Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

‘Don’t end up a clone of your thesis adviser,’” he told me. “Take your skills to a place that’s not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.”

Netflix came to a similar conclusion for improving its recommendation algorithm. Decoding movies’ traits to figure out what you like was very complex and less accurate than simply analogizing you to many other customers with similar viewing histories. Instead of predicting what you might like, they examine who you are like, and the complexity is

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education published a report by six scientists and an accomplished teacher who were asked to identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list. All three impair performance in the short term.

I rushed into extremely specialized scientific research without having learned scientific reasoning.

Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle.

Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

They were trying to turn a conceptual problem they didn’t understand into a procedural one they could just execute.

“Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task,”