"Learning in Public is not altruism. It is not a luxury or a nice-to-have. It is simply the fastest way to learn, establish your net- work, and build your career. This means it is also sustainable, because you are primarily doing it for your own good. It just so happens that, as a result, the community benefits too. Win-win."

"Some vulnerable people have personal safety or other reasons to not Learn in Public. These are totally valid. Since the majority of the time, we all are still Learning in Private, it’s worth think- ing about how to do that well too."

"Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning. Document what you did and the problems you solved. Organize what you know and then Open Source Your Knowl- edge."

"You catch a lot of friends when you are Helpful on the Internet. It is surprisingly easy to beat Google at its own game of organizing the world’s information. Even curating a structured list of information is helpful."

"Don’t judge your results by retweets or stars or upvotes — just talk to yourself from three months ago. Resist the immediate bias for atten- tion. Your process needs to survive regardless of attention, if it is to survive at all."

"sooner or later, you’ll have to focus on your needs instead of others. Then you’re back to square one: having to develop Intrinsic Drive in- stead of relying on External Motivation."

"Try your best to be right, but don’t worry when you’re wrong. Keep shipping. Before it’s perfect. If you feel uncomfortable, or like an im- postor, good. That means you’re pushing yourself. Don’t assume you know everything. Try your best anyway and let the Internet correct you when you are inevitably wrong. Wear your noobyness on your sleeve. Nobody can blame you for not knowing everything."

"Don’t try to never be wrong in public. This will only slow your pace of learning and output. A much better strategy is getting really good at recovering from being wrong. This allows you to accelerate the learning process because you no longer fear the downside!"

"the other 99% of the participants only lurk.” You stand out simply by showing up."

"uilding in a social feedback mechanism to your learning encourages more learning. As you build a track record and embark on more ambitious projects with implicit future promise, your public activity becomes a Commitment Device."

"Learning in Public forces you toward the higher modes of learn- ing, including applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating."

"everyone you’ve ever heard of, dating back to Plato and Aristotle, you’ve heard of be- cause they wrote down and shared what they thought they knew. Your learnings may outlive you."

"Better at Zero Shot: As a fine-tuned “GPT-3.5 series” model and an InstructGPT sibling, it is a LOT better at zero-shot generation of text that follows your instructions"

"It has long term memory of up to 8192 tokens, and can take input and generate output about twice as long2 as GPT3."

"It still can’t do math, generates false information about the real world, and writes bad code, and does not pass Turing, SAT, or IQ tests."

"the best usecases are where creativity is more valued than precision: brainstorming, drafting, presenting information in creative ways."

"The biggest unresolved debate is how much a ChatGPT-like experience can replace Google: on one hand, ChatGPT answers questions far more directly and legibly than a Google results page8; on the other, its answers are often incorrect and unsourced"

"I do agree that this is the birth of something that looks like AGI. The main factor is learning that we have somehow gone much faster with Reinforcement Learning via Human Feedback than I knew in October"

"Moravec’s paradox guarantees that there will always be domains where humans are more efficient than machines. There is no point trying to compete with humans on home turf (conceptual understanding, intentional creativity, deep empathy…); machines should focus on doing things humans are bad at (storage, search, scheduling…)."

"Every entrepreneur going top-down (aka not merely “scratching your own itch” and improvising, but genuinely trying to find the global optimal product to create from the start) needs to go through the Idea Maze (cdixon writeup) - having run the business idea through a gauntlet of all the first- and second-order questions that necessarily arise."

"Both Bezos and Musk did their mazes starting from a basic ground truth about the future (the Internet will consume the world, and humanity will move to a solar electric economy) and worked their way backwards to a non-obvious first product (books, and sports cars) to go to market with."

"Most founders and VCs vaguely believe AI will transform software and transform most industries, but the exercise of working that backwards to the non-obvious first product is the real billion dollar question."

"We’ve started with “What AI Can Do” and refined it to “What AI Can Do Better Than Humans”. Interesting questions for AI founders."

"Shishir Mehrotra (YouTube, Coda) has been calling these Eigenquestions, a pseudointellectual name for the smallest set of questions that have a good branching factor that prescribe all future questions because they dominate product strategy"

"Jason has a really simple model of how to grow your LSA - do more things, and tell more people about it. Doing and Telling. Already this embodies a more active attitude toward how you can orient your life for more positive random events. It’s ”Fixed vs Growth mindset” adapted for luck."

