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Scott H Young

Writer on learning and author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything; known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

10 books on the record · 19 Dec 2023 – 19 Dec 2023 · @scotthyoung

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

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Beginning to Read by Marilyn Jager Adams

Marilyn Jager Adams's extensive review of the literature concluded essentially the same thing in 1994.

on scotthyoung.com · 19 Dec 2023

liked it

Creativity in Science by Dean Simonton

This book surveys theories of creativity, contrasting four competing explanations: expertise, genius, society, and chance, in offering a model for how creativity works. Simonton's work provides a nice hybrid between the purely anecdotal work of biographers and the data-driven work of experimental scientists.

on scotthyoung.com · 19 Dec 2023

liked it

How Languages are Learned by Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada

To that end, I read a few different books from the field of second language acquisition (SLA) over the summer, and even wrote a review of How Languages are Learned.

on scotthyoung.com · 19 Dec 2023

liked it

How We Reason by Philip Johnson-Laird

I had read Johnson-Laird's original work, Mental Models, last year. It was nice to see an in-depth follow-up on how the theory has developed in the subsequent two decades.

on scotthyoung.com · 19 Dec 2023

loved it

Psych by Paul Bloom

Despite having read a few bookshelves worth of academic psychology texts, I enjoyed Yale professor Paul Bloom's survey of the field. Because understanding psychology cannot be divorced from understanding its history, I enjoyed Bloom's birds-eye view of the field from the past to the present day.

on scotthyoung.com · 19 Dec 2023

loved it

The Republic by Plato

To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Republic. It is both well-written and weird, which puts it above many other famous philosophical books that are too obscure to be easily read.

on scotthyoung.com · 19 Dec 2023

liked it

The Science of Learning Physics by José Mestre and Jennifer Docktor

Mestre and Docktor tackle this challenge by reviewing the large body of literature on learning physics. I plan on writing a full review of their book, which I found to be a helpful summary.

on scotthyoung.com · 19 Dec 2023

liked it

Why Knowledge Matters by E. D. Hirsch

In this 2016 book, Hirsch presents a sweeping curriculum change in French schools as evidence that misguided educational theories are undermining our children's learning.

on scotthyoung.com · 19 Dec 2023

Everything Scott H Young recommends — not just books — on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.