The Art of Stupid

Why "good students" will never make great minds

One of the most common questions I get is “how can I start learning _____?”, where _____ is either mathematics, machine learning, or some other technical discipline.

You usually expect me to drop a hot tip that’ll make you an expert overnight, but unfortunately, I don’t have one. All I can give you is what I learned on my journey.

Whenever I decide to collect my thoughts, reflect on my experiences, and identify the patterns that emerged, I always end up at one core concept.

I can recall the exact moment my learning journey kickstarted. It was when I embraced that I knew nothing, and it’s perfectly alright.

In this post, we are going to talk about humility, that is, “the willingness to look stupid.”

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I vividly remember my first semester as a young student of mathematics. “Let F be an arbitrary field. V is called a vector space over F if…” was the very first sentence I heard in my very first class, and it felt like a kick in the head, and I left the lecture feeling entirely confused about what vectors are.

The next memory: I’m sitting on the bed of my flat, staring at the lecture notes for hours, unable to comprehend a single thing.

My beginnings in math felt more like a futile wrestle with the Rosetta Stone, rather than unlocking the secrets of the universe.

“Let F be an arbitrary field.” In our class of around a hundred first-year students, no one asked WTF a field is. About 10% of them knew, but the rest were just keeping up appearances, afraid of feeling or looking stupid.

I quickly realized that if I want to become a mathematician (and that’s the only thing I ever wanted to be), I have to overcome the resistance.

Appeasing peers and professors is useless. Appearances are irrelevant. Feeding our ego is dangerous.

Knowledge and skill matter.

So, I started asking all the stupid, trivial questions.

“What is that ∑ symbol?” (It’s the summation sign.)

“Isn’t a vector just an arrow, pointing from the origin to a single point?” (No, it’s not, but it’s a good mental model in the beginning.)

“Isn’t a field just like the set of real numbers?” (Yes, it is. The set of real numbers is a good mental model of fields.)

I found that the best way to flatten the learning curve of any subject is to be completely honest with yourself and ask all the “easy” questions that no one asks.

“Fake it till you make it” doesn’t work if you are looking for mastery.

You can only become smart if you are willing to feel stupid.

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Where does our fear of failure come from?