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Ask HN: I'm interested in so many disciplines, but what can I do with that?
444 points by samh748 on April 6, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 314 comments
A couple of years back I started dabbling in the social sciences and humanities (my background is in ecology / evolutionary biology), and became interested in one discipline after another. From psychology to history of science to anthropology and sociology, to economics and politics, to philosophy and religious studies and cultural studies, etc.

I find it intrinsically motivating to move from ignorance slowly towards understanding. I love reading textbooks to learn basic concepts and looking through academic titles just to swim in their ideas.

While I loved university, I won't be able to handle the demands of formal schooling (especially not while raising a family). I also wouldn't want to do any advanced research degrees as I have no patience in studying a small set of problems (I tried it for science and it was horrendous).

While I have no issue just continuing to explore these subjects privately, I feel like something is missing. I feel like I want to do something more tangible with this breadth of interests, but I'm coming up empty in terms of ideas. I like writing and can imagine having some sort of blog, but that's seems so cliche?

Any suggestions? Perhaps examples of something others have done with their broad interests?

What does one do with an intellectual life other than swimming through intellectual content?




I'm very similar and would just give you two pieces of advice: (1) buy books compulsively and don't do your research predominantly online, and (2) make sure you write often, whether or not you publish your work or keep it to yourself. I think the latter is the most important advice for those trying to pursue an intellectual path outside of academia -- if you don't develop a habit of writing, you aren't really synthesizing what you've learned and developing your thought. Don't worry if the quality is not great to begin with (and certainly don't worry that it seems cliched).

The other thing I would suggest, if your career and family would manage, is spending time working in the UK. It's very easy to get a visa if you're involved in the tech industry and their higher education system for MA/MS degrees and PhDs is very different than the US, both more affordable and better suited towards working life. In the US, the thought is that if you're doing a PhD, say, it's a full-time professionalized pursuit under the assumption you will be a professor; in the rest of the world, a PhD is essentially an apprenticeship in writing under a mentor for however long it takes you, often with no aim (i.e. career) other than that writing itself.

Personally, I've alternated between highly-paid years working in the tech industry and years studying or writing without employment to great personal satisfaction (and managed to help publish a few scholarly anthologies that wouldn't have happened without someone who didn't need to rely on academic grants etc).


> In the US, the thought is that if you're doing a PhD, say, it's a full-time professionalized pursuit under the assumption you will be a professor; in the rest of the world, a PhD is essentially an apprenticeship in writing under a mentor for however long it takes you, often with no aim (i.e. career) other than that writing itself.

Couldn't disagree more with all of these statements.


Very insightful comment. Would you mind to explain why you disagree?


Because every single statement is wrong.

> In the US, the thought is that if you're doing a PhD, say, it's a full-time professionalized pursuit

You're still a student, still taking classes.

> under the assumption you will be a professor;

Simply not true, you could pursue all sorts of jobs.

> in the rest of the world

Do I really need to comment that? Hint: outside the US border, there is more than one country. Germany alone has 16 different educational systems.

> a PhD is essentially an apprenticeship in writing

No, it's about research.

> under a mentor for however long it takes you,

Limited to 3 years e.g. in France or Italy.

> often with no aim (i.e. career) other than that writing itself.

Man, that's just bullshit, I don't even know where to start.


I read your post in good faith and respond in kind. There are certainly very important details I did not elaborate in a quick post, but I assume you understand that the question under consideration is how someone pursuing a full-time career might partake in (non-STEM) higher academic degrees. While I regret using the expression “rest of the world”, I don’t believe it’s just hyperbole to say that this is easier in Europe.

You are correct that people pursue different paths after US PhDs. However, as you say, a US PhD contains heavy course work and (outside STEM, where I have few data points since most researchers I knew dropped out to work for startups/FAANG) the average full-time program duration is only going up. There are exceptions of course, but admissions are centered around a personal scholarly narrative rather than a particular project and pricing is generally under the expectation of grant funding. Again, there are further details we could write books about, but I don’t think this is far from a general picture of US PhDs in the humanities and social sciences.

In Europe, MAs and PhDs are separated as many have noted. I know most about the UK context, where MAs are affordable and can be taken part-time, completed in two years with one class a semester. PhDs, which are research only (I agree with the you and would indeed change “writing” to “research” if I wrote the post again), can also be done part-time over eight years for a very nominal cost (about 5k a year for an international student). Systems have become more standardized in the EU after the Bologna accords towards the more professionalized three year track, but I’ve known PhD students in Germany to take 10+ years writing their dissertations. Unless policies have changed in the past few years, the same goes for France.

Again, comparing post-graduate education between US and EU, let alone between EU countries, is a complex topic. I have attempted only to show that there is a substantial regional difference and that, at least outside STEM, the EU system is more accessible for those with full-time careers, who do not plan to work in academia.


> I read your post in good faith and respond in kind.

Sure, sounds good. Let's do this!

> I don’t believe it’s just hyperbole to say that this is easier in Europe

You haven't brought any evidence to the table except your personal opinion, which is, as you notice yourself, often only crudely argued in your post.

> However, as you say, a US PhD contains heavy course work and (outside STEM, where I have few data points since most researchers I knew dropped out to work for startups/FAANG)

It's still pretty light compared to what you do at many European universities up to the MSc level. Hence less (or no) course work in many European universities after your MSc.

> the average full-time program duration is only going up.

Ok.

> There are exceptions of course, but admissions are centered around a personal scholarly narrative rather than a particular project and pricing is generally under the expectation of grant funding. Again, there are further details we could write books about, but I don’t think this is far from a general picture of US PhDs in the humanities and social sciences.

So far I don't see any contradiction to what I wrote.

> the more professionalized three year track

You still haven't discussed what you even mean with 'professionalized'. Is a non-three-year degree unprofessional?

> I’ve known PhD students in Germany to take 10+ years writing their dissertations.

Absolutely, many of them in full time positions doing that research.

> Unless policies have changed in the past few years, the same goes for France.

My information is different.

> agentcoops 8 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: Ask HN: I'm interested in so many disciplines, but...

I read your post in good faith and respond in kind. There are certainly very important details I did not elaborate in a quick post, but I assume you understand that the question under consideration is how someone pursuing a full-time career might partake in (non-STEM) higher academic degrees. While I regret using the expression “rest of the world”, I don’t believe it’s just hyperbole to say that this is easier in Europe. You are correct that people pursue different paths after US PhDs. However, as you say, a US PhD contains heavy course work and (outside STEM, where I have few data points since most researchers I knew dropped out to work for startups/FAANG) the average full-time program duration is only going up. There are exceptions of course, but admissions are centered around a personal scholarly narrative rather than a particular project and pricing is generally under the expectation of grant funding. Again, there are further details we could write books about, but I don’t think this is far from a general picture of US PhDs in the humanities and social sciences.

In Europe, MAs and PhDs are separated as many have noted. I know most about the UK context, where MAs are affordable and can be taken part-time, completed in two years with one class a semester. PhDs, which are research only (I agree with the you and would indeed change “writing” to “research” if I wrote the post again), can also be done part-time over eight years for a very nominal cost (about 5k a year for an international student). Systems have become more standardized in the EU after the Bologna accords towards the more professionalized three year track, but I’ve known PhD students in Germany to take 10+ years writing their dissertations. Unless policies have changed in the past few years, the same goes for France.

> Again, comparing post-graduate education between US and EU, let alone between EU countries, is a complex topic.

I know that; you're the one who's presenting it as simple.

> I have attempted only to show that there is a substantial regional difference

By 'equalizing' 96% of humanity as 'the same'?

> and that, at least outside STEM, the EU system is more accessible for those with full-time careers, who do not plan to work in academia.

You keep claiming that, but you haven't shown anything.


I’m mostly familiar with STEM PhD’s, and do not have one. However, my understanding is coursework is over once the PhD starts and you’ve earned a masters. You’re in the lab doing research on your thesis, and often teaching classes.


That's not accurate. 'ABD' (all but dissertation) [1] is an an important milestone because you are not typically done with coursework when starting out (in the US).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_but_dissertation


Not the parent commenter, but I agree with the sentiment. The selected portion of the earlier comment has multiple pieces that I disagree with: 1) A PhD isn't about writing, and 2) you are not expected to become a professor once you get a PhD in the US.

A PhD isn't really about writing, it's about research. Writing is merely the means of demonstrating that you know how to do research. The way that you break something down involves finding a gap in understanding or a portion of a problem that has not been addressed. Then you find an insight that leads to potential solutions to address the gap. Then you run experiments based around the insight. It is fundamentally a way of thinking, not a way of writing. That's why it's a Doctorate of Philosophy. The actual topic that you cover for your thesis is not as important as the demonstration that you know how to think about research. It's moderately unlikely that you will be working on the same problem in industry.

It's commonplace, at least in engineering programs, to ask whether you're going to go into industry or academia. Research positions in industry typically go to PhDs or Masters with a lot of experience. It is much harder to break into the research world without a PhD in the US. So I believe the original statement:

> a full-time professionalized pursuit under the assumption you will be a professor

is overly specific. Your future could be a professor, a researcher/scientist, or an entrepreneur.


Yes, completely agreed with your corrections. Research is really the term I should have used and, as I clarified in a response above, it’s certainly true that, especially in STEM, there are at least industrial and academic tracks.

I would just clarify that my only intention was to address the particular case of someone currently working in tech who would like to additionally pursue non-STEM studies for their own sake. In that case, rare but that I wish were not so, the part-time, dissertation-only PhD programs of many European nations (Germany and the UK in particular) are, on average, a better fit.


> part-time, dissertation-only PhD programs

It's just getting worse and worse. I believe you're trying to argue in good faith but maybe you should just stick to stuff you know about.

