/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15951222
bump bros please help a stemcel in need

>>15951222
Schizo loser. I won't give you the secrets.

>>15951284
brutal!!!!! how will i recover.

Read the chapter once to get a general sense of the topic. Then read it again and take notes. If there's a definition, rewrite it in your own words and think of examples. If there's a proof, prove it and understand it. You know the topic when you can explain it to a layman. If at any point you're tempted to go
>Why? B-because the textbook says so!!!
then that means you didn't understand the topic and need to try again.

>>15951313
this seems worse than my pedantic approach. you do one thing twice and never properly LMAO.

feynman's technique is good, but just how retarded do i assume my layman to be?

>>15951320
retard

>>15951320
There is a lot of meandering in text books. Looking at the big picture is a good idea before diving in. One trick for stem is looking at the last chapters. A walk before you crawl approach. They have fully embraced all of the little details in the book. The gap is immediately apparent.

>>15951222
>do you read them from cover to cover? do you read every single sentence and solve every single exercise? do you ensure you cover every detail and perhaps read certain sentences multiple times to be certain you understood properly?

Yes, I also write down every sentence that contains new knowledge, which in some cases it might be more than half of the book.
And if I have to spend days stuck on a chapter or exercise, so be it. When I figure it out it's extremely rewarding.

>>15951460
Could you post an example?

>>15951222
You'll get better answers if you stop pairing questions with images of schizoposts.

>>15951469
Basic Mathematics with all exercises took me 302 pages of 223x295mm size paper. It took me 5 months but I was being extremely lazy at first (30min-1 hour/day), it should not had taken more than 2-3. I also never skipped a day (only 2-3 days of intense fever).

>>15951432
you described yourself just right! concise and complete — there's nothing more to your worthless existence — i like that!

>>15951451
are you referring to a final chapter that affords summarization? for most books, the final chapter is the last piece of the puzzle and not having read the subsequent ones leads to confusion

>>15951460
holy fuck, i didn't ask for the least efficient approach LMAO. the fact that you slothed out through the most basic maths textbook of all time — as confirmed in >>15951507 — casts doubt on any advice you could offer. i might as well consider you as a troll, for making this tremendously inefficient and unnecessarily effortful suggestion. peak midwittery and nothing more KEKMAO

>>15951486
just say you have cannot comprehend nuance. saves some space and some oxygen you are depleting with your worthlessness.

shit fucking replies KEK /sci/ truly has fallen. if i had posted this 5-6 years ago, i would have received dozens of pieces of advice, so much so that it would have been difficult for me to make up my mind.

let's just hope that during euro hours the posts will be more inspired.

>>15951222
boompa

>>15951222
Write notes, do the exercises

>>15952104

>>15952106

>>15952104
you've told me nothing new, nigger, that's what everyone preaches.

holy shit, why did i expect this dead ass board to be capable of any new insight into learning?

>>15952167
>NOOOOO you need to spoon-feed me and if you don't I'll freak out!
Go. Back.

>>15952176
oh my science, retarded nigger, that's the whole point of a high-quality thread — coming up with novel, exciting, insightful ideas, not platitudes that even the darkest gorilla nigger can vomit. who can you even spoonfeed, idiot, and with what? do you think you have any arcane, noteworthy knowledge that others are missing out on? seethe harder, midwit

>>15951871
Listen ESL faggot if you're not a retard you're going to read it once, write it down and remember it. It's not that hard.

>>15952190
once again, 0 new insight! this board is completely fucking doomed if a genuinely effortful and interesting post receives such bland and unoriginal reactions. some of you idiotic niggers are even aggressive on top of bringing no valuable contribution. what a load of subhuman crap you all are

>>15952199
>nigger this, nigger that
You're really obsessed with that word. I'm willing to bet you're Indian or something. And talking like you memorized the dictionary won't make you seem any smarter, it's just more evidence that you're mad, kek.
Whatever, keep being a failure.

>>15952213
lmao you have just confirmed yourself to be a flaming retard. i accomplish more in a month than you have in your entire worthless life. i don't even need to know you, you stink of retardation and that's a good enough indicator for your subhumanity. whatever, nigger, keep bumping my thread! do it one more, maybe even call me a jeet or a retard; bring it up, buddy!!

