29. Risk vs. Depth 🔗

Realizing I’ve never actually learned anything non-tactile/physical (like swimming or bike-riding) as a result of explicitly trying to learn it. It’s always been a side effect of something else (like reading for pleasure) or wanting to do or make something.

All my explicit “study” habits suck. I don’t take notes, I rarely go “back to basics” to read foundational “classics”, I don’t do practice exercises unless they are like puzzles for fun (a criterion is satisfied by most math-based skills fortunately). I don’t learn “good form”

I do have what you might call “wild cousin” behaviors to disciplined learning. I repeat good stories I’ve heard. I put a lot of direct quotes and oblique references in my writing. I tend to think about everyday contemporary topics where relevant information is socially cached.

At a macro level, everything I do is unapologetically, even gleefully derivative in some sense. Any value comes from the risk rather than skill or imagination. Eg: using The Office to interpret management theory, without being skilled at either screenwriting or textbook MBA stuff

This is not “making connections across fields” (which requires some depth in to/from fields. Nor is it playing “chess postman” which requires some careful systematic left-brained bridge building. It’s more like shallow right-brained arbitrage.

This is a very lean, differential-diagnosis focused survivalist thinking style that basically surfs the learning already in the environment and/or embeddable in natural work output. A mediocre-small-brain style. It has strengths (speed being big one) but also serious blind spots.

First, it doesn’t work on topics that aren’t simultaneously being worked by lots of other people. Preferably focused types who are likely to miss obvious things that are in peripheral vision or first-order “irrelevant”. So you can’t do far out stuff being worked by like 5 people.

Second, it doesn’t work on things that require skill stacks deeper than 2. An example is building hardware/software integrated things, which is at least about 3 layers deep (physical design, physical fabrication, software). This is an interesting one...worth a <sidebar>

I don’t think I ever made/hacked/repaired anything non-trivial more than 1 layer deep. For eg, I’ve built decently complex model gliders, rigged up electronics layer for stuff with existing hardware/software things, and fixed 1-factor issues (eg pure electrical or pure plumbing)

...but I’ve never made or hacked anything requiring 2 stack layers. Eg full model plane with remote controls. Closest I came was a kit robot but I never got past a few hello-world programs that made it go around in circles. I quit when I couldn’t fix a simple coupled problem...

If you’re curious, I couldn’t get wheel alignment perfect. So an open-loop straight line program would cause a slow turn. I’d have had to either true the steering, compensate in software or design and add a position feedback sensor loop... lost patience, gave up.

Same story in software. Software has both stack levels (source, compiled, environment...) and lifecycle stages (dev/production). I’ve built complex single-level/single-stage things (Matlab basically) but go to 2, and I’ve never gotten beyond hello-world level complexity.

Implication: I only hold 1 context in head at a time and largely surf natural dynamics in that context intuitively, and by learning patterns of “luck”. Go to 2 contexts and intuition breaks, coupled 2-context good luck becomes unlikely, “normal accident” bad luck becomes likely

This is almost the definition of least-effort slacking. The one mitigating factor is that sometimes a context boundary that is taken seriously by others is not actually real so you can exploit a broader single context and seem like a holistic mind-like-water systems thinker.

Example: sociology and management theory are pretty much the same. You need no context switching between them really, just some jargon mapping. Intuition and insight-luck patterns work in nearly seamless ways across them. Ignore the boundary and you’ll look like a genius.

Sometimes you get really meta-lucky and see a really “long” single-context pathway cutting across multiple specialized stack levels/lifecycle stages. Like a wormhole through learning space. Any move you make in this wormhole context looks like magic to disciplined learners.

I think this is what looks like “strategic insight” (coup d’oeil) from the outside. It’s really a cheap exploit in the landscape of other people’s socially embodied institutional ways of knowing, due to improbable concurrences of insubstantial context boundaries. End </sidebar>

Third, it doesn’t work on things that take more time than social-cache-refresh time constants. For example, “blockchain” was in hive mind for a year, so I was having interesting thoughts about it. But serious work on blockchain takes 3+ yrs. So I’m recession-weak on the subject.

If I had to name this thinking/pseudo-learning style given its tricks, strengths, and weaknesses, it would probably be “parasitic”. Low-energy, low-effort, derivative survivalism. Like the grasshopper in ant and grasshopper story.

Occasionally predatory rather than parasitic.

If you find this inspirational/aspirational at some level, curb your enthusiasm. It’s more curse than blessing. There’s something very unsatisfying about this, which is why every year or two I take a run at a “deeper” project that would come easier to disciplined learners.

Hasn’t worked yet, but I’m optimistic I’ll eventually do at least one 2+ layer deep thing in my life that’s more than right-brained arbitrage/surfing or wormhole trickery of environmental learning.