There is nothing about 'dissertation only' that makes these programs 'part time'. I'd argue that a good German or French university (I would guess the UK too, but I know less about that system) has more comprehensive and more stringent coursework to the MSc level than most US universities have for their PhD level. They don't do additional coursework because they're 'done'. Talk to those PhD students (and their advisors) about whether they consider that work 'part time'.


My last response to you as you’re obviously not arguing in good faith. The sentence that offended you is very simple. PhD programs in the UK are almost universally dissertation-only. While full-time you are expected to finish in three to four years, you can enroll part-time and finish in eight. The latter path is intended for those who are self-funded and typically already working full-time in whatever profession. An MA or MSc, with as or more stringent coursework than in the US, would be required in either case, but the MA can also be completed part-time. Look at the website of almost any English PhD program.

Again, my only argument is that the EU offers more options for advanced studies alongside another career than the US, which is something I have firsthand experience with.


What I do think is true:

In UK / Germany, a PhD can carry more of an apprenticeship feel with higher pay, compared to a US PhD where you are working for very little money compared to what you might make using your undergrad degree in industry.

But I share your disagreement that US PhD is intended to only lead to academia - it seems like it as often leads to:

- Paying ones way through grad school (you get a masters / course work out of it too). Dirty secret: you can bale on your PhD with a masters

- Corporate research (pays as well as anything)

- Corporate engineering job in environment where deep expertise is valuable

There's a pay bonus to having a PhD (at least in robotics) but the opportunity cost vs working in industry indicates to me that getting a PhD just for the credential / higher pay is not a good idea. Do it because you love to have more time to learn deeply and to conduct research. And know you have a lot of options should you want to go into industry - at any time - during your PhD if you drop out, or after.

(I say all this as someone without a PhD who's been working in research labs and among PhDs at companies for a while).


Agree with all said here, but a small caveat with PhDs in the UK – from my understanding, admissions can be very difficult for those not living in the UK (purposefully biased towards UK citizens). However, getting into a one year Master's program in the UK or Netherlands seems pretty feasible, and might get you a taste of what getting a PhD is like without too much commitment.


I'm not so sure. A Masters program is often affiliated with the PhD program (both being part of the graduate school) in many STEM fields, and you do substantial research as part of the degree (unless you go for a course-based MEng).

Masters degrees in Europe tend to be affiliated with the Bachelors program - and they're often administered by the same people - as part of the Bologna system, and it's heavily course-based even while there might be some projects in it.


In the UK at least, MA/MS degrees are largely autonomous from either PhD or BA programs. They indeed are predominantly coursework-based alongside a research component, but typically offer a part-time option that is entirely manageable alongside full-time work. It’s a very competitive market and quality varies wildly, but it’s often possible to do an MA there in a discipline you may not have studied as an undergraduate — I’ve known several people who, over their working life, picked up numerous post-graduate degrees in multiple disciplines (even for an international student, we’re talking about 5-6k per year part-time).


> It's very easy to get a visa if you're involved in the tech industry

I'm interested in more info on THAT!


There are multiple paths, but the easiest is what is called an intra-company transfer. Basically after a year working for a company that has an office in the UK you can easily get a visa that will allow you to move overseas and work for that office, bringing family etc. As an engineer at even a medium-sized high growth startup, there are many opportunities to switch offices in this manner and I’d highly recommend it, even if you aren’t interested in studying.


https://technation.io/visa/


I took the "quiz", it said i was not eligible. It did not say why. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But you think it's very easy? I wonder what I'm missing.

Other brief googling research.... it might require you to be earlier in your career (first five years?) than I am?


It's a scam.


say more?

(Also, it looks like it may not in fact be very easy to get a UK visa simply by being a software engineer?)


It's not just that the criteria they publish is incredibly ambiguous, but they will make decisions based on different, secret criteria.

For example, while not stated anywhere, there seems to be an expiration date of five years for anything you list.

And, yes, there doesn't seem to be a good UK visa for software engineers.


Don't quit your day job - ya gotta pay the rent. And in the meantime, if you gain satisfaction from satisfying your curiosity about myriad things, go with that. It doesn't have to have an end or a greater purpose. Everybody you know has a head filled with things they'll never "usefully apply" to the greater world around them: it's a fact of life. So if you end up on your deathbed with nothing having really clicked for you - no celebrity, no fortune - then that's how it goes. There is always your family - don't screw that up. The world's a mess and so are most of the people in it so don't sweat it. Sturgeon's Law applies. But by all means gather friends around you with whom you can have civilized, intelligent conversation - it's important.


Seconded. As you grow older you may find that you actually did lift some of the subjects to a "marketable level". For example, I'm now 40, studied molecular biology but my dedication to my home server, HN and tech podcasts is now paying dividends because I can talk with the big boys about infra-as-code, higher level system architecture and software development. This is really nice as the healthcare company I work for is transforming more towards IT and away from the lab. It also helps me in talking to oncology professionals about their IT woes.

But my formal education always payed the bills and I did enjoy it (although I really wanted to move away from the lab and for as long as I can remember I enjoyed the data analysis parts more than the cell-culture/lab parts. I can still remember starting where I work now, 12 years ago, and saying: I want to get out of the lab! And my manager back then replying: But you have been educated and hired to be in the lab, start there, we'll see where it goes...).

Yes I like philosophy, economics, politics and math too, but I'll leave that for birthdays and late nights at conferences, keep it at the cocktail level so to speak (and watch some Stand-up Maths and 3Blue1Brown, read some Yuval Noah Harari).

One has to specialize in some things to make money. I always tell my kids: You need to learn a trick that your are better at than others so someone will pay you to do it. Then you can pay others to do things you find boring or difficult. Of course you want to focus on something you find fun. If they get older I'd recommend them to keep consciously thinking about what gives them energy and what drains it. It's what my career coaches always told me (I was fortunate enough to work at a company that supplied coaches to everyone). Is it really more complex than that?

My tip would be to look for a company where you get the opportunity to "transform" (a large company's research department for example?), and then to sometimes just give it a year when you don't like your current position. Talk to people, go to conferences, try to learn if there is work out there with the right balance of old vs new for you.


What a great answer! I have similar questions as OP in my head. Would like to have a return-on-investment on my following of technical or philisophical blogs or reading books about it. Or on what I learned about my Arduino hobby projects. But my formal education combined with practical experiences is the trick that pays the bills, even though it is often hard or boring. The rest of knowledge makes great conversations at the coffee machine or at a party.


So you're working in bio but yearning for IT? I'm almost the opposite. IT pays the bills, but I wish I was in evolutionary biology.


Evolutionary biology as a profession is probably difficult to be a bill payer, it's afaik exclusively an academic exercise. Sure they need IT people (for bioinformatics, genome informatics, data science, etc) but you are almost 100% certain to be entering the academic "rat race". Which can be nice, if you're into it.

You could make a start by offering your IT skills to an evolutionary biology professor? Why not invite yourself for a coffee? Biology is IT-ifying at a very rapid pace (I sequenced 200 basepairs in one experiment in 2003, last week we did 120.000.000.000 on our midrange NG sequencer, the human brain is pretty useless in dealing with that raw data.)

Oncology has aspects of evolutionary biology, every tumor is in a mini evolutionary arms race with the host and its defenses, and Hospital Informatics is booming. It's an interoperability mess, they are struggling to "unlock their own data", let alone collaborate effectively. People with the right skills and fitting interests (like evolutionary biology) are really needed. But target the research side of things, or you end up what we sometimes call a "data plumber", you're just struggling to bring data from many legacy systems together when the professor or MD/PhD student asks for it... I heard from Data Scientists that are lured in and realize they are employed as Data Engineers. Which can be nice, if you're into it. But it's far away from biology. You could also go for healthcare companies like Illumina, Roche, Sophia Genetics, Philips, Siemens, etc. They all have hospitals as customers.

Anyway, I guess once you in the right environment you can start to move in small steps towards preferred positions, say you start as a data engineer but work your way up the IT chain and soon you're talking to Oncology professionals trying to understand their problems. But give yourself 5-10 years I'd say, it's not something you can do fast, you have to prove yourself at every little step.


Thanks for the thoughtful response! But I'm actually not interested in the computational side of biology, it might be a way in but I really don't find IT interesting, it just happen to be very lucrative, so as soon as I can I want to escape.

Academia is where I want to end up actually, planning to pivot when I can afford it. Not too far off now!


Cool, biology is a very nice field to be in, good luck! Beware of the "guy that can fix the printer"-label (happened to me), just play dumb, don't let them know you're good with computers ;)


These domains are not mutually exclusive. Have a look at evolutionary algorithms.


The thing is I DON'T want to do anything related to computers, it's just a good way to make money.


I'd add to that that you might want to find yourself a part-time job, or work as a contractor, which would free up time to explore your other interests. You don't need to get all your life's fulfilment from your day job (ideally some, of course but to expect all from your day job seems a fallacy to me).


[flagged]


Very sad way of seeing the world and experiencing life imho. Sounds like some very traumatic past experiences that are the exception not the norm. things can definitely be much better


Sorry to burst your bubble but marriage regret is the norm past age 35. One of the canned responses to going your own way is always "who hurt you".


Most marriages that are first marriages for both partners end in death. Doesn't sound like there's a lot of regret there. People want to stay married. Otherwise they wouldn't.


In the US, researchers estimate that 41% of all first marriages end in divorce [1]. I guess it's technically true that divorces are in the minority, but it does sound like there's a lot of regret there.

[1] https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/


As someone who divorced, it doesn't mean that I regret my marriage. It didn't work out but that doesn't mean that we didn't also have good times or that the bad outweigh the good and from other friends who divorced, it doesn't seem that I'm the only one.