>>15951222
all textbooks are partially degenerate - there is overlap between textbooks on different matter. Biochemistry textbooks will contain simplified structural biology and molecular biology information, and plant physiology will contain simplified thermodynamics basics. Probably the idea is that textbookd and courses that are based on them should be as self contained as possible, but we end up with bloated textbooks that fail to answer your questions. What you should do is to look through the textbook (especially the problems at the end of chapters) and read/solve whathever you find interesting or relevant to the problems you're facing on your research and if the textbook fails go answear your questions you look for a more specific book, eg. plant physiology -> thermodynamics/physical chemistry. You rarely need to read the whole book, let alone whole book in order (unless you are in grade school). Let the reddit "book counting" go and become question oriented rather than material oriented.

>>15952188
>>15952199
>>15952223
Do you always chimp out when you don't get what you want?

>>15952245
awesome, anon, finally, someone non retarded in this cesspool of a board. i wholeheartedly agree with you, especially the question-oriented part. your input is highly appreciated.

>>15951222
I feed my book library to an LLM get a summary and work on real life problems
discipline and methodology are for fags

>>15952248
yes if your definition of "chimping out" is standing your own ground and not tolerating extreme human retardation, troll posts and midwittery.

>>15952268
BASED i shall try that

This is my advice as a math student who is constantly considered a genius and received a 4.0 in all my undergraduate math classes so far, and I've already been accepted to graduate school.
I do not have a super memory ability, I think my memory is probably pretty average.
Here's what you do, there are two ways to absorb information, it is to scan and to render.
Rendering it is like working it out in your mind so you develop a memory with it. This is like if you're reading in your head, but that's actually very low level rendering. Scanning is simple: you see the information and you move on. This will build recall, not memory which is fine. You don't have a super genius memory neither do I so who cares anyways. Scanning will be perfectly fine.
Something to empower scanning is to have something to recognize so it will buzz when you scan it. This can be helped by the author putting something at the start of the chapter which tells you what to look for or looking at the questions at the end and then finding it in your scan. Recalling something in the question is worthless of course everything in the question you could recall/recognize, DUH.
When you're rendering something you're thinking about what is being said it's something that needs to be digested.
Think of as an analogy. You can recognize stuff by taste but you can only absorb the nutrients by digestion, and books have a lot of indigestible cellulose.
Here's my process: scan the chapter, look at the questions to render them, go back and render JUST the examples and definitions only. Then I work through the problems. I write them out and that is when I'm really digesting information when I'm forming thoughts and generating memories from what I can recall.
If I'm feeling extra studios I'll make a binder for the book I'm following to condense my memories because lets me honestly I'll probably forget most of this shit the next day, that's why understanding is beyond just a book, it's a habit.

>>15952342
thank you, anon! that's awesome. with regard to your studies, only a femoid can follow the rules of the cancer that is academia so strictly. can you post tits or gtfo? otherwise, your post was a very fun read and im happy to have come across it

>>15952317
That's not what you did at all. You chimped out in the sense that blacks do. You should be ashamed of yourself.

>>15951222
>from cover to cover?
yes, never the insides tho, it's enough for judging

>>15952371
i am only ashamed of sharing the board with an worthless imbecile and an idiotic cuck like you

A man does not read, he writes. If you read, you are allowing another man to tell you how to feel, tell you how to think, tell you how to perceive and understand the world around you. Why do this? Are you too afraid to find your own way? To illuminate your own path?

>>15952372
BASED

>>15952375
oh, yes, that is true! and that is so cucked now that you mention it. perhaps that's why lang wrote so much. it's like another man (Apostol, Spivak, Landau, Griffiths etc.) is fucking your brain in like... the most cucked way ever! Holy shit, bros!

