Riley Harris

  • The Chaotic Approach to Learning

    I’ve been thinking about a new approach to learning which I haven’t seen anywhere else, here’s a bare bones sketch. I’ll tell you why it’s exciting at the end because I want to tell you what it is first.

  • Can We Ditch the Myth of Language Fluency?

    Imagine someone taking their friends out in Japan, comfortably conversing and joking with the waiter before ordering for everyone. Are they ‘fluent’? Their friends think so, and perhaps they are until they walk outside to the street and realise, they don’t know how to ask for directions.

  • Trial by fire: My mission to prove every real analysis theorem from scratch

    Proving stuff yourself is hard, and my initial attempts were catastrophic. I wrote one proof that began with a stronger statement than the conclusion I was attempting to draw, rendering the proof useless even in the unlikely case it was otherwise successful. It was not otherwise successful. Jumping through several dodgy implications and logical errors,…

  • Two Approaches to Learning

    Josh Kaufman argues you can learn anything in less than 20 Hours. This seems to contradict research that says it takes (on average) 10,000 hours to master a skill. Josh Kaufman doesn’t mean it takes you 20 hours to master a skill, it just takes that long to get “good enough”. This article explains two…

  • Don’t Learn Latin, Don’t Use Translations, Don’t Be a Hack.

    I recently read my first book in Spanish. To celebrate, I’m reflecting on how I got here. It was an arduous journey and there are many pitfalls to avoid. Three principles guided my way: Don’t be led astray Eliminate the unimportant Go slow to go fast