Divorce doesn't mean regret though. You can have a wonderful time with a partner and then decide the you want something else later, at a different point in life.


The website lists a breakdown of common reasons given for divorce:

- Lack of commitment 73%

- Argue too much 56%

- Infidelity 55%

- Married too young 46%

- Unrealistic expectations 45%

- Lack of equality in the relationship 44%

- Lack of preparation for marriage 41%

- Domestic Violence or Abuse 25%

(Respondents often cited more that one reason, therefore the percentages add up to much more than 100 percent)

All of those seem like regretful reasons to me. There's no evidence that unregretful reasons are a significant factor in divorces (even anecdotally I've never heard of this, but if you know one then I'd find that pretty interesting). Still sounds like there's a lot of regret out there.


Yes and no. You can have plenty of commitment for 5 years, and then you feel like doing something else and your commitment decreases. Infidelity doesn't mean the whole relationship has been bad.

My point is, there is an expectation that a happy marriage lasts your whole life, and while there is nothing wrong with a marriage like that, it is not the only happy solution. You can have a relationship end without regretting ever going into it.


I don’t regret any of the relationships I’ve been in. They’ve all made me into the person I am now, and I’m sure that at the time, starting and ending them made the most sense to me.


Sure, the failure of a relationship doesn't mean the relationship had no value, but the expectation that a happy marriage lasts your whole life is the very foundation of marriage. "I was committed for 5 years and then I wasn't" is as affirming to a marriage as "I honored your warranty for 5 years and then I didn't" is to a lifetime warranty. If you just wanted to be in a relationship with someone that realistically lasts 5 - 10 years, you don't marry them.

Every aspect of marriage hinges on it not ending before death. All religions explicitly spell that out one way or another. Religion aside, legally every government imposes life-changing financial penalties for ending it that way. The main reason governments do this is because culturally it was very common for the wife to stop working or stop pursuing a career in a marriage due to the implied commitment the husband has to the wife, but if the wife knows that the relationship has a 5 year clock then she would behave differently. Married couples have children due to the implied permanence of their relationship, if a 5 year expiration date was known upfront it would change behavior because it's well known that divorce is damaging to children.

If I buy something called the Forever Car that's very expensive but promises in return to never break down, and then it breaks down in the middle of an interstate trip...I guess that doesn't invalidate all the miles the Forever Car got me through, but it certainly calls into question the value proposition of the Forever Car. I may not regret that I bought a car but I certainly wouldn't have gotten a Forever Car. I would definitely say that a Forever Car that doesn't go the distance has something very wrong with it because it doesn't deliver what it promises.


I feel like "Married too young" is not like the others, I mean, something else is under that reason, perhaps one of the others. Because what is too young? Who decides all of a sudden "You know what, this is all great but we married too young, I'm out."


You're presuming that the small majority in that subset , are not just choosing to silently suffer until death , and this could be for a number of reasons - as it is more socially acceptable, one side has got stuck with kids, they co-own property, share bank accounts, renting in cities is too expensive without a partner. Divorce is expensive (its not called divorce rape for nothing) and marriage is an extremely difficult government contract to exit from cleanly.


Sure I read a statistic that roughly half of "happy", long term marriages are, in fact, unhappy and unfulfilled. If true then about 20-25% of first time marriages do not have happy endings.


I didn't get married til my early 60s. So far so good! I've seen so so many busted marriages "out there" that I did NOT rush it (obv).


Had children too?


One! 28 months and starting to read! (mostly simple monosyllables)


What’s your source on that?


Investing might be an area where you can profit from being the way you are.

I am very similar, having read way over 1k books in the last ten years or so, on a perversely wide array of subjects. I’ve also done everything from tinkering with Arduinos all the way to marriage counseling. But I quickly get bored and move on to the next field.

An early disciple of CG Jung, Marie Louise von Franz, wrote that the life of our personality type looks like a never ending track of fields sown but never reaped.

But while you may never stay long enough on a field to reap its fruit, what you do reap is a very interconnected, multidisciplinary way of understanding the world, which comes to you not so much in the form of explicit knowledge but in the form of a very special “intuition”.

That isn’t to say that you are infallible. In fact, you should always be careful to question that intuition and to try to make as much of it as possible explicit, even just to yourself. But if you do that, you have a good chance of being quite successful with a Peter Thiel style of investing.

Just always keep in mind your three biggest enemies: The mimetic reflex of wanting to follow the herd and get approval from others. The seductive illusion of superiority or infallibility. And the general tendency of wanting to be right, and of fooling yourself.


>what you do reap is a very interconnected, multidisciplinary way of understanding the world, which comes to you not so much in the form of explicit knowledge but in the form of a very special “intuition”.

What is the value of that, though? When it comes to social sciences, everyone believes they have a special intuition or a sense about how the world works. It's impossible to distinguish who actually does, and who is self-delusional. You cannot even be certain for yourself.

In tech, in contrast, you can build a product that can prove you are valuable, despite being an un-credentialed autodidact.

I can think of only a few paths that can really realize the value of genuine brilliance of this type:

1) With your special intuition of how the world works, predict the course of society and make money off of that. That can be difficult, though, since nobody is going to bankroll you, and this would also require knowledge of finance.

1.1) Gamble on the nascent event markets instead. Not sure if they are going to exist in the long term, though.

2) Write compelling fiction. However, if your conclusions about society are true, but unintuitive to the general public, it's going to be tricky to convince them you're right, and they're wrong.

3) Become political analyst/pundit/substack writer. Same downsides as above.

4) Identify key trends in society and start a business in a field that is likely to dramatically explode. This strategy requires tech or business skills, and is high variability.


Vow!!! those last lines. Been going through rough patch (mentally), and these lines influenced a bit of my thought process.

Can you provide some source or book to read on this deeply?

Lines I'm referring = "Just always keep in mind your three biggest enemies: The mimetic reflex of wanting to follow the herd and get approval from others. The seductive illusion of superiority or infallibility. And the general tendency of wanting to be right, and of fooling yourself."


Thanks. Well, different sources. As I said, I'm the intuitive type. But I can try to expand on those three.

On mimetic desire:

1. Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. He has an example of a company that buys billboards. Not actually to advertise to customers. But to advertise to their competitors.

2. Girard, who inspired Thiel. For instance, in "The One by Whom Scandal Comes", he writes: "In observing people around us we quickly perceive that mimetic desire, or desirous imitation, dominates not only the smallest details of our everyday behavior, but also the most important choices of our lives, the choice of a spouse, of a career, even the meaning that we give to our existence".

3. Warren Buffett once said, "It's not greed that rules the world. It's envy."

4. Watch children playing. Very often, they start fighting over some toy, even though there are many other toys lying around that nobody wants. That's a great metaphor for business, I find (think of all the buzzwords of areas people want to be in - A.I., crypto, etc.). And it's a great metaphor for investing as well.

On superiority:

C.G. Jung has this thing about the superiority complex. And I think he especially singled out the personality type that we today would classify as INTJ in the Myers-Briggs typology. INTJs have intuition as their strength. That is to say the thing Nietzsche talked about when he wrote, "It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!". The idea is that an INTJ has access to a way of "knowing" things without being conscious of reasons or sources. And the frightening thing is that his intuition is often right!

When you look at websites that classify the Myers-Briggs types, they'll often say that the slogan of the INTJ is, "Why is everybody else so wrong?". Once you have discovered that your "weird", often "unexplainable" hunches often do prevail, if you just listen to them, it is easy to believe that you have some "special power". It is easy then to believe that you no longer need to even just attempt to "justify" yourself, or to try to communicate with other people.

It's easy for anyone to fall into this trap, of course. The person who once got lucky when buying stocks could easily believe themselves to be infallible. Many a fortune that has been made has been lost again by this exact mechanism.

I also find it interesting to hear that, in indigenous cultures, there often are checks and balances enforcing humility. I remember an example from the book "Humankind": A successful hunter comes back into the village. But instead of boasting about his success, he is expected to sit down quietly. And when somebody asks if he caught anything, he is expected to say, "I'm really not much of a hunter. Maybe I got lucky and did catch a little thing." The idea apparently is that if someone becomes too sure of themselves, they eventually will become dangerous to the tribe.

There's also the story of Jesus who chooses the lowest chair to sit on. And Tolstoi, in one of his books ("What I Believe"?) speculates that these teachings do not exist so much for the good of society as for the good of the individual. As far as I understand, he says that boastfulness is a happiness trap. Presumably because 1) it makes you feel separate from the people around you and will antagonize them from you and 2) it will eventually cause you to do something stupid, with painful consequences for yourself or for others.

On fooling yourself:

I was thinking primarily of Feynman's quote: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

We humans have the consciousness of the hunter, and we can only focus on one thing at a time (I heard that first in this podcast [1]). Our brains are constantly looking for shortcuts, in order to save energy (hence cognitive biases [2], and often also: failed marriages [3]).

We laugh today about people in ancient Mesopotamia who sacrificed lambs to the Gods in order to save a sick child's life. We laugh about how they drew a causal connection where, in reality, none ever was, nor could have been. But then look at B.F. Skinner's "superstition in the pigeon" [4].

The desire to be "in control", and to "have the answer" easily overpowers our feeble minds. Very often, it is more important to us to believe that we know than to really know. What we often seek is not so much the real answer, but escape from the question. Being "unsure", and "not knowing the answer" is not a pleasant state to be in. And, like small children, we often try to escape from this state as quickly as possible.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3VBCWIDEzk [2] https://busterbenson.com/piles/cognitive-biases/ [3] https://stantatkinblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/our-automati... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AzjDs8aF7g


Thanks for this elaborate answer! These type of comments are the reason I'm coming back to HN!

I'm curios, how did you come up with all the examples in your comment? Do you have some notes linked to ideas or you just remember them?