>>15952342
>"This is my advice as a math student who is constantly considered a genius [...]"
picrel

>>15952245
this one was phone posted, now I will expand on my ideas
>how do you filter what is relevant from what is not in a book that you have not read?
You are reading because you want knowledge and ability that you don't yet have, it's readily apparent whether the book delivers or not — at least if you are above high school level, you should be far enough in your general education to know what the basic themes of disciplines are — if you are a complete beginner you can feel that you don't understand, that you don't know the symbols, don't understand the language, or that the conclusion seems to come out of thin air rather than from a series of precise syllogisms. Clear signs of your lack of understanding are right before your eyes, and clues on where to find explanations are within the text: if organic chemistry textbook talks about H-NMR integration curves and you don't understand the word and what does the long "S" mean you should look for material related to integration, probably in a math textbook, and if in that math textbook you don't understand what a derrivative or dx or differential is you should look for chapter related to derrivatives, differentation, and so on. If you are more advanced in the subject you should have a clear idea of what you are looking for: a specific reaction mechanism, macromolecular structure, lab technique for measuring the amount of water consumed by a plant per hour, a proof of some math formula; you'll know it when you find it. The golden rule of note taking (in the lab notebooks) is that all of what you write should be legible and clear to a person from a different lab working in a related field (eg. plant biochemistry, human cancer genomics), so that they could replicate your experiments using your notes, same rule applies to all technical and scientific writing.

>>15952447
nice. beautifully put. you have increased my confidence in my own powers. so it appears there is no special, subtle technique. everything boils down to common sense.

one more thing, anon. the word "derivative" has only one "r" in it. i understand chemists do not need to be aware of what differential calculus entails besides their basic kinetics and thermodynamics, but it's nice that you really tried your best! *smiles broadly at you*

>>15952379
Aristotle didn't read. Plato didn't read. Tesla didn't read. Pythagoras didn't read. George Washington didn't read. Aurelius didn't read. Isaac Newton didn't read. They barely even wrote, they spoke as men do. Other, weaker men wrote down their words and read them.

when you read the words of another, you give them control over not only your thoughts and feelings, but you let them define the limits of your reality, tell you what is and isn't possible, what is and isn't true.

a man decides these things for himself.

>>15951222
Read cover to cover (without getting too in depth) to get the general idea of topics it covers, then start with chapters/topics that I find interesting, do those and eventually move onto less interesting things.
This more or less applies to a subject I am familiar with, if it a new unfamiliar subject then start at chapter 1...

>>15952465
>there is an anecdote about tesla spending nights to read Voltaire and then quitting Voltaire forever because his work was too extensive and Tesla never wanted to left books unfinished. also his father Milutin was a priest with an impressive collection of books which helped build the foundation of young Tesla
>Newton is known for spending his entire life reading, studying and writing
>the other examples are probably bullshit too

it is understandable you have some severe mental impairment, some ailment that keeps you from thinking clearly. but try not to project your decrepitude on other people. you are only going to embarrass yourself.

>>15952473
would you still apply the same technique to a 1200-page long book? instead of doing the same thing two times and poorly like a subhuman monkey, I would rather do one thing once and properly for all eternity.

i would have not been so vitriolic in my response had you not made your suggestion so haughtily. get a grip and stop bossing people around if you know jack shit.

>>15952354
I study math. Most math professors are pretty cool people because they are pretty happy.
When it comes to other courses shitty uni requires the professors are usually awful and evil for no reason.
>>15952447
It's over...
well if a low IQ like me can do it then anyone can

>>15952481
>had you not made your suggestion so haughtily.
It's my fault for not being clear, I was not suggesting anything to anyone, I typed quickly and somehow ommited "I" at the very beginning of my post (and when I said "do those", I meant "I do those").

>>15952447
cont.
Too often have I seen notes taken by others (in lab or in class) that is logical gibberish. As Bacon said "Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man." If you writing is exact your mind is exact, as it should. There should be no doubt regarding the meaning of your notes when you read them after months or years. Fermi made indexes in his notebooks, I started making a table of contents and careful diagrams in my notebooks from the beginning of 2nd year of undergrad. Do what you have to to become exact like Fermi, Feynman, Faraday, Monod, ...
Your writing will teach you reading and vice versa, feeding the loop of increasing exactness in your thinking.
>>15952457
I'm not a chemist, just and ESL.
There is no special technique, everything is common sense, because it all is in essence mundane. The excitement or awe is often detrimental. Not that you should not find joy in your work, but you should be weary of the immature emotions that stifle the mind:
> a genius, how did he do it, no one will know because he's a genius!
> this is an arcane and very hard subject, no surprise I don't get what the author says! Guess that's normal!
What you need is mundane everyday practice of clear and precise thinking, after a while you'll start seeing where things don't match and what you lack. As for practical advice I'll say what I say to everyone: write with non erasable ink, write on paper (no laptops or tablets), cross out your mistakes in a way that allows you to easily read what is crossed out (whole process of thinking is important, not just the final "correct answer"), work on your hand writing if it's illegible, write slower than you think you should, write less notes during the lecture than you think you should (if you can't keep up either the lecture is bloated or you are writing too much)

