One common advice is that you shouldn’t just passively read nonfiction, you should argue with it and try to push whatever it presents further or try to come up with counterexamples.
Keeping a private journal about stuff you read and think about might help. Writing things down forces you to make your ideas more explicit. Trying to summarize what a book or an article says will make you engage with it more. Exactly how much engagement a given text warrants is a hard problem.
Get comfortable with frustration. Deep learning something is much slower than reading about it, and you will be confused about it in the meantime. Assume that everyone goes through this but doesn’t talk about it much. People who seem to know something very well have had a compulsion to keep digging at it even though it was initially confusing.
Choosing which confusing thing to keep engaging with and which to discard as nonsense is not easy beyond some commonly recognized nonsense clusters, but peer reviewed mathematicians and physicists tend to have a better than average track record in producing confusing but useful stuff.
Being able to get really interested in some big questions that have some meaningful scientific approach to them, like “how can living things do all the stuff they do if they’re just built from atoms” or “what kind of Earth-based creatures could keep living and where after the sun has gone out in a couple of billion years” will help you get some direction at looking into a large amount of stuff with some purpose in what you want to get out of it. Reading things just for general erudition is great too, but the choice of things to start studying can get quite overwhelming. Reading more will also help you come up with more interesting questions, so try to make this a cycle instead of trying to come up with the perfect objective all at once.
One common advice is that you shouldn’t just passively read nonfiction, you should argue with it and try to push whatever it presents further or try to come up with counterexamples.
Keeping a private journal about stuff you read and think about might help. Writing things down forces you to make your ideas more explicit. Trying to summarize what a book or an article says will make you engage with it more. Exactly how much engagement a given text warrants is a hard problem.
Get comfortable with frustration. Deep learning something is much slower than reading about it, and you will be confused about it in the meantime. Assume that everyone goes through this but doesn’t talk about it much. People who seem to know something very well have had a compulsion to keep digging at it even though it was initially confusing.
Choosing which confusing thing to keep engaging with and which to discard as nonsense is not easy beyond some commonly recognized nonsense clusters, but peer reviewed mathematicians and physicists tend to have a better than average track record in producing confusing but useful stuff.
Being able to get really interested in some big questions that have some meaningful scientific approach to them, like “how can living things do all the stuff they do if they’re just built from atoms” or “what kind of Earth-based creatures could keep living and where after the sun has gone out in a couple of billion years” will help you get some direction at looking into a large amount of stuff with some purpose in what you want to get out of it. Reading things just for general erudition is great too, but the choice of things to start studying can get quite overwhelming. Reading more will also help you come up with more interesting questions, so try to make this a cycle instead of trying to come up with the perfect objective all at once.