Yes to those last couple of lines.

I started to pursue a Masters of Divinity, but quickly dropped out as I came to terms that my motivation was primarily to "have the upper-hand" in conversations. (Not to mention I can't set aside 6 years of my life for school right now).


I was going to suggest writing, and I'll go one further: Do write a blog, but don't just write a blog.

Write a blog, and then create a video for each blog post, and upload it to YouTube (where the eyeballs willing to consume intellectual material are).

Also do livestreams.

Start interviewing anyone who will take you seriously. Set a goal for who your dream interviewee is.

Do this for a couple years, putting out content every week, and then glue & edit all that stuff down into a book that says something interesting, useful, and at least somewhat new.

Publish that book. Get interviewed yourself by other people.

Being a writer is not cliche. There's an enormous world there and a career you can build, and I think it's a very good idea to pursue that, so that you can get paid for pursuing your curiosity. In 10 years or so, if you keep at it, you could be doing very well for yourself and have "built" some things you're really proud of.


> YouTube (where the eyeballs willing to consume intellectual material are).

Whyyyyyyyyy?!

Seriously I'm curious, what happened? Do intellectuals (whatever that means) really not prefer reading any more?

A desire for Podcasts/audiobooks I can understand, as someone who occasionally has to drive places, but video?


I feel that you can assign a separate IQ-like score to many different components of human intelligence. I score badly on book comprehension relative to other components.

I find it easier to concentrate for an hour or two on a video than a book. I'm probably slightly dyslexic or something. At university I made sure I never missed a lecture but hardly ever read a book. I did above averagely well.

This is a disadvantage though. I have friends who can read books in a couple of hours and absorb the content. I'd have to sit through more hours of video to get the same content, even watching the videos at 2x speed.

Wild speculation: being intellectual used to require being good at book comprehension. Maybe only 10% of the population are good at that. Maybe some of the remaining 90% are still clever. If so, video content could allow those book-comprehension-limited people to become intellectual. That'd be nice.


> I find it easier to concentrate for an hour or two on a video than a book.

That is because video does not requires you to concentrate. Imagine a book which is required to be read in 1x or 1.25x or 1.5x or 2x only. Pretty impossible to read, isn't it? You know, some paragraphs may require several hours to be read. Video just doesn't support to be consumed at different speeds per paragraph.


I can't even read light fiction. I read the first Harry Potter book once. To give a feeling of how hard reading is for me: it took me longer than working out how car understeer and oversteer physics work from first principles and making a simulation in C++ [1].

[1] Admittedly crap 2D car sim https://github.com/abainbridge/car_sim


I'll appeal to aphantasia here again. For me, I love to watch videos, but the visual images vanish the moment I stop watching. As such, they are an inefficient way for me to learn. I retain more when I read.

I suspect this is at the root of disagreements about 'visual learners', etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia


How can you seriously say "video does not requires you to concentrate". I'm genuinely curious as to why you would think this is true.


> "video does not requires you to concentrate"

My English is not enough eloquent yet, so I share my anecdotal evidence. Some sentences in books is not understandable if reading only once, and we usually do not go to next one if the previous has been not understood. It is OK to read a sentence 5 times and to read another 2 places in previous parts of a book in order to understand that sentence. Going to a special place from previous parts of lecture might be a pain because of needness to re-listen some extra materials.

While watching video it is too easy to skip that hard sentences especially if professor is too charismatic to let us feel the needness to stop his lecture for a moment in order to think. And it is too hard to re-listen only the part is needed for re-listening, like when you can not parse one word (0.5 seconds long), so you press backwards and you realize that you need to relisten extra 4.5 seconds each re-reading.

That circumstances leads us to just keep listening while the pyramid of non-understanding actually grows on.


While reading you're more prone to analyze and think about the subject, while videos are sort of mechanized, in which generally people don't pause and reflect on what's being said.


Why is it hard to believe that some consume information more effectively through video than text? I find it particularly useful to be able to watch/listen to a video on a topic when I have chores to do around the house that prevent me from sitting and reading a book. I suppose an argument could be made that reading is objectively better than watching something but watching something is closer to having a conversation with someone which is (I think) the best way to consume and understand information.


The problem with text as far as I see is discoverability. Google promotes YouTube videos, but the text sites I've seen ranked are just garbage like "7 ways to clean your sink".

And video is a more addictive medium.


If you are doing some researches, Google almost never is your friend. Alphabet/Google/Youtube are not interested in moving science forward, their work is to pump your attention with their ads. Your friends are: torrents which are storing some books, sci-hub for free access to whitepapers, github for having some free software. So sorry that free access to whitepapers is less legal than advertisement of some scams like some kind of "investments".

> And video is a more addictive medium.

IMHO it is not about video but about smartphones. They are too optimized for consuming ads instead of sciences. For example, it is way more handy to watch videos while constantly being interrupted by social networks than to silent reading if you are already taking a smartphone in your hands.


I think "intellectuals" are willing to read books.

I think videos are the best way to consume content in ~20 minutes.


But isn't reading a preferable way to consume the same content in ~2 minutes?


hmm, I'm not sure about that.

I think that good videos add something on top of the raw script. Visuals, body language, sound effects and music, timing,... That's just for the kinds of videos where the bulk of information is in the script, which excludes things like videos about music production or the like.

Maybe if you spend 20 minutes reading a book, there's going to be a lot of interleaved information: kind of repetition, but with change, so that you really get a good feeling for the core ideas.

A video that would take the same amount of time to watch might not have the same density of language (and I'm not even sure what the ratio would be: i don't think it's 10X, as you implied)--well, maybe it achieves a similar effect, that of increasing comprehension, not by repetition or extra examples, but by the non-linguistic information I listed above.

The 2 minute article just doesn't have the same sticking power.


I agree, but we appear to be in the minority. I find videos unengaging personally.


I've been reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari and one of the points he makes is that there actually is a general decline in the ability to focus enough to enjoy reading books, even amongst educated and intellectual people. A lot of the blame gets put on the usual suspects (smartphones, social media, etc.), but there are a lot of factors like the stressful and distracted nature of our work environments, our diets, our sleep patterns, pollution, etc. that may genuinely be contributing to a increased inability to focus enough to disappear into a book.


Monkey see, monkey do. For physical skills, watching somebody do it while they explain why they are doing it that way is much more illuminating that text alone.

For strictly intellectual skills I find short introductory lectures on YouTube a great way to survey a topic. For a topic I know nothing about I find YT great place to find which direction is most interesting to pursue.


I don't get it either. I'd rather read an information-dense 5-10 minute article than watch a 30 minute video. The way youtube videos try to engage you with music and animations, and the intonation of the speakers, is uncomfortable for me. I accept that's a minority view though.


YouTube has quite good discovery (for me anyway) of related content. Some of it is highly produced. In the best case it’s also more compelling to watch the delivery.

And finally, I often go to YouTube for something specific, like say researching a camera, and as long as I’m already there I catch a few short videos on this or that idea.

I still read magazines (online because of where I live) and a few blogs and listen to maybe half a dozen podcasts regularly, but unless you show up on one of them, you’re much more likely to cross my radar on YouTube.

+1 for writing and also doing some YT videos, also +1 for interviews, and if you have time and a pleasant voice the. consider doing a podcast.


Spoken word was the original form of communication for "intellectuals". (e.g. Sokrates was famously against writting things down).


Because attending lectures in person is anachronistic.


How did you read my mind? I've thought of most of these things and thought I was completely crazy dreaming.

I absolutely want to interview people, dig their brains, hear their stories, etc.! This reminds me of how I used to go to my profs office hours because I just loved hearing them talk passionately about their subjects.

A question, livestream of what?


Dig into intellectual / political Twitch. One guy I've paid attention to is Hal Sparks, a comedian/TV personality turned webby political analyst.

He just reads a bunch of stuff and then does a livestream talking about current events and connecting them with what he's read (plus jokes). There's also a lot of reacting to YouTubers' video essays and the news.

Bullet points for livestreaming subject matter:

* Reacting to the news.

* Reacting to YouTubers / web content.

* Q&A sessions (this is key--the strength of livestreaming is audience interactivity, and that audience will be fiercely loyal).

* Spitballing -- You can give a rough version of a presentation you might give in a video.

* Live writing / creating -- This sounds crazy, but people actually watch people write code, create music etc.

Additional considerations:

* Create a ritual that people show up for. Livestreaming and video audiences love rhythm.

* You don't have to be that entertaining -- people often turn to Twitch/YouTube to fill a similar need in their life that they use podcasts for -- background noise / a distraction where they can feel like they're in the room with a public figure / community.


Thanks so much for all these! So eye-opening!


This is a great reminder, because there are LOTS of people doing this successfully, and in all likelihood, nothing separates them from you except that they've started and you haven't.

Is it possible they're more capable/interesting/competent than you are? Sure, but in all likelihood, it's actually just the discipline to keep doing it and iterating to make it better that separates you.


I most certainly agree that writing isn't cliche, but the exceedingly low barrier to entry makes it hard to distinguish yourself from the crowd of untalented hacks who want to squeeze money out.

More what I'm saying is that the environment requires shedloads of marketing acumen. Not that that's impossible to learn, but it means you're either getting someone to sell it for you (i.e., a publisher) or have to do a lot of work you probably don't love (i.e., not writing).

Or you could be like me and make stuff for fun, and never expect to get paid for it!


I think what you're saying is probably right, but I also think there's a big overlap between being a great writer and being a great marketer.

There's bonus value in getting paid because it's a relatively simple metric for "how good of a writer am I".


Another question, if you don't mind: What sort of things do you think I could write as a novice in these fields?? I don't think I'm interested in writing study notes or summaries etc. I think I'm more inquiry-inclined, something more critical, more engaged.