>>15952513
>. There should be no doubt regarding the meaning of your notes when you read them after months or years
That is a skill and most people don't realize that. Not a very difficult or complicated skill but still a skill that requires learning and practise.

>>15952513
this is a good response. precisely what i asked for. see, /sci/, you are not a completely worthless swamp of shit. occasionally someone, not necessarily exhibiting the best command of english, but definitely with a wealth of practical knowledge, will pop up and effort post in these threads.

thank you, anon. some of the things about the very act of writing — pen on paper — were known to me, but you've definitely helped in emphasizing.

>>15952522
Pen and paper is fine but get a phone eith a stylus, if you ever come up an idea on the go and haven't got your notebook, on you, you always have your phone, write your idea down quickly before you forget it!

>>15952530
has it happened to you? what was your revolutionary can't-afford-to-lose idea?

>>15952541
"write, don't read"

>>15952541
One time in particular I was thinking about a problem for about two weeks then suddenly one day I had a revelation, I had something, maybe the key to solving it, and I didn't write it down immediately, I forgot it, that lost idea have always been vague since then.

>>15952557
oh, then it's nothing worth crying about. if you can't remember it, then it's unimportant.

>>15952513
cont.
you probably noticed that a lot of what is written in textbooks is some general trivia on the matter (compared to more specialized texts), that you should not pay much attention too. At most it reminds you that there is more to know out there:
> "Some books are to be tasted, other to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."
Textbooks are modular manuals and should be treated as such. Workbooks — books with exercises and problems — are much better than textbooks, yet are often treated as inferior. As scientists and aspiring scientists understanding nature is our main goal, not solving exercises or marking textbooks as read to stroke our egos.
>>15952521
Yes, and it makes the difference between a pseud and this guy>>15952530 who finds it easier to take his phone everywhere than to have a dedicated small notebook for ideas to carry everywhere.
>>15952522
go and look up photos of notebooks of Fermi, Faraday, Pauling and others if you haven't seen them already, watch the Woodward's lecture on cephalosporin C synthesis and see how carefully he writes the chemistry on the blackboard. That's how real dedicated people study, read and write. Probably one of the worst tragedies of modern world is how disfigured is the view of scientific work in popular media. The culture of careful exactness and precise thinking was replaced with wannabe geniuses and "I didn't have to study at all" guys of people with "techniques for 4.0 GPA" that only brain dead could find useful.
>>15952541
You are a scientists 24h a day, you should think about problems all the time and note any new ideas regarding them so you can expand on them when you have more time. No problem is too small to be worthy of careful thought. If it's easy solve it and be done with it forever, if it's hard think about it and learn.

>>15952568
may i ask you what your specialization is?

>>15952568
>who finds it easier to take his phone everywhere than to have a dedicated small notebook for ideas to carry everywhere
Are you a luddite? A hermit? Do you not take your phone everywhere? Notebook is great but I don't always have it with me but my phone is always near me, it's a nice phone with dedicated stylus and excellent note taking app.

>>15952581
Molecular biology, but I plan on moving to physics department for molecular biophysics for my masters, which these days due to small demand is probably just a specialization within physics major

>>15952585
I have a phone, but only use it for gay porn.

>>15952595
I am so sorry anon.

>>15952585
Skill issue
I take my phone, keys, wallet, small notebook and a slide rule everywhere.

Only women read. They read things like "A Handmaiden's Tale", "A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", or "The Three Body Problem"

men speak or write. they do not read. Do you think Tolkien read books about elves? Did Newton read books about Calculus?

