For what it’s worth, this is very true for me as well.
I’m also reminded of a story of Robin Hanson from Cryonics magazine:
Robin’s attraction to the more abstract
ideas supporting various fields of interest
was similarly shown in his approach – or
rather, lack thereof – to homework. “In the
last two years of college, I simply stopped
doing my homework, and started playing
with the concepts. I could ace all the
exams, but I got a zero on the homework…
Someone got scatter plots up there to
convince people that you could do better
on exams if you did homework.” But there
was an outlier on that plot, courtesy of
Robin, that said otherwise.
Idea: learn by making conjectures (math, physical, etc) and then testing them / proving them, based on what I’ve already learned from a textbook.
Learning seems easier and faster when I’m curious about one of my own ideas.
For what it’s worth, this is very true for me as well.
I’m also reminded of a story of Robin Hanson from Cryonics magazine:
Source
How do you estimate how hard your invented problems are?