"A beginner's guide to..." is always a great format.

"Book reports" are better when they're not simply notes/summaries but engage the content from your point of view as a reader and go a bit deeper into the subject matter.

Most important: Just start putting your writing out there and getting feedback. Also study and imitate the styles of writers you appreciate. You'll probably suck for a few years. Keep going.


That's really great advice. I especially like your point on going beyond basic notes/summaries. Thanks again!! :)


Read a couple of books by Barbara sher: Refuse to choose [0]

She calls people like us "Scanners" and claims that our diversity of interests is not a weakness, but a strength. Then goes on techniques to make this skill work for us.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594863032/


It's only a strength if you have a strong base and a way to tie things together. Being interested in a bunch of disparate fields is not in itself useful. In fact for most people it's probably completely useless, because you're going to suck at everything.

Ex: OP wants to read "textbooks to learn basic concepts" and "swim in their ideas". That doesn't equal competence.

However, if you have strong expertise in a particular field and can find a way to utilize the ideas/learnings from a different field you're interested in then it might be useful. Big if though.


I find that exposure to a broad range of concepts expands cognitive breadth and the set of things one can quickly comprehend exponentially, even in /complete/ absence of expertise or competence.

Single-field people tend to be hilariously bad at diffuse reasoning relative to what you'd expect from a person that competent.


Ok, but if you want to operationalize "cognitive breadth" and being able to "quickly comprehend" you need to actually be good at something.

No one is going to pat you on the head for learning the basics of a field 10x faster than someone else because the basics have very little value by themselves.

I say all of this as someone who is very curious and likes learning about new things.


A really important step is getting really good at /something/. Once you've done that, it's much easier to hit a similar level of competence in new areas a bit faster.

A big part of being good at something is really mastering the fundamentals. I tend to think it's possible to turn 'master the fundamentals' into a kind of transferable skill.

Another big part of mastery is pattern recognition, which develops from sheer experience. To some extent, learning to recognize important types of patterns is also a transferable skill.


No, they won’t pat you on the head, but they may pay you for skillfully managing something that takes cross-trained skills that others, equally competent in the chosen field, lack.

A luthier that can play guitar will make a better guitar, most likely.


I think it's a lot easier to build "competence" than people usually think.

Think back to college, to your friends who actually got degrees in various specialties. How many of them actually closely read even five of the books in the curriculum, took detailed notes, and thoroughly understood the material?

A motivated autodidact can do that in a couple months (about how long I manage to stay interested in any one topic). Understanding that 20% of the knowledge in the field really does tend to make you 80% "competent." I find that I can have "competent amateur"-level conversations with specialists in a subject after just that much effort.

From there, it's all a question of whether you want to move toward expertise. Becoming an expert takes MUCH more time, energy, and effort.

What normally happens for me is that, after reaching the level of competence on a broad subject, I may come across a subspecialty or two that inspire me to reach competence on them. That's the layer deeper.

That doesn't usually happen right after the broad review. It usually happens a few cycles later, but because I engaged the material and made notes on it, I can refresh what I knew from my overview and be prepared to dive deeper.

It opens up interesting conversations (I know something about an incredible variety of things, so can usually engage someone in a conversation about something that matters to them). It allows me to connect ideas that make me seem "creative" in any one particular field.

In other words it's a very engaging, fun way to live! And not nearly as daunting a thing as it seems if you mistake building expertise with building competence.

Being a polymath is just really good fun if you let it be!


Agree - otherwise it can just justify procrastinating.

Edit: Someone else said it better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30928437


As an example (someone can correct me), I believe Alan Kay’s background in biology helped his contributions towards object oriented programming and UX.


I wrote a general comment in response to this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930012


Sometimes it is hard to see how all different things you are doing now connects until at the end. I think it was Steve Jobs who said everything he did made sense only when looked in reverse order.


I find it super helpful in applied social science research.


I might have to check this out. Im skeptical of it being a strength in today's world. So far, it seems to only be a weakness for me.


I fall into this group. I've so far found it to be a strength (mostly). R&D/prototype style work benefits highly from having generalists around. Most normal people just don't have a lot of breadth in terms of knowing what else is out there or what's been done outside of a narrowly defined field.

95% of the time you'll be greeted with a "huh...interesting" and no follow up, but in my experience that remaining 5% can be pretty awesome when you stumble upon something that solves a problem in a way nobody else imagined.


"R&D/prototype style work"

That sounds great, but it also sounds rare and potentially low paid.


I work embedded so pretty much everything falls into R&D in the field. Like obviously stay away from maintenance projects but most new development is a science project in my experience.


I work in a similar role and it was a pita to get and involved luck. They're definitely rare, but not low paid


I think it works best if you have a core field. The cross discipline knowledge would prevent group think and result in more original ideas.


Yeah, and in my experience management only wants people who think the same way they do.


It definitely can be a weakness and some of us are just wired this way.

When it comes to the job market I think it's important, for those of us who are generalists, to NOT attempt to compete in fields where there are massive numbers of candidates all aiming for the same kinds of jobs. In any "hot career track" one would be competing against others who are much more narrowly focused. There's always going to be someone who is more capable and has gained more achievement in any particular activity "silo".

Ironically, generalists do much better in niche jobs where they can apply peculiar combinations of skills. The hard part is these jobs are hard to find, and worse, the situation can be miserable for generalists early in their career.


It's a weakness unless you succeed in synthesizing ideas and intuitions very fast into something unique and high quality.


Extra knowledge can't possibly be a weakness.


If you frame it as just "extra knowledge" then, sure, it's not a weakness. The problem is when extra knowledge is acquired at the expense of deeper focus (knowledge) in another area.


>> The problem is when extra knowledge is acquired at the expense of deeper focus (knowledge) in another area.

How it this a problem? It is just another way.


Just as an example, if you look at tech job postings you'll see that they almost all want someone who is an expert - mostly senior level, have a core tech listed in the title (eg Senior React Engineer at Company X). I rarely see any truly general roles posted. People want "T" or Pi shaped devs, nobody wants a "-" shaped dev.

As a dev with 10 years experience and a masters who has not been allowed to specialize due to language/stack/project/product context switching, I can anecdotally say that generalists are not valued and that this breadth of learning generally prevents specialization. I am only a midlevel and make under $100k in a moderate-high COL area.


Being a generalist is beneficial in freelancing, since it gives you demonstrated skill in lots of areas. The more areas, the more projects you "qualify" for, since clients want assurance that you can jump right in and be productive. (Also, "getting up to speed quickly in a new language/codebase/whatever" is a useful skill in freelancing, since that is a clear need)

I think people hiring employees frequently don't realize that they need generalists and instead act like they are hiring permanent contractors.


You've made the strongest case I've seen for some knowledge flexibility by bringing up tech freelancing, but this generalization is still ensconced in tech specialism. The last two posts have lost sight of the bigger picture.

The conversation began with the OP talking about wide cross-disciplinary pursuits.

"A couple of years back I started dabbling in the social sciences and humanities (my background is in ecology / evolutionary biology), and became interested in one discipline after another. From psychology to history of science to anthropology and sociology, to economics and politics, to philosophy and religious studies and cultural studies, etc."

My post was a reply to a response to "Refuse to Choose" and the concept of a "Scanner", someone who is looking at many different disciplines that do not all immediately relate to one another.

And my original post was to the effect of "Yes, being a scanner is a weakness if you can't synthesize your cross disciplinary knowledge into extremely valuable non-obvious insights and/or awe-inspiring products".

Basically, think of ideas as being distanced apart from each other. Some of them are in your head, others in mine, some are in a book, or a movie. If we are specialists working together on a project, then to access and synthesize ideas that exist in both our heads we need to have a meeting, which takes significant time. To access it from media, we're going to need to consume media and study, which takes even more time. A helpful analogy would be the memory hierarchy if you know a bit about computer architecture.

But, if many different ideas exist already, only in one person's head, no meetings are needed. They can just work, synthesizing as they go. That is where the "Scanner" emerges from their cocoon and inverts what has been up to then a weakness sapping the ability to excel in one field, instead becoming what one might call "A Renaissance Man".


I hope OP (and other "scanners") sees this - it might be worth knowing that you may have ADHD, especially if you also heavily procrastinate, are messy/disorganized and always run late. There is much more than I can type in a single comment but if someone wants more info I can try and help.


That's what I suspect is happening too.

ADHD doesn't necessarily present as "hyperactive child" or the other stereotypes to which it often gets associated. Many people receive an ADHD diagnosis in adulthood after years of (more or less) successfully coping by employing organizational strategies, e.g. good list-making, appointment reminders, setting extra alarms, and so on.

In terms of OP's rotating interests, the colloquial term is "hyper-focus" and it occurs because people with ADHD are dopamine deficient and generally crave novelty. That can lead to both regressive behaviors like substance abuse or more progressive behaviors like adopting new hobbies and interests.

For the latter, it's easy to get quick dopamine hits when you first dive into a new subject/hobby. But as time goes on and you dive deeper into it, the novelty you first experienced begins to wear off. The quickest antidote is to find a new fixation and start the process over again.

I've experienced this phenomenon many times myself, and much of what OP described resonates with my experiences.


I totally agree.

> ADHD doesn't necessarily present as "hyperactive child" or the other stereotypes to which it often gets associated. Many people receive an ADHD diagnosis in adulthood after years of (more or less) successfully coping by employing organizational strategies.

That's pretty much been my case so far :') (though yet undiagnosed, only suspected).

It's not necessary to know that you have ADD/ADHD to tackle these issues, but it gives you a good idea of what's going on.


