Noticing that I’m more likely to gravitate strongly toward disciplines once I can place its theory into a historical narrative.
Began to study networking protocols after reading STS-laced histories of the development of TCP/IP and the OSI protocols.
Am now invested in becoming a decent chess player after learning about the succession of schools of chess theory.
Seeing how domain knowledge accretes over time makes it easier to engage fields that would otherwise seem too complex to approach.
@Connor tell me more!
@Navertal As one example, I took a college music theory course that was 80% Italian Baroque music (which is usually pleasant but a bit cliche and repetitive). After spending three months listening to it intensively and doing exercises like composing in Baroque style, I had internalized the musical idiom enough that the genre's cliches just made sense in an incredibly satisfying way, and the little innovations in works by more adventurous composers like Bach actually sounded revolutionary.
@Connor Oh yeah, this makes sense. It sounds so homogenous to the untrained ear, but of course there’s all this particularity and deep meaning once you zoom in on the right areas.
@Navertal yeah. TBH this is the best way to appreciate all pre-1800 music—the early masters were working with a tiny vocabulary of harmonies and instrumental textures, and the leap from Mozart to even a very conservative early Romantic like Mendelssohn is enormous if you’re attuned to it.
@Navertal I'm afraid of investing time into areas that will go out of date. Getting historically grounded feels like it would resolve that fear w.r.t. certain areas.
I feel quite confident studying math or Buddhism, less so around ML or self-help concepts.
@StevenFan that’s a reasonable fear, I think. A fair number of the Al and ML researchers I know and trust emphasize its limitations and the need to treat it as a tool within a larger array.
@Navertal I've noticed this for music genres