Created: January 10, 2021
Modified: January 10, 2021
Modified: January 10, 2021
deep understanding
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Which is more useful:
- reading the New York Times every day, or reading John Stuart Mill?
- listening to a current-events podcast, vs listening to an insightful audiobook?
- Is it more useful to read the ML subreddit and a bunch of new ArXiV papers every day, or to work through calculus, linear algebra, and ML textbooks?
- Is it more useful to read a French newspaper, or to visit France?
- Of course what is useful depends on your goals. But it's important to recognize that:
- Every area has foundational ideas, principles, mental models, techniques, and reference points.
- The world is infinitely complex, but a large amount of complexity is generated by the interaction of simple components.
- Many of the dynamics playing out in the world can only be understood as the manifestation of historical, social, or intellectual forces.
- However much raw data you see, it is a fraction of what people everywhere have seen. You will be able to learn a lot more, a lot quickly, by focusing on the lessons that people have abstracted from the data and the concepts they've developed.
- Reading about something is very different from living through it. Watching something is very different from doing it.
- These imply that there's a lot of value in the fundamentals. Read the great philosophers. Read history. Study basic math, physics, chemistry. Write some computer programs. But also live your life. Travel, play sports, make friends, start a business, play an instrument, teach something.
- There is value, and necessity, in reading about current events. But don't confuse novelty with importance. We find newspapers and Twitter feeds addictive; there is always new drama somewhere. This means we spend more time reading them than we should.
- New things also have a social advantage: they form a Schelling point for people's attention. Knowledge of current events is a more natural thing to have in common with other people than knowledge of Marx or of quantum mechanics, and humans are social creatures. So again, we focus on current events more than we otherwise would.
- All of the incentives described in fundamentals are useless for adults apply to keep us away from understanding fundamentals. But most 'adults' in the sense of that post would benefit (intellectually, if not necessarily practically) from being a bit more like kids.
- To learn a subject deeply:
- Learn the basics.
- Learn the history. Understand how the subject in its current form came to be.
- Talk with people about it.
- Follow your curiosity.
- Socially, college classes are useful because they provide an alternative Schelling point: when you meet someone else in the same class, it's natural to talk with them about the subject. I did FRS in college partly because I wanted this experience. But after college, in the real world, you'll need to find your own groups to help you think about fundamentals.
- I should try to create or join a group(s) in which these effects are all common knowledge, so that we can build social patterns around a shared understanding that we want to focus our thoughts on important things.