I suspect I have ADHD as well. Well, at least something similar / along the spectrum. I talk about it more in another Ask HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952648

Would love your input! :)


Thanks for this. I did another Ask HN about ADHD-like thoughts and behaviors here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952648

Hope you can contribute! :)


As much as I'd like to be a "Scanner" I think ADHD describes me more accurately. Procrastination is my entire identity but also being interested in ten things at once. But on the flip side I went back to school and for a project of minimum required 3,000 words I wrote 20,000 word. I do know a person with valid diagnosed ADHD and they seem far more erratic than me so I hope I only have a low to mild version.

It could be genetic too my Mom's sister's children are all doctors but one of them or some of them don't use their degrees and work manual labour jobs. Maybe I have that but to a lesser degree due to procrastination and my environment.


I was wondering if I had ADHD as well, but I never "overdo" my homework, like what you've described and what I've heard some ADHD people talk about. I talk more about my thought patterns and behaviors in another Ask HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952648

Would love for you to take a look if you don't mind :)


It can (and often I'd guess) is both! The author of the book also apparently has ADHD (I suspect I have it too). I'd recommend going to a doc and starting out with CBT/DBT therapy and/or meds.


Thanks for bringing that up. I actually posted another Ask HN about that because of your thread :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952648


I just ordered this book and wrote a blog post about it because the _description_ spoke to me. Which kinda proves the point, I guess.

I have been lucky enough to turn my passion into a successful software career working for someone else but I’ve always wanted to be self employed.

https://joeldare.com/im-a-scanner


Wow, I have struggled with OP's sentiments about how they get engrossed in too many things. Thanks for such a cool book rec, I will add it to the pile but seriously prioritize reading it. It'd be nice to feel good about this compulsion I have, but I often dread it drags me down. Great to see writing about it, and something not negative like you say!


The book "Range" is another good one on the same theme.


It is a great book. It gave me permission to pursue different fields & hobbies without feeling guilt about abandoning them later. It suggested also various ways to pursue your interests. Some people are serial scanners, they get into one thing at a time. Ben franklin was like that.

Then there are some who are able to manage their schedules and pursue multiple interests at the same time.

There might be more types of scanners that I cannot recall but another type was scanners with one core interest and then various interests around it. This is what works for me, programming is my core interest and luckily pays well to let me pursue my other hobbies. Over years, I have had various hobbies and learned so many things. I feel I can find a common hobby/interest with almost anyone now.


The reading/learning you are doing is entertainment. It's not that much better than watching TV - if anything it's worse because you can kid yourself into thinking you are doing work, or that it's important.

You gotta do some work.


I responded to this more generally here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930012


AKA procrastinating.


One thing I've done with myself is taken up the hobby of playing prediction markets, and which I now do for a living since the pandemic (though I really want to get back to 'normal' coding job).

It involves a wide set of skills and approaches. The subject matter is basically anything that exists. It doesn't require money and you can play for free on sites like gjopen.com. I recommend the book Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock as a good introductory read.

You may find you're good or terrible at it, but most people can get better. I'm biased, but I do think more fields/levels of leadership could benefit from understanding how to get better at probabilistic thinking---or at least to have a respect for the arts of prediction and seeking out better counsel.

One thing that might be good to learn is how to find the interesting aspects of any subject, and how even within fields there can be quite a lot of breadth to the knowledge. Because to do useful work often you're going to have to focus on some area for a long period of time. If you can also develop good people skills, then being able to appreciate a bigger picture can make management another path to remaining stimulated.


I’m interested in these as both a consumer and a contributor. However I haven’t found many interesting markets. Often are just markets on elections. Additionally many seem to have very small max bet size.

What markets have more interesting breadth of coverage + have decent betting limits? I had the impression cftc or sec limit this to avoid become a regulated security.


If your goal is making money, then that's different. I personally don't encourage people to get into the betting aspect unless you don't mind paying my rent, know what I mean? It's one of those "if it was easy everyone would be doing it" things. The limits on bet sizes only matter once you can demonstrate long-term profitability, IMHO. Since prediction skills are still applicable to basically everything, you're not 100% wasting your time just by testing your abilities on gjopen.com.

If you want intellectual engagement and don't prioritize money, then you can find markets on any topics. Which is why I suggested gjopen.com, and if you are good enough then they will try to recruit you to their analytics platform.

But, yes, politics via PredictIt has been the standard CFTC-approved platform. They're rumored to be working on a more general uncapped platform due to competition from Kalshi (next paragraph).

A new YC startup, Kalshi.com, got CFTC approval for uncapped markets with no topic limitations. They only got up and running last year, so often the markets don't play as large with no betting limits even compared to PredictIt. We're hoping they get momentum, but they could be ahead of their time and give up before more widespread adoption takes off.

There is also Polymarkets.com, but it's trying to operate the markets via blockchain. It's often not the greatest user experience for that reason, but they get more leeway on markets and are uncapped.


which prediction market platform(s) do you use in order to make a living? As noted previously, the breadth of the topics and bet size caps seem to limit potential payouts.


I use all of the above: PI, Kalshi, Poly

It's not so much the caps that are a concern to me than the fact that these platforms haven't been around for a long time. There's no guarantee they will continue to always exist and also be as lucrative. As more money enters I'd expect ROIs to decrease and for it to take more capital to make the same amount of money.

I prefer it more as a side hobby than something I have to do every day. It can be fun, but it's missing the satisfaction of building things or delivering something of value to customers that I'd get if I were still working for a company coding.


Working full-time in prediction markets is exciting. Congrats and thanks for your reply.


Did you ever get into Augur?


No, there were flaws with the implementation that kept many of us away. We all felt vindicated when Poyo, a sketchy character we all knew about from PredictIt, tried scamming people who bet on the outcome of the 2018 elections.


My reply will be short, but hopefully insightful:

Congratulations, you're curious and have an intellectual appetite!

Some people do sports, some people collect stamps, some do RPG, some... and some are curious of academic disciplines (to phrase it poorly).

There's a quote I don't remember the (french) author (and since I don't trust the Internet for this) but I very much like:

"Since we're not given the opportunity to choose the world we live in, the least we could do is try to understand it"

In french: "Puisqu'il ne nous est pas donné de choisir le monde dans lequel nous vivons, la moindre des choses est d'essayer de le comprendre".

On a personal note, discovering philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, among others, has changed my life.


Write and keep writing. Find the connections between the disparate fields.

You have to write your thoughts down because you'll have so many you'll forget them.

Buy a bunch of lovely notebooks and coloured pens and write all your thoughts. Your thoughts and how you write will change over time.

I did nothing but write in my note books under the heading 'Thoughts and Feelings' for 10 years or more based on some advice a therapist gave me a while back.

Also going to see a therapist is fun if you have lots of thoughts. They're like a 3rd party interested in psychology who is paid to listen to your thinking out loud. Sometimes they can listen to your random collection of words and thoughts that pour out of your mouth and find a kernel or thread that runs through it all.


I was going to suggest this, but take it a step further and consider writing commercially. A huge number of press articles and books have been written just to explain subjects to other who are not professionals in the field, but have an incessant curiosity about many subjects. A casual search will turn up innumerable explanations of how, for example, machine learning works, or what quantum computing could do, what the Mars rovers have found, or what GMO foods are. IMHO, these articles and books provide a meaningful social service in keeping people informed on subjects which could impact society or their lives.


Make a big list of the things you are great at and love doing, and then look for combinations that nobody else is combining. Bam. Super hero.

My super power? Expert level customer service with a deep technical understanding of my profession. Usually somebody is one or the other, but I happen to have both. It's a rare combination, and people who succeed at that combination (and market it properly) can do quite well. That's not to say I'm making FAANG wages (I'm not) or that I have a big savings (I don't) but I love what I do and I'm good at it, and I am able to make a great impact at the startup I work for. That's good enough for me.


Have you thought about being a (local) politician? From a voter‘s perspective, this sounds like someone I would like to be my town’s mayor. You can grasp a large variety of things, you can meaningfully talk to experts in many fields and then bring their different ideas together in your policy.

Of course politics is a field with its own very special rules that may not have much to do with actual understanding of the subjects at hand. But I’m not talking POTUS or senator and maybe not even mayor. Even in smaller towns there are a couple of positions to fill. (I’m from Germany but this is true for many countries; maybe it’s true for yours. I’m presuming you’re from the US and I just noticed that I would rather not presume that, but I guess I do most of the time on HN.)


This comment is wonderful. As somebody who works with local politicians and community leaders professionally I really appreciate this good advice. I would add - local government, either through election, government office work, or consulting often offers (and demands) a very large breadth of topic knowledge and work.

Have you thought about strategic consulting (government or otherwise)?

I'll provide a real life example - my background education is in law, but I work professionally consulting on Emergency Management. For the entirety of COVID I have been working with my local government to stabilize our food bank network as they navigate food system supply chain issues that have caused serious suffering in our food insecure population. Prior to this I have consulted on land mobile radio systems, website design, fire fighter line of death inquires, mass vaccination, and many other areas.

Consulting offers this amazing opportunity to soft "quit" a job when a project ends, but offers continuous employment through your consulting firm. Over a career, you get to see the inside of dozens of different operations, and you always bring an outside perspective. You are hired, in part, to solve unique problems and work on hard tasks where your breadth of knowledge will be appreciated and work as an advantage for you. And, if you have a client you hate working with or for, you are always just a few months from moving on to the next one. :-)


Being interested in many disciplines can be an invaluable asset in life. Treasure your knowledge, and nurture it every day. Here are a few fields and strategies for tapping into your interests, and creating results that make the most of them:

1/ Postmodern philosophy: (re)consider the possibility of pursuing advanced studies in postmodern philosophy, because that is one of the fields where all your bits of knowledge can coagulate and be put at good use. There are academic institutions that can accommodate part-time schedules, or where most teachings are offered in time of the year that facilitate part-time learners;

2/ (Visual) Arts: An art practice can benefit greatly from a solid theoretical foundation of the subject-matter that it tries to address. I am not speaking of arts pursued for the sake of them. I am referring to contemporary art engaging with some of the most pressing socio-political challenges our societies face.