NO

They CREATED these things because they didn't allow other men to control them (aka reading books)

>>15952634
nigger, at this point is clear as day to anybody that you want to keep all the books for yourself. FUCK YOU. Cunt.

>>15952568
But why not use a computer to write notes?

>>15952634

What do you think Newton meant by "standing on the shoulders of giants"? Principia is filled with references of men that came before Newton as well as his contemporaries.

Did Terence Tao read tons of books about Calculus and continued to develop on those works with partial differential equation theory or did he went around trying to "CREATE" calculus all over again?

To create you need to absorb first. Otherwise you'll be stuck at trying to invent a language and die an ooga booga.

You are most likely trolling but I can never be sure.

>>15952657
I also have a computer but for scat porn

>>15952657

He will probably talk about tactile memory and he would be right but it's way easier to maintain your notes on an iPad. You get to do it in your own handwriting (which has been shown to help retrieval afaik) but at the same time it makes it way easier to convert it into texts and feed to LLMs which can help a ton.

>>15952659
Mouth to ear is the most effective way to transfer information. Books are written for the general public, so much information is lost when written down. Reading it is even worse, because now you're translating those written words through yet another filter, yet another perspective. Face to face is how information is best shared, like a parent sharing knowledge with their children. In words, in a book, it's like trying to read a poem that has been translated through several different languages before it arrived in yours. the original meaning is obscure, if not entirely lost.

>>15952659
dude, it's clear as day he is trolling, think about it for a minute. That or he is not into math/physics

>>15952679
Just get the visage of Rudin or Griffiths on your wall and read the contents of the book loudly to yourself. Why do you think so many scientists hung the picture of their mentors, teachers and idols on the wall next to their workdesks? They mastered the art of immersion.

>>15952679
Barkun, is that you?

>>15952679
i prefer mouth to mouth transfer ;^-D

>>15952657
There is something fidgety about electronics that I don't like since it makes me more ADHD-like. There is the question of utility: if you write a lot of math or make diagrams you need a way to make drawings and write formulas, which makes a computer not the best tool unless you want to take notes in paint, and there's the problem of how easy it is to change things in if they are a file. Specifically write with pen that is non erasable, making computer notes non erasable would require some encrypted file format and special software, typical word or text editors don't cut it.
If Sam Hyde ever said anything wise it is that the video editing software made movies worse since now you don't have to think about making cuts or wasting film, everything is on memory cards that can be reused practically forever nullifying the weight of your errors — making you think less. The freedom to change anything unlimited number of times make a computer a worse thinking tool compared to pen&paper.

>>15952679
I would agree with every word if you are talking about philosophy.

But maths and physics textbooks are pretty darn precise and your misconceptions too get sorted out once you work out the practice problems. In my experience with physics, lectures help a lot but you really start to decipher the lecture once you are solving practice problems.

>>15952681
Man twitter has fried my brain. The dudes with Greek statue pfps dish out similar advice all the time.

>>15951222
hottest thread on /sci/ right now
feels good :^)

OP is a faggot, kill yourself!

>>15952694
You know you can save your handwritten notes as a pdf/png or even svg images and just print them?

schizo thread

>>15952694
>I don't like since it makes me more ADHD-like
Yeah, right now especially when I'm studying for my Calc exams I began working with my computer but I just ended up copying and pasting the professor's notes without understanding them, with paper and pen it's too much of a pain in the ass to copy an entire explanation for a therom so you have to understand in order not to snap your wrists

>>15952710
bump

>>15952714
>therom
LMAO

>>15952686
not gonna put posters of random men in my work area, homo

>>15952885
low iq shit, nigger

>>15951222
Maybe read Adler's book: How to read for advice.

>>15953553
>reading a book about reading
can there ever be a lower iq thing to do?

>>15951222
trans lives matter

>>15951222
>how
Sure, we have a Wiki that also covers this:
https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Study_Methods

>>15951222
I make notes of whatever section I need to study and ask ChatGPT about a topic and use it to slowly understand it by asking similar situations I can think of that I DO understand. Made the provosts list twice in a row now so its working pretty well