What's the best way to learn

A few days ago, I came across a YouTube video titled “Reading other people’s code is the most worthless way to learn”. The idea made sense to me at the time.

But today, after redoing two “A tour of go” exercises, I changed my mind. The truly worthless to learn isn’t reading someone else’s code - it’s failing to think about why. For example, “Go by Example” is a well known simple and fast way to learn Go. You can indeed learn programming languages by looking at examples written by others. So what’s the really problematic is not asking questions and thinking about why in the learning process.

I recalled when I was preparing for my previous graduate school entrance exams, my primary aim was to be efficient, meaning that when I was working on a quesion, I would often go through the answer very quickly, and I thought at the time that it would save me more time. Isn’t the purpose of doing the questions to understand and memorize the answers?

I now understand why I failed my graduate shool entrance exams at that time. The most valuable thing I missed about doing the exercise was the process of thinking, making mistakes, and correcting them.

Making mistakes is good and indispensable. It also seems to make sense to use mistakes as a reward mechanism in machine learning.