<story><title>So you want to learn physics (2021)</title><url>https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qsort</author><text>A point that&amp;#x27;s rightfully emphasized by the author:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Solving problems is the only way to understand physics. There&amp;#x27;s no way around it.&lt;p&gt;This generalizes well to other fields. I don&amp;#x27;t want to discourage anybody from trying to educate themselves in a difficult field (be it physics or something else), but that&amp;#x27;s a very common and immediately visible problem with autodidacts. If you haven&amp;#x27;t worked through enough hard problems you lack the intuition that ties together theory.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>belugacat</author><text>That’s a POV I’ve grown to adopt as I got older (like many, perhaps). I used to heavily privilege theory, believing that everything could (and maybe should) be derived from first principles.&lt;p&gt;Now I place the concrete over everything else; theory is nice when it can illuminate why the practice works. Otherwise, it’s just words.&lt;p&gt;The most frustrating is when I have friends who have derived their entire understanding of a subject I know as a practitioner (typically something tech&amp;#x2F;programming related) from watching YouTube videos&amp;#x2F;listening to podcasts.&lt;p&gt;Because they’ve heard hours and hours from experts, they have a feeling of deep understanding. But talking to them about this topic is extremely frustrating because their knowledge clearly has never had to be applied to the real world, and is grounded in nothingness, so they misunderstand lots, but they feel like they know what they’re talking about as much as you do.</text></comment>
<story><title>So you want to learn physics (2021)</title><url>https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qsort</author><text>A point that&amp;#x27;s rightfully emphasized by the author:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Solving problems is the only way to understand physics. There&amp;#x27;s no way around it.&lt;p&gt;This generalizes well to other fields. I don&amp;#x27;t want to discourage anybody from trying to educate themselves in a difficult field (be it physics or something else), but that&amp;#x27;s a very common and immediately visible problem with autodidacts. If you haven&amp;#x27;t worked through enough hard problems you lack the intuition that ties together theory.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Totally 100% with this. When younger I thought I could read the material and say &amp;quot;Oh, okay that makes sense I understand this.&amp;quot; Only to fail miserably when on a test or somewhere I had to apply what I &amp;quot;knew&amp;quot; and realizing I didn&amp;#x27;t actually know it. I lean strongly toward autodidacticism and learned that if I could solve problems with the technique &lt;i&gt;then&lt;/i&gt; I knew it.</text></comment>