This is basically math (and computer science) education. On one hand, some parts are probably not very useful. On the other hand, some people expect that teachers will defend every single step along the way by explaining how specifically this tiny atom of knowledge improves the student’s future life. No, I am not preparing a PowerPoint presentation on how knowing that addition is associative and commutative will make you rich one day.
funnily enough, my experience has been almost entirely from the other direction—almost everything I know is from working directly on things I care about, and very little is from study. one of the reasons behind this shortform was trying to untangle why people spend lots of time studying stuff and whether/when it makes sense for me to study vs simply to learn by doing
I think it is good to use your goals as a general motivation for going approximately in some direction, but the opposite extreme of obsessing whether every single detail you learn contributes to the goal is premature optimization.
It reminds me of companies where, before you are allowed to spend 1 hour doing something, the entire team first needs to spend 10 hours in various meetings to determine whether that 1 hour would be spent optimally. I would rather spend all that time doing things, even if some of them turn out to be ultimately useless.
Sometimes it’s not even obvious in advance which knowledge will turn out to be useful.
This is basically math (and computer science) education. On one hand, some parts are probably not very useful. On the other hand, some people expect that teachers will defend every single step along the way by explaining how specifically this tiny atom of knowledge improves the student’s future life. No, I am not preparing a PowerPoint presentation on how knowing that addition is associative and commutative will make you rich one day.
funnily enough, my experience has been almost entirely from the other direction—almost everything I know is from working directly on things I care about, and very little is from study. one of the reasons behind this shortform was trying to untangle why people spend lots of time studying stuff and whether/when it makes sense for me to study vs simply to learn by doing
I think it is good to use your goals as a general motivation for going approximately in some direction, but the opposite extreme of obsessing whether every single detail you learn contributes to the goal is premature optimization.
It reminds me of companies where, before you are allowed to spend 1 hour doing something, the entire team first needs to spend 10 hours in various meetings to determine whether that 1 hour would be spent optimally. I would rather spend all that time doing things, even if some of them turn out to be ultimately useless.
Sometimes it’s not even obvious in advance which knowledge will turn out to be useful.