My point is not that one should learn more, but about understanding naturally related to any given claim of fact, whose absence makes it brittle and hollow. This sort of curiosity does apply to your examples, not in a remedial way that’s only actually useful for other things. The dots being connected are not other claims of fact, but alternative versions of the claim (including false ones) and ingredients of motivation for looking into the fact and its alternatives, including more general ideas whose shadows influence the claim. These gears of the idea do nothing for policies that depend on the fact, if it happens to be used appropriately, but tend to reassemble into related ideas that you never heard about (which gives an opportunity to learn what is already known about them).
It doesn’t require learning much more, or about toothbrushes, it’s instead emphasis of curiosity on things other than directly visible claims of fact, that shifts attention to those other things when presented with a given claim. This probably results in knowing less, with greater fluency.
To the extent that I understand what you’re saying, you seem to be arguing for curiosity as a means of developing a detailed, mechanistic (“gears-level” in your term) model of reality. I totally support this, especially for the smart kids. I’m just trying to balance it out with some realism and humility. I’ve known too many people who know that their own area of expertise is incredibly complicated but assume that everything they don’t understand is much simpler. In my experience, a lot of projects fail because a problem that was assumed to be simple turned out not to be.
This is useless in practice and detrimental to being a living encyclopedia, distracting from facts deemed salient by civilization. Combinatorial models of more specific and isolated ideas you take an interest in, building blocks for reassembling into related ideas, things that can be played with and not just taken from literature and applied according to a standard methodology. The building blocks are not meant to reconstruct ideas directly useful in practice, it’s more about forming common sense and prototyping. The kind of stuff you learn in the second year of college (the gears, mathematical tools, empirical laws), in the role of how you make use of it in the fourth year of college (the ideas reassembled from them, claims independently known that interact with them, things that can’t be explained without the background), but on the scale of much smaller topics.
Well, that’s the attempt to channel my impression of the gears/policy distinction, which I find personally rewarding, but not necessarily useful in practice, even for research. It’s a theorist’s aesthetic more than anything else.
My point is not that one should learn more, but about understanding naturally related to any given claim of fact, whose absence makes it brittle and hollow. This sort of curiosity does apply to your examples, not in a remedial way that’s only actually useful for other things. The dots being connected are not other claims of fact, but alternative versions of the claim (including false ones) and ingredients of motivation for looking into the fact and its alternatives, including more general ideas whose shadows influence the claim. These gears of the idea do nothing for policies that depend on the fact, if it happens to be used appropriately, but tend to reassemble into related ideas that you never heard about (which gives an opportunity to learn what is already known about them).
It doesn’t require learning much more, or about toothbrushes, it’s instead emphasis of curiosity on things other than directly visible claims of fact, that shifts attention to those other things when presented with a given claim. This probably results in knowing less, with greater fluency.
To the extent that I understand what you’re saying, you seem to be arguing for curiosity as a means of developing a detailed, mechanistic (“gears-level” in your term) model of reality. I totally support this, especially for the smart kids. I’m just trying to balance it out with some realism and humility. I’ve known too many people who know that their own area of expertise is incredibly complicated but assume that everything they don’t understand is much simpler. In my experience, a lot of projects fail because a problem that was assumed to be simple turned out not to be.
This is useless in practice and detrimental to being a living encyclopedia, distracting from facts deemed salient by civilization. Combinatorial models of more specific and isolated ideas you take an interest in, building blocks for reassembling into related ideas, things that can be played with and not just taken from literature and applied according to a standard methodology. The building blocks are not meant to reconstruct ideas directly useful in practice, it’s more about forming common sense and prototyping. The kind of stuff you learn in the second year of college (the gears, mathematical tools, empirical laws), in the role of how you make use of it in the fourth year of college (the ideas reassembled from them, claims independently known that interact with them, things that can’t be explained without the background), but on the scale of much smaller topics.
Well, that’s the attempt to channel my impression of the gears/policy distinction, which I find personally rewarding, but not necessarily useful in practice, even for research. It’s a theorist’s aesthetic more than anything else.