Issue #39: Learning under constraints

🚨 NEW VIDEO DROP

Last week*, I made a crash course video on doing Bayesian statistics with Stan. Check it out!

📺 What’s coming up?

Preparing some videos to go over my entire graduate school experience

📰 TL;DR

There’s a lot of joy to be had in learning hard stuff, and deadlines can help you confront difficulties.

In this issue…

I wanted to talk for a bit about my experience making this most recent video. I have never learned about smoothing splines before, so going from research to finished product in a week’s time was much more stressful this time around.

That being said, this is probably the most that I’ve enjoyed doing the research for a video. Most learning in late-stage Ph.D is on an as-needed basis: if I need it for a paper or to learn a method, then I do it.

Very rarely do I get the chance to learn something for the purpose of learning it. This kind of sucks because this is the type of learning where it’s easy to lose yourself in the material and just keep picking up more info. I think I was able to grasp many of the main concepts very quickly, but the difficult part was connecting all the abstract math back to the concrete statistical task.

Deadlines are a forcing function

A forcing function is “any task, activity or event that forces one to take action and produce a result”. In my case, it was an (arbitrarily set) deadline to upload the video. As much as I wanted to nail down all of the math and intuition behind smoothing splines, it was just not possible with only a few days. The video needed to be made.

As stressful as it was, this self-imposed deadline was helpful in pushing the video forward. It forced me to figure out exactly what details needed to be in the video, and which ones could be sacrificed.

If I had given myself all the time in the world to make this video, I doubt it would have ever come out. I would have stressed out about knowing everything there is to know about smoothing functions.

Knowing that I’m coming into the work force soon, I think this skill will be essential for getting through the early months. There’s going to be a lot to take in, but having usable knowledge is going to be better than perfect knowledge.

If you want to learn something fast and solidly, try giving yourself a deadline to stick to. It feels somewhat arbitrary, but there’s a lot of power to be had from respecting deadlines, even if you made them yourself.

See you in the next one!

📦 Other stuff of mine

• You can support me on Ko-fi! YouTube and Substack are by far the best (and easiest) ways to support me, but if you feel like going the extra mile, this would be the place. It is always appreciated!