"I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names"
This is a common complaint when learning many subjects, and many teachers don't explain why the names are needed.
Take music theory, it has an insane amount of vocabulary and concepts to assimilate, but if you watch any of the popular music theory videos on YouTube around these days, you get a glimpse of what mastering those terms looks like.
So, extrapolating to other areas, it seems like school needs to do a much better job of explaining the focus on vocabulary. The language of Algebra, the language of Organic Chemistry, the language of Music Theory, etc, etc ... what superpowers does mastering those languages unlock?
To me, watching someone work who already mastered those languages in action can be very inspiring, even if haven't reached that level of understanding yet.
This is entirely off topic, but the way you phrased your comment makes me think you have experience learning music theory. If so, could you share some resources that you found helpful? I've always wanted to learn music theory (and put it to practice), but besides hiring a teacher I could never get solid recommendations of where to start.
Indeed! There is a vast bibliography but starting with a music-school theory book is often really daunting... so searching for something different I found this series from Michael Hewitt [1], there are 3 books, one for theory, one for harmony and one for composition.
Halfway through reading the first book I decided I needed to get better at inputting music to my computer, so I started to learn Reaper (which is a bit like "the emacs of DAWs" :-).
https://www.hooktheory.com/ is also a great practical resource, focusing on numeral analysis of popular music, and the their composition tool is fantastic!
I have a backburner of other resources that I want to eventually cover but I figured that was as good a starting point as any.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/ used to have a lot of rabbit holes that were fascinating, but not sure what the community is like now. From a quick look it could still be a useful place to lurk.
- The Youtube channels 12tone, Sideways, 8-Bit Music Theory and Nahre Sol are my go-tos now that I'm no longer in active learning mode. Music Matters, Adam Neely and Signals Music Studio are also good. There are others in the Youtube sphere too but those are the channels I'm most familiar with.
- Music composition videos and classes also tend to be fairly theory-heavy without advertising it overtly.
> what superpowers does mastering those languages unlock?
Maybe think of it this way: it isn't unlocking the superpowers, it's an ultrafilter. If you aren't capable of performing precise and contextualized recall of trivia, then your engagement with the subject is going to be limited to diletanttery. When I was a biochemist, there were several critical instances when recall of some minor thing that I had learned years or even a decade ago, sometimes even an offhanded comment in a journal club, enabled debugging a situation where there wouldn't have been time to "go to the library" much less even know where to start looking.
I know it's fiction, but think about the show House. Would House have been as effective if he didn't have an encyclopedia of knowledge at his fingertips? You have to be able to not just think about things from first principles BUT ALSO literally have indexable fast-access knowledge.
Since you bring up music theory, in jazz, it's one thing to know the theory of what a 2-5-1 pattern is, but if you don't have it in your fingers, you are not going to be able to make good music, imagine a jazz pianist constantly searching the keyboard for the correct notes.
House was effective because the writers made him that way. The real top people in fields are not walking encyclopedias. They have extremely good grasps of core principles, key findings, relationships between ideas, etc.
Specific names and other specifics that don’t fundamentally affect things are not things they clutter their minds with.
If you don't have committed to memory and immediate recall that "aspartic acid" is a negatively charged amino acid, that has dramatically different chemical properties than cysteine, you won't notice something strange is going on when hundreds of amino acids go by your eyes in a BLAST alignment, that you did offhandedly one day:
That's an easy example. Another one: knowing the atomic mass of nickel in a mass spectrogram and explaining a deviation in a MS fragmentation pattern instead of throwing out the data. Another one: Knowing the mechanism of chen-mapp phosphorylation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7184505_33-Rearrang... and rescuing an otherwise lost synthesis in a group meeting (not published; the downstream results were not otherwise interesting).
Don't discount having raw knowledge at your fingertips.
Encyclopedic knowledge can be a great tool, no question about it! I think of it as memoization for the brain.
It may well turn out to be that some problem you are attacking could be simplified if you only knew that piece of "trivia", but if you don't know it you need to spend some brainpower re-discovering the thing instead of attacking the main problem.
The way I think about the learning / performance is a bit like an RPG game. Encyclopedic knowledge is just another bar to fill in, with the corresponding trade offs.
This is a common complaint when learning many subjects, and many teachers don't explain why the names are needed.
Take music theory, it has an insane amount of vocabulary and concepts to assimilate, but if you watch any of the popular music theory videos on YouTube around these days, you get a glimpse of what mastering those terms looks like.
So, extrapolating to other areas, it seems like school needs to do a much better job of explaining the focus on vocabulary. The language of Algebra, the language of Organic Chemistry, the language of Music Theory, etc, etc ... what superpowers does mastering those languages unlock?
To me, watching someone work who already mastered those languages in action can be very inspiring, even if haven't reached that level of understanding yet.