

How To Learn About Everything - parallel
http://metamodern.com/2009/05/27/how-to-learn-about-everything/

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stewbrew

        You learned your native language by immersion, not by swallowing and regurgitating spoonfuls of grammar and vocabulary.
    

I remember a study about language learning that concluded that it's a matter
of age and that the older you get the more efficient you learn by using a
systematic top-down approach. On the other hand, immersion over a longer
period of time doesn't guarantee you make any advancement.

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mbeswetherick
"This knowledge isn’t superficial in a survey-course sense: It is about both
deep structure and practical applications. Knowing about, in this sense, is
crucial to understanding a new problem and what must be learned in more depth
in order to solve it."

I am usually of the school that finds more value in deeply understanding a
single thing than having good knowledge of a lot of things.

When it comes to start-ups and hackers, do you think it's more important to
have a deep knowledge of a few topics or a fair understanding of a lot of
topics? I think it's more beneficial to have the kind of knowledge that the
article described, than a true bare bones understanding of programming.

You don't need to know compiler languages to code the next big thing. It just
gives people an indication to how smart the founders are, which means a lot.

~~~
nadam
"do you think it's more important to have a deep knowledge of a few topics or
a fair understanding of a lot of topics"

I have been thinking a lot about this. My conclusion is that the optimal thing
is somehow both. When I say both, it sounds bullshit, but it is not. I think
the key is to be ABLE to study specific topics deeply, know what is deep
understanding, know what really tight focus is, learn and practice one or two
specific topics very deeply AND with this kind of developed mind, go into lots
and lots of quite diverse topics following your interests and needs. And be
brave to sometimes dig a bit deep into something which no one expected you to
dig into.

So optimally your knowledge should be 'incalculable' by other people. A kind
of interesting, a little bit strange knowledge-portfolio which is not very
common.

TL;DR: Go very deep into something (extremely deep if possible), learn a
little a bit of everything (extremely only the basics about extremely lots of
things) to avoid knowledge holes, and go a little bit deep into unexpected
things to make your knowledge-base incalculabe and interesting.

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personlurking
For me, it's about constantly barraging my brain with new info by reading,
writing, listening and speaking. No matter if it's a new language or any new
subject. Read about it, write about it, listen to people talk about it and
talk about it yourself.

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obtu
I'm not sure this works for things that require a lot of precision and focus,
like understanding proofs of theorems. That's probably part of the “about”
caveat.

