How To Learn About Everything
Eric Drexler posted about "How to Learn About Everything", explaining a process of immersion to gain a shallow, broad, integrative understanding of the connections between different knowledge domains.
- Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.
- Don’t halt, dig a hole, and study a particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it.
- Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.
- Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic.
- Notice which topics link in all directions, and provide keys to many others. Consider taking a class.
- Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.
I think it applies to more than just science and engineering. This is why, and how, I read Hacker News. I only half understand a lot of information about programming and startup business strategy. But I don't wait to figure out, for instance, virtual environments, before version control systems, or version control before servers, or servers before web frameworks, or frameworks before templating languages, or templating before markup. That way I'd never learn any of them, because a lot of it is connected in kind of a circular fashion. I have found out through the CREM project that in order to use these tools to accomplish anything I care about, they all hang together, which has been quite overwhelming.
Comments
desfontaines on Mar. 9, 2010 12:06 AM
Interesting... my personal favorite start for picking up shitloads of stuff -- kids' books -- isn't there.
matt-arnold on Mar. 9, 2010 12:14 AM
I never would have thought of that.
Can you recommend a good children's book on founding a web startup?
Oh my... now that has to exist. That just has to be made!
desfontaines on Mar. 9, 2010 12:18 AM
Well, I wasn't thinking anything in PARTICULAR. Just lots of stuff in GENERAL. :)
matt-arnold on Mar. 9, 2010 12:27 AM
Suddenly I have a great idea for explaining the Model/Controller/View software architecture to kids, and now I want to do it.
desfontaines on Mar. 9, 2010 12:47 AM
Sweet!
crywolf on Mar. 9, 2010 1:36 AM
Perhaps on a related vein, when I'm trying to understand something (usually computer related), I will read it three times: First, not to understand anything, just to become familiar with where various concepts and terms are mentioned. Second, to try to understand all the various little bits. This will fail, because all the little bits depends on all of the other little bits. But when I get to the third read-through, it all falls into place.
stormgren on Mar. 9, 2010 3:35 AM
Hmm...This is not unlike the way I tend to learn new things.
Perhaps I'm not as warped as I thought I was :)
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