Set aside the fields above, all other fields can benefit from some non-zero degree of interdisciplinarity, but are hardly all encompassing and would leave part of interests less leveraged then others.

I salute you and wish you well.


Oh hi alfonso! Clicked into your profile from your Ask HN re alternative career paths, then realized it was you!

Thanks for this reply! Really cool suggestions. I definitely should dig around arts and philosophy more, especially in ways you've suggested!

Question: Are you able to give example(s) of #2? Like you mean something by Aiweiei would count right? I came across a few books of his and thought was pretty cool.


Hi Sam, good to talk with you again :-)

Ai Weiwei would definitely count! In reality all western contemporary art, and to a more limited extent also contemporary art made artists in other regions of the globe, is political art. Political art here doesn't mean art related to the institutions of politics, as sometimes it is assumed in some circles. All art that raises questions about how we relate to each other in our societies is inherently political. (We are reminded that the etymology of politics is the Greek polis, the city-state in the Ancient Greece.)

So I could provide you with countless examples of political art/artists, from Claudia Andujar, to Trevor Paglen, to Forensic Architecture, to name just a few that influenced me the most – And I am sure you are familiar with true superstars such as Banksy, don't you? But this is just the tip of the iceberg; there is a galaxy of artists doing politically engaged art. Some of the most recurring themes nowadays are: gender politics, power, and sustainability.

Before leaving, as you mentioned the Ask HN re alternative career paths, I will take this opportunity to tell you that I am a (concerned) cybersecurity technologist by background with 20+ years of professional experience, who has approached, at mid-career, the arts as a way to distill my thoughts and raise questions about the world and time we live in. Some of the societal challenges related to my professional career form one the main thematic areas for my oeuvre. In my practice, I examine the aesthetics and politics of surveillance, traumatic memory, and sustainability. I will leave you below a few links:

* LI: https://it.linkedin.com/in/alfonsodegregorio * Artist practice website (to be updated): https://www.escapingphotons.com * Latest body of work: https://phmuseum.com/adg/story/retained-reports-1b29a4727a


Thank you so much for all your wisdom and knowledge Alfonso! So nice to learn about your work! I'll be treasuring deeply all that you've shared with me. Perhaps one day I'll have my essays published and I can show you if you're open :)

All the best, Sam


Sam, please do it! I am always eager to learn more; I will be happy to hear from you, and I thank you for the opportunity to exchange a few ideas here on HN. Wishing you all the best with your personal and intellectual life. – Alfonso


Sounds like some sort of teaching might be a good idea? Like Sal Khan of Khan Academy. Even if you're not super deep into the individual fields, creating some kind of content that enables people to see the cross connections might be extremely motivating for many people to broaden their horizon as well and become a valuable learning resource.


If you find something that works for you that lets you create artifacts of your interests, go for it! You never know what people will latch on to.

I also have a lot of unrelated interests and ideas for projects I lack the depth to get off the ground.

The real breakthrough for me occurred while I was using Minecraft to practice improvisational comedy on YouTube and realized that I can take any infeasible idea that would never happen like "What if I gave a $40k speech to Goldman Sachs?" and added "... in Minecraft?" to it.

I made a lot of videos people didn't get for about a decade, and now I quit my day job as a LAMP dev and make most of my living off tips from viewers.

Best of luck!


Wow. I need to know you.

Links please, but would actually like to know who you are.


It's not like he's hiding or something. https://youtube.com/c/JoeHillsTSD


(long time lurker but made an account for this post specifically) I'm in a somewhat similar boat. I'm not even in my thirties and figured out that staying in IT as a full-stack lead whatever architect project manager do-it-all which I'd gotten close to would not even be remotely challenging and intellectually stimulating enough but would swindle me out of my time.

Right now I'm expanding that to slowly build up a hosting company (a cluster running on Docker Swarm and Gluster with a lot of tools and scripts already), jammed basically all fundamental music theory in my head and working hard to apply that, make YouTube videos, do streaming on Twitch, do 3D stuff, work with a game engine, graphic/web design, being capable to have professional-level conversations about therapy and always interested to learn more on the sidelines, doing voice acting and impressions.. well.. etc. because basically I gravitate towards more stuff and the list goes on. It turns into this rambling list real quick because I still have no way to synthesize it all into something that can be quickly and simply understood. I don't know if I ever can. My theory so far is that that becomes easier once all those skills go more into the unconscious competence stage.

It comes with the territory of being profoundly gifted for me and I wouldn't want it any other way. The main challenge for me is trying to find a way to have income and still be busy with all these things. Perhaps in some time in the future I'll be able to combine a lot/all of these things and sit in some ridiculous hyperniche.

So with all that, I have no idea where I'm going but going there is too much fun to let up and I'll fight forever to keep going that way. A confusing state and a paradoxical one since it goes past understanding to understand a lot. Wish I could help. I just wanted to share.


Choose a game that gives you rewards for being intellectually gifted if you believe that is it. A lot of strong intellects go to Investing for this purpose (see Nick Sleep, Joel Greenblatt, Charlie Munger). Many did it because of the intellectual stimulation.


Blog. Yes it’s cliche but it’s step 1 of many different paths. You can decide where to go after a year or two of consistent writing. You could

- write a book or ten

- become a speaker (TED talks, conferences, universities, etc)

- become hands on in one or more of those fields (not sure what that looks like but it came to mind)

- get a PhD and become a professor, after your children are older etc

- create a new field of study synthesizing several of your interests

Caveat: I haven’t done any of this, or anything like it. These are just ideas I had after reading your post. They may all suck. But I think blogging is the first step in many paths. It creates a perception of authority for yourself, where previously the only way to do that was to get a PhD or similar. (Some have no right to this perception of authority and they abuse it; they just blog a lot and convince some, but such is life.) Anyway, you can leverage this perception of authority to do any of the things I mentioned above, and more besides. If you’re 40 right now, you can squeeze in 2 full careers before you’re 80 if you want to go broad.


I think blogging is great way to connect various hobbies and start turning them into possible careers. Even if no one reads your blog, you will something to look back at.

One thing I suggest is to never start over your blog. I did many times and wish I hadn't. Not because of SEO penalties but because those deleted posts were snapshots of my mind at those stages in my life. They could be great for you or your kids to read in the future.


If I was starting with such a broad set of interests and evidence that I will come to find almost anything rewarding -- honestly I'd think about who is served by the work I'm doing and whether it allows me to live in a location I like comfortably by whatever definition you use for that.

Consider working with a non-profit, your breadth of interest can be a huge benefit to a small team. Small teams often lack the headcount to realize when they have a problem with a simple alternative or how to tackle certain kinds of more specialized problems like surveys or non-profit taxes or heck, when I was a kid I remember learning to typeset newsletters because no one else really knew how... like any underfunded small team you have to fill in the gaps as well as you can.

Stuff that you find trivial might seem unattainable to others there and a breadth of experience can provide a lot of context and research directions that would otherwise be missed. And if it serves a social good that you care about all the better.


I have a similar pattern and decided, maybe instead of trying to fight it, I should turn it into a strength. Build around it https://rigelblu.com.

David Perell's dime video was the final clue I needed — pick your center and just go https://youtu.be/gRDopONrnHE

Happy to chat if it helps. Who knows, maybe you could help me. I’m relearning software engineering now after being out of it since school (2004).


To give you an example of the similarties. I've been learning writing, storytelling, and storyboarding over the last year. Even practiced sketching so I could do storyboards.

More recently, AI, software engineering, business strategy, and a tiny bit of marketing, data science, and venture capital.

The other thing that helps is that I always try to have a showable/shippable output. Nothing that's just in my head or scattered notes that wouldn't make sense to others.

A fav quotes, "The reason you want to be creative is because you consume every day. To balance out your energy, you also need to create every day." and “Don’t tell me. Show me!”


Does this resonate? https://wildcardpeople.com/what-is-a-wildcard-person


This is amazing thanks for sharing, it's been so long that this felt like a negative for me it's incredible to see this behavior described positively


... I feel seen in a way usually reserved for a particularly depressing memes.

Huh.


Whoa, for me it does. Thanks for sharing. I had no idea this concept was so well-defined that it could be a whole job board.


That's pretty accurate description of me. But I don't think it's that rare, especially for startup people. It's kind of expected for people working in small companies and especially solo founders.


It's hard to do anything with broad interests. Maybe start a podcast? People with wide interests can do well investing if you read up on that and keep all the other stuff going. Or you could get a main job and do the intellectual stuff for its own sake on the side.


The world is competitive. As long as you can blend in your diverse interests so that you have an advantage over your competitors, you will be well rewarded for your breadth of knowledge.

However, if a team consisting of an expert in each of your disciplines would outperform you, then you have to consider whether you’re mixing your disciplines creatively enough to have an edge.

One powerful mix is the ability to have breadth of knowledge as you mention but also the ability to dive deep into one specific problem when needed.

In my experience, people with wide breadth of knowledge were only taken seriously if they had an equally deep knowledge in one of the specific fields. This demonstrates they can go deep if needed.


You might find that you hate trying to "do" something with your curiosities. It might feel more work than fun after a while.

But I suspect that if you love learning about lots of different things, you'd enjoy sharing those things too (and teaching!). Blog, podcast, youtube videos.

If you're in a major city, check and see if there's groups that could scratch your itch. Odd Salon (https://oddsalon.com/) is really cool if you're in the bay or NYC - people give talks about weird bits of science and history.


