In my first Blog post, I promised you there, I’ll guide you to see the inner-working architecture of human understanding (also called epistemology in classical philosophy), which is the most important Lemegeton to really learn and master any field. In this sense, learning or any other people activities is ultimately understanding. Nowadays with so many excited articles about machine learning, AI, GPT3, etc, I’d like to take a detour to the old fashioned human learning and human intelligence kingdom. It’s still beautiful there… As every expert of any programming language (such as Python) will tell you in private, to master meta-programming is the ultimate holy-grail, as from here a hard cold computer program can change itself, very much like a real person adapts one's own behavior based on self-critique. Without it, any program is just, that, a program in the usual fully-determined imperative control flow sense. Surprisingly, any other field expert will tell you in private the same story, like all the prominent physicists are all metaphysics experts, such as Leibnitz, Mache, Einstein, Feynman, etc, too many to name here. So what does my meta-learning really mean here? Answer: it’s about how to learn to be able to abstract something useful and creative out of the subject matter focused before! It’s about reflection, it’s about transcend…

Dear reader, thanks for reading thus far of this article in this big data era... A while ago I decided my pen name as Double Knot which comes from an interesting mathematical object in highly advanced modern algebraic topology branch I heard when I was in college. I hope you don’t get discouraged as I won’t talk about it anymore at least for now.

In my high school and college years, I remember I was mostly interested in math and physics courses, I used some C, Matlab, and Fortran in some classes, but never took any formal Computer Science courses or real interest, I felt they’re too dry mostly dealing with reading and writing some bits in memory or hard drive mostly only expressible in the futile imperative logic with truth-value gaps per Jørgensen's dilemma and Ross's paradox, while curved spacetime geometrical physics with fixed-end fermion string and mysterious closed-loop free graviton string, plus esoteric advanced math symbols seem much more sexy than any computer language. Compared to homology, Étale cohomology and categorical algebraic symbols, any modern functional programming language and concept (Scala, Julia, Elm, Lisp, Haskell, oh, of course, monads) seem much more straightforward. And the functional calculus framework commonly used in physics everywhere really attracts me, it seems God is like an economist, natural physical laws always follow an optimal functional quantity as if it’s the holy grail. All these are my past learning subjects I still clearly remember.

Now let’s step out of the ivory tower, and wander into the vast work and life domain every person goes through. Here, money and power is much more dominant at play. Implicitly assumed without question, everyone is chasing his or her success proved by the wealth he or she acquired. The learning subjects here are mostly skillset, social communication and engineering. You either proactively try to find and solve a problem for others, or you just follow orders from above to help find and solve a problem for others. And due to heavy competition, you need to have lots and lots of skills and experience to either be a boss, or an employee, or a contractor, a consultant, or whatever hat that calls itself. In this social web of object oriented world, hierarchical position knowledge is key to navigate successfully, much like in an OOP coding paradigm. However, I observed the foundational "success proved by wealth” axiom in this world is highly questionable. Unlike the pure intellectual motivation to tackle an academic problem in ivory tower, here the assumption of wealth acquired by helping other people is seriously controversial, as many services may not truly help people, maybe even a dis-service. For example, in my experience I see many people having to struggle and worry about more things after receiving a paid service. A service producer or ads will always emphasize the benefit side, however, its consumer will still need to go through all those unintended cost side sooner or later.

So what does above mundane life experience of several different learning subjects teach us in common? If we imagine all past learning activities as mirrors, what can be reflected from them? As recorded in various religious books from long time ago, a saint is like a mirror, he or she let’s you see yourself clearly, others make you more confused… An average teacher only shows you how to solve a problem and stops there, the greater one shows you what the deeper problem actually is for various cases you’ll face sooner or later. The story does not end here, wait for my next blog post...