physics, but self studying through an entire course dramatically expanded my understanding. For an example of what I mean this [1] is Feynman's lecture on conservation of energy. It's something every schoolkid learns -- I'm fairly sure I saw my first pendulum from the nose demo in middle school, yet Feynman will take this and make you completely rethink your understanding.
So for instance, what is energy? Somebody who knows a little would probably tell you something like the capacity to do work, and so it feels quite abstract. But the interesting thing is that energy really "exists" so to speak. If you paused the universe somehow, and then resumed it - you'd need to know exactly how much energy was and where in order to keep things moving as they were. Yet there is no known 'thing' that is energy - just a wide array of mathematical abstractions.
And then this thing is also perfectly conserved such that the amount in play will never change. It's completely bizarre to think about, and this is something you initially "learned" in grade school, and probably never even really though twice about.
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And more generally I think the point of learning should not be to do something, but to expand your own mind and understanding of the world (and beyond). Outside of this being arguable alone as a philosophical point of view, I also think there's even a practical reason for it - unknown unknowns. There are things you can't even imagine that you don't know, and the only way you can reconcile this is trying to dive into things across a wide breadth.
Somehow millions of people have learned physics in a "straight-line" at university. Most physics majors have a logical progression from the simplest to most complex ideas.
I think it's useful for learning about unknown unknowns. If you don't have a clear direction, it's entirely fine to start with a university course then stop when you get a feeling for what you really need.
The analogy seems to be like learning classical music (like piano or violin) after as an adult.
You learn the basics like scales and chords to build and build to modern jazz.
But if you’re an adult, life is too short, just go straight to a few pieces you like. Get a simplified version and learn the bits you need from there from a teacher.
I think there is more in this world than is dreamt of in your philosophy. The crowd on HN now is very different than it used to be rest assured there are many people self-teach themselves the equivalent of a university curriculum. I mean, nerds actually exists, they're not all humdrum corpo worker bees trying the maximize their employers' value and then just hiking or whatever.
I think self-studying a university curriculum is also helpful. I've studied physics at the undergraduate level myself.
Quantum mechanics, for example, is useful enough as a general background, and going through fluid dynamics and GPS problems is also helpful. But if you just follow the application problems, you can learn what you need, but the bigger risk is that you might miss the larger framework that defines those problems. That's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the entire university curriculum training is ultimately a process of translating complex phenomena into the Western scientific way of understanding things. It's a mental model that says 'this phenomenon can be interpreted with this kind of formula.'
In other words, it's about building mental models. In a formal university curriculum, you usually learn things like vectors, topological spaces, energy conservation, and how to map real-world phenomena onto these perspectives. It's about learning to simplify the world using mathematical tools. I didn't go to a top university, so I didn't learn things like tensors, but I hear they're taught now. I used tensors in grad school.
Of course, when I actually code and deliver factory equipment, I've done motor-related work under NDA, and the actual formulas aren't always perfectly accurate. There are corrections and adjustments. But the important thing is not just problem-solving itself, but building the mental model of 'how to approach the problem' before solving it. And I think the curriculum helps with that.
I think this is unnecessarily pessimistic. I think there's actually a surprisingly large number of people who are interested in and have the discipline to study something on their own, and there's value in pursuing a whole course of study from beginning to end. Doing things piecemeal and incrementally has value too (especially in software development), but can obscure the whole shape of a discipline.