How To Learn From Other People

How do I learn from other people?

This is a great question! I think the best way to learn from someone is to listen to them. Ask them questions and take the time to genuinely engage with their answers. Show you care about getting to know them, and want to learn from their experiences. Everyone has stories and a testimony, and so many people are willing to share if you will just ask. I also love to read. What is something you are passionate about, and want to understand more deeply? Find blogs or nonfiction books from people who share your passion. Take the time to understand what caused someone to succeed or fail, and look for ways to apply it to your own life. I wish you the best!

How can I learn to value other people's opinions?

You have to start by entertaining the concept that you might be wrong. You can do this by first making it your first priority not to be wrong.If you truly desire to not be wrong, then you will do whatever necessary to find out if you are wrong and if someone else is right.You will be forced to admit the tiniest possibility that you are wrong and they are right if you want to have the tiniest chance that, on those occasions where you do happen to be wrong, you can change your mind and become right.To this end, feel free to tell opinionated people who like to talk about their opinions that they are wrong, and more importantly, why you think they are wrong. As George Bernard Shaw said, “A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.”However, keep in mind the possibility that you are the one that is wrong, and remember to always follow Marcus Geduld’s Rules of Order so as not to so piss off the person in question that they never get around to giving you the information that you need in order to determine if you are wrong.And furthermore, try to keep the conversation focused on the facts and evidence and underlying values in support of the opinions in question. Don’t get bogged down arguing about the definitions of words or minor outlying details which wouldn’t actually affect your understanding of the major issue at hand.Finally, analyze your own opinions, even when you’re alone, with an eye to convincing yourself that they are self-serving as well. If you can’t prove that at least one of your opinions is, you aren’t trying hard enough to change your mind.Note that a self-serving opinion is not necessarily wrong. Believing that closing myself in the garage with the car running will kill me is both self-serving and true. Nonetheless, the self-serving opinions are the first ones you should be questioning—they have an above-average chance of being wrong.

Why don’t people learn from other people’s mistakes, and make the same mistakes when they knew the consequences the whole time?

Experience is the best teacher, not words. Knowledge of someone else's mistakes is an abstract in your mind. The memory of your own mistakes contains neural links to emotions, sounds, smells, and other details. making mistakes on your own produces an experience that once mastered, allows your brain to be flooded with dopamine. After the first time this happens your body knows that to succeed after a failure makes you feel good.

How can a person learn by observing other people?

I am pretty sure that one cant just get "THE" idea of opening whiskey bottle by himself. ;)we all learn new things from people every day; every time we talk to them its just we don't give them credit for that. :pGalileo said:-You should not expect a "simplex algorithm" as an answer ! its just an automatic process!Scientists are trying to develop auto-learning codes for AI ROBOTS. just learn that code for better understanding of the subject. Else you can just have a "open minded approach" towards everything.

Why is it so hard for us to learn from other people's mistakes?

Because we think we're better than them.There's just no way we're ever going to make the same mistakes. We always think we're better than someone else, even when we don't openly admit it. That doesn't make us bad people, it's just part of human nature. We believe we can succeed where others have failed, so we don't take their failure seriously, and refuse to examine it closely.Because when somebody fails, we tend to see it as part of their destiny.When we reflect on someone's mistakes, we are really looking back into the past. We tend to take things that have already happened as irreversible, like this is how it was always supposed to be. We can't comprehend a possible alternative, so we can't accept that someone could have done something that would have lead to a different result.Because understanding what went wrong is always harder than understanding what went right.Life has too many variables. It's tough to assign the cause of a particular outcome to a specific action, especially when something goes wrong. Successes are always easier to explain, as if there's some magic recipe that irrevocably leads to the desired result. It never works that way of course, but there's an allure to thinking that everything is as simple as that. That way we can do it too. Failure is harder to understand, because it's hard to construct a concrete path amongst all the past events that contributed to the result at hand.Because we believe in luck far too much.Some people thing that it's all a matter of good fortune. Some get rich because it favors them, and others remain forever poor because it's against them. They don't need any other explanation for why the world is the way it is. They're simply content to play their odds.Because we need to believe that things will work out for us.This is a question of faith. We need to believe that everything will turn out all right in the end. Humans are optimistic by nature, because we wouldn't be able to deal with the hardships of life any other way. So even though someone has failed before our very eyes, we still think it's possible for us to succeed in their stead. Hope is always necessary, though sometimes hurtful.

Is modifying other people's code a good way to learn?

Yes, if you do it right. No, if you do it wrong. Others have covered the right way so let me discuss a little about the wrong way: basically, you don't learn anything by cut-and-pasting and running random code that you don't really understand, even if you modify it a little so that you feel like you are programming. A lot of beginning programmers are way too obsessed with online tutorials. The problem with tutorials is thatAnybody can post anything on the internet, because of this most tutorials suck. Most tutorial authors have no business trying to mentor others because they do not really understand the technology they are explaining. Beginning programmers aren't experienced enough to distinguish between good tutorials and bad tutorials. When you learn a programming language from a published book, however, you can assume a minimal level of competence because the book will have been vetted to some degree by the publisher.These days it is very easy to run some code in some tutorial for some language or framework with little understanding of what one is really doing. So easy that true beginners can develop a weird view of what programming is and what results they can reasonably expect from their level of development and understanding as a programmer. Because of this, modifying others' code can be a bad way to learn if you are doing it to avoid learning the absolute basics such as learning to write, completely on your own, very simple and very un-glamorous applications.For example,  if you want to learn C#, it is way better to work your ass off and bash your head against the wall to get a crappy C# guess-a-number game up on the screen  than it is to run someone else's C# + Unity 3rd person shooter and modify it by changing the color of the sky box.