"Jason Roberts coined the term ”Luck Surface Area”, and it was expanded by Sean Murphy and popularized by Patrick McKenzie."

"Luck is still randomly occurring, but you can position yourself in a way that captures more of it"

"Naval summarizes the 4 kinds of luck as such: Hope luck finds you. Hustle until you stumble into it. Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss. Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny."

"“I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.” - Charles Kettering"

"“You don’t get extreme results without extreme actions.” - Derek Sivers"

"“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” - Seneca"

"“Chance favors the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur"

"At some point you'll get some support behind you. People notice genuine learners. They'll want to help you."

"Try your best to be right, but don't worry when you're wrong. Repeatedly. If you feel uncomfortable, or like an impostor, good. You're pushing yourself. Don't assume you know everything, but try your best anyway, and let the internet correct you when you are inevitably wrong. Wear your noobyness on your sleeve."

"most people ""learn in private"", and lurk."

"Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discord, they're not public."

"Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning. Don't judge your results by ""claps"" or retweets or stars or upvotes"

"chances are that by far the biggest beneficiary of you trying to help past you is future you. If others benefit, that's icing."

"Make your own libraries no one will ever use. Clone stuff you like, from scratch, to see how they work. Teach workshops. Go to conferences and summarize what you learned."

"Open Source your Knowledge!"

"I think, like any new habit or diet, the best plan for you is the plan you can stick to."

"Pick Up What They Put Down"

"Who's ""they""? Anyone you look up to, anyone who knows more than you in the thing you're trying to learn. If that's still too broad for you: Look for the maintainers of libraries and languages you use, or the people who put out YouTube videos, podcasts, books, blogposts and courses."

"Any new library, demo, video, podcast, book, blogpost, or course that they put out. It is important that it be new. By virtue of it being new, it is simultaneously at the top of their minds, and also the most likely to lack genuine feedback."

"If it's a new course, go through it, highlight the top 3 things you learned."

"You must also close the loop - when you have produced anything (e.g. a blogpost) based on their work, tag the creator in social media. Twitter is inherently designed for this, but you can also reply in a comment or email it to them with a nice note."

"There is a VERY high chance that you will get feedback on your blogpost or demo or tweet or whatever, directly from them."

"In fact, being wrong in public will be your biggest source of personal growth."

"There is a dire lack of feedback everywhere."

"But even they go out of their way to respond to some feedback."

"What we all crave to keep going is feedback that we're doing something wrong, or right, anything to prime the next action we take."

"The fact that we don't know what the feedback will be makes it a ""variable reward"" - which is human catnip for forming a new habit."

"You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people ""learn in private"", and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves."

"What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust:"

"Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning."

"Don't judge your results by ""claps"" or retweets or stars or upvotes - just talk to yourself from 3 months ago."

"If you're tired of creating one-off things, start building a persistent knowledge base that grows over time. Open Source your Knowledge! At every step of the way: Document what you did and the problems you solved."

"Try your best to be right, but don't worry when you're wrong. Repeatedly. If you feel uncomfortable, or like an impostor, good."

"Talk while you code."

"At some point you'll get some support behind you. People notice genuine learners. They'll want to help you. Don't tell them, but they just became your mentors."

"This is very important: Pick up what they put down. Think of them as offering up quests for you to complete."

"Because you learn in public. By teaching you, they teach many. You amplify them. You have one thing they don't: a beginner's mind. You see how this works?"

"At some point people will start asking you for help because of all the stuff you put out. 80% of developers are ""dark"", they dont write or speak or participate in public tech discourse."

"At Goddard, it really seems like it is about empowering people to share and reflect on what they know best. It’s a subtle distinction, but I really like that they put people in the center of this work, and start from a place of abundant knowledge in people rather than a lack of information in systems."

"One of the great benefits of using social media as a KM tool is that you are creating and capturing the knowledge at the same time."

"“Learning in Public” is scary for many reasons – people can find and cling to outdated information and users are exposing their knowledge during a vulnerable time in the project (i.e. when they don’t yet have all the answers). However, during this part of the process is when learning can be most valuable."