Editing Blog/2025-10-20/Against Note Taking

A recent Hacker News thread was about Andrej Karpathy's advice for success at Stanford. It's got a bunch of advice but what I was particularly struck by is the absence of one piece of advice that is commonly given to students: to take notes in lectures. I had to share [[Blog/2025-01-15/Spatial-Textual_Memory#Place_in_the_Class|my usual position on this]].
{{HackerNews
 | url      = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640454
 | author   = arjie
 | title    = Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)
 | text     = Fascinating. I wondered if this would suggest note-taking in lectures (it doesn't). This is something I never did and then finally I bent to everyone saying it's the most important thing and I did awfully in Algebraic Geometry. I had to return to my old technique of just paying 100% attention with 0% note taking, and then creating short cheat sheets of techniques in LaTeX before the exam.

This is the first time I've come across any college advice that does not mention this and I'm glad for it. I just never got good at note-taking to be able to properly pay attention to the lecture.
 | date     = 2025-10-19
 | score    = 632
 | comments = 190
 | comment = yes
}}
Usually, I find myself in the minority on this, but this time a fair number of people seem to also have the very same issue as me: they are terrible note-takers but are able to pay attention very closely. In fact, what they described seemed exactly like my experience all through my years of schooling: pay attention closely in class, then go work on the material at home. If I tried writing notes, I'd get nowhere. But one guy said something entirely different:
{{HackerNews |url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45642277 |author=bananaflag |title=Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success |text=I never got this idea that taking notes distracts you from listening. To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write (especially in math, where I usually rewrote some proofs on the fly so they were less ambiguous and more easy to check for correctness later).|comment=yes}}
The advice that notes structure your thought is the general advice that people give, and I honestly thought it was a bit bogus. But I doubt that I could have reasonably paid attention to a lecture at the same time as I was rewriting the proof. If I stopped paying attention and had to catch up in thought I might miss the next large section that relied on some crucial insight.

But I did have a very smart chap in the same class who I could totally have believed could have done something like this. And just like the Yasantha in Jeff Bezos's class, this guy's existence convinced me (to my great fortune) that Mathematics research was not going to be my skillset and that I should exit with my Master's degree as fast as possible and find another way through life.

{{Blockquote
|text=Because I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I was a really good student. I got A pluses on almost everything. I was in the honors physics track, which starts out with 100 students. And by the time you get to quantum mechanics, it's like 30. 

So I'm in quantum mechanics. I think this is like junior year. And I can't solve this partial differential equation. It's really, really hard. And I've been studying with my roommate, Joe, who also is really good at math. And the two of us worked on this one homework problem for three hours and got nowhere. And we finally said, we looked up at each other over the table at the same moment. We said, [[wikipedia:Yasantha Rajakarunanayake|Yasantha]]. Because Yasantha was the smartest guy at Princeton. 

And we went to Yasantha's room and we show him this problem. And he looks at it. He stares at it for a while. And he says, "cosine". And I'm like, "what do you mean?" He's like, "that's the answer". And I'm like, "that's the answer?" and he's like "yeah, let me show you". 

So he brings us into his room, he sits us down, he writes out three pages of detailed algebra everything crosses out and the answer is cosine. And I said "Listen, Yasantha, did you just do that in your head?" and he said "No! That would be impossible. Three years ago, I solved a very similar problem. And I was able to map this problem onto that problem. And then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine." 

And that was an important moment for me, because that was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist.
|source=Jeff Bezos<ref name=yasantha/>
}}

Well, lucky me.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=yasantha>
{{cite web |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN1PyNwjHpc&t=1503s
 |title=Jeff Bezos, CEO and Founder, Amazon |website=YouTube |publisher=The Economic Club of Washington, D.C. |date=September 13, 2018 |access-date=October 20, 2025 |time=25:03}}
</ref>
</references>

[[Category:Blog]]