What do you call these types of groups? I want to see if they exist in my city.


I see other people on here say this but I think it is so important that it can be said again. WRITE, WRITE, WRITE! As you read and learn I think it is so important to write. I suggest a mixture of notes, journal entries, and short essays. The more you do this the more your thoughts will gain clarity and you will see themes emerge from what you are doing.

As far as finding 'what to do with it'. I think that will develop over time as you talk with people about your interests. Share your writings as best as you can and join discussions. See if there are local MeetUp (or something similar) groups on the topics that you find most interesting. If so, join them and go to discussions. Ask if you can give short presentations on topics to the group. If you find a book or essay particularly interesting then send an email to the author.

Another trick that has worked for me; Some famous authors can be sometimes really hard to reach. But look at the work that they cite. Usually you will find some academic paper that they quote or reference. Look up the author / authors of those papers and read about them and contact them directly. Professors LOVE to talk about their work and usually (from my experience) they are happy to talk to people about their research who have read their papers. From those conversations you might find a path to a career or hobby that make you feel fullfilled. Enjoy the journey.


> swim in their ideas

Speaking as an accomplished dilettante, I can tell you that the ability to have interesting conversations with anybody about anything is in fact a fairly OP soft skill.

If you're an extrovert, I would encourage you to move into a role where you get plenty of exposure to different people - you'll find that you have a natural edge.

The other major benefit of your approach is that you will build diverse mental models and paradigms for dealing with problems. Try to find your way into some sort of consultancy.


Those interesting conversations are so awesome.


OP here, gonna double post a couple of general replies to common themes, here's the first:

For those who mentioned/wondered about my day job / income, I work a "humble" warehouse job at a university bookstore, so I get to work with textbooks and general books regularly (though not all the time). This was how I got exposed to all these subjects! The pay isn't the greatest, but the university has great employment benefits and security.

And an interesting backstory: I actually started working here as a part-time seasonal cashier after dropping out of grad school and had to find something "random" to pay some bills. After a couple of seasons and no luck finding a "real job", my supervisor suggested that I apply for the warehouse opening. I was aversive to the idea, because I never would've imagined working a seemingly "lowly" warehouse job, especially as a "university grad". I applied anyway because I had no luck elsewhere, and I've stayed here ever since!

Honest to god, if I didn't work here, I would've stayed in the sciences with my head in the sand, clueless about other disciplines, clueless about the world.

Gonna quote one of the comments here: "The universe has a strange way of putting the pieces together... It will make sense looking back on it." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30928282

PS I love that you folks are actually thinking about this constructively. I'm blown away, can't thank you all enough!


If working a "lowly" warehouse job and dabbling in many different subject areas is what makes you happy, that's obviously perfectly fine. But if you believe that dabbling in many different areas will actually somehow in the long run lead to any kind of (work-related) success you're dead wrong in my opinion. You have to focus most of your time on one or maybe two or three areas (after you have become really good at one thing) in order to be able to make any meaningful impact somewhere. Knowing a little of a lot of things is nice to have, but unfortunately has very little use in our society.


Not looking for success, if I were I wouldn't still be packing boxes. Just trying to be more constructive and exploring various ways to make that happen.


> I love reading textbooks to learn basic concepts and looking through academic titles just to swim in their ideas.

Keep doing this! It’s more fun to learn a little about a lot than a lot about a little. It’s easy, feels good, and is a good way to pass the time.

Why change?


(i can relate), you sound younger than me, so here is my life-hack tutorial I wish I could send to myself:

welcome to the life of the autodidact, sounds like you are well on the path towards being a polymath in a plurality of subjects. without formal degrees in subject matters people will NOT take you seriously, so it's best if you can connect with other people who are credentialed - there are several ways to do this, best case see if you can get your name on a few papers in the field(s) you are interested in. there might be conferences, reddits, or discords on subject matters that interest you - look for those to network. you will need to continue feeding your curiosity or you will probably become depressed. having a wife and kids, try to always put them first to be a good father! (note: i wasn't, and that scar doesn't fade - so kids are the priority once you've got them and you'll probably need to wait until they're off to college before you really get any free time to pursue your own interests).

someday, it's possible (although semi-unlikely) perhaps you might find or discover something that nobody else has figured out or bothered to do yet - but don't try create and do anything that requires a seed capital because few will understand wtf you are talking about most of the time and with no degree nobody will take you seriously making fund-raising an exercise in futility unless you literally get a patent - if you can build/demonstrate a prototype/mvp then it might be a different tune -- if you can sell/license something you make in the field, then you can pay yourself to pursue your passions and that's "living your best life" (where I am now) but until then you're probably going to be living a lonely life of solitude with regard to your academic pursuits. cheers.


I want to say, this seems a lot like information seeking as a form of procrastination itself. I suffer from this. Worthwhile to look into ways to either help use it to your advantage or limit it.


This is a good reason to look for real problems to solve, and work on solving those. This could be non-profit or for-profit.


The universe has a strange way of putting the pieces together eventually. It will make sense looking back on it. Continue to follow your intuition. I believe it is your higher purpose.


Thanks for warm fuzzies, favorited.


I feel your pain. I've made multiple websites that are designed as broad-based solutions to things I observe. It can be a bit frustrating finding a specific interest to dive into.

At least in my life, I've discovered that it's important to NOT identify with your interests. While this is a generally important rule, broad interests are toxic to the psyche if you declare your worth by them, since the implementation will vary (e.g., your psych and history may be spot-on, and you might suck at understanding philosophy).

I've read a few Paul Graham essays on the subject, and they're worth poking around. My takeaway is that you are free to do what you love, but find a day job in the meantime. My bias is to steer clear of academia, but you may fare better in that group of people than me if you're not the out-of-the-box thinker type.

And, for your second question, find a way to create. You're clearly hitting up against the wall I've hit against: how do you make an "original thing" that thousands of other people haven't done already?

The answer to that, put very simply, is that you are a unique person. Your personality, sure, but whatever we philosophically represent as the "soul" is the thing that fuels all your creative endeavors, and it flavors everything.

For example, I used to be a fan of the Myst computer game, and have recently been poking around with its sequels. You can actually feel over the series the dilution of original "spark" that the two brothers had in the original.

So, find an expressive form to make what you want. It doesn't have to be fancy, but once you incubate a vision of it, you'll naturally fill in the blanks of what it would be. Off the top of my head, building out an LMS using existing information would be a good start, or finding a way to index/archive more finicky aspects of large repositories of information (such as associative keywords toward economics).


This should be a blog post at this point. This was super helpful. Thank you!!!


First, slow down - choose 1 or 2 topics at a time

Second, work towards the goal of "be an and" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855775)

Don't limit yourself to just one thing, but do limit yourself to learning only 1 or 2 things at a time - and learn them as deeply (or shallowly) as you like (since no one is forcing you to do this (ie it's all voluntary on your part)). For a suggestion on how you might approach this, see https://antipaucity.com/2012/12/10/finding-your-niche/#.Yk2s...

It's as important to find out what you don't like as what you do like


1. Use it to your advantage: Being curious and able to satisfy your thirst is incredibly valuable. Foster it and be assured that having diverse knowledge and an open mind can help you in various situations and jobs. Best thing if you are able to find a spot/job where a wider perspective is useful and appreciated. But there is no single job description where this is the case, it is entirely individual.

2. Accept the fact that you will always have a shallower knowledge than people that focus on specific things. Be humble, there will always be someone smarter in the room with knowledge on his favorite topic that you will not be able to match unless you dive way deeper than you are currently willing to go.

3. Realize that your drive for knowledge and understanding is actually a natural thing - I would argue that this is the case for most people, and while some have found ways to satisfy this "need" with random redirection activities (mostly "entertainment" and shopping), some have found "their thing" and are investing their energy into a specific thing - which sometimes is utterly useless (as in "useful for the greater good, humanity, or for someone") , sometimes can be turned into something useful for oneself or for others (e.g. "money in the bank").

4. As soon as you make your hobby your job, it is no longer a hobby, it is now your job. And for most people that means they no longer enjoy it nearly the same way they did before. A envy the few lucky ones where this is not true. You now need a new hobby.

5. Don't forget to enjoy life. If you found something that makes you happy, that is purely awesome! But also realize that you will have to do things that at the same time (1.) keep you from doing what you love, but (2.) also enable you to do what you love. Some people call it their "job". You need money and time, your family needs money and time, your hobby needs money and time. Find a way to sustain all that, so you can do and enjoy the things that make you happy.


during the coronavirus episode I grew fascinated with the inventor of N95 mask, the guy came from Taiwan and regularly write rather candid thoughts on newsletter section as if it's his personal blog in Taiwan's nonwoven association's website; anyway I digress.

Turns out this guy's just like you! He took literally every single paper built up to 500 credits for his post grad. And it is exactly this multidisciplinary approach that lead to his invention which is only commercialisable due to his intuitions in manufacturing processes...

I firmly believe there's value in broad interests and no time is spent unwisely. Just remember to step up when it's your queue, best of luck and even if you don't think you did anything I'm sure at least the swimming through the content was enjoyable trip all by itself..


I think generalists make good Product Managers. Getting a "good" understanding of all the business functions (tech, analytics, ux/design, sales, legal & regulatory etc) is fundamental to being successful in the role and naturally fits the type of mindset that you describe.


Read "Why greatness cannot be planned: The myth of the objective" for understanding the context of my response. The key trope shown in this book is the power of "treasure hunter" agents & the benefits of following "interestingness". The path to greatness is continually collecting "stepping stones" that take you further, no matter the direction. If you continuously focus on finding the next step, the next exploration point, and if you remain active, I am sure that you'll come to find wonderful things on your journey. The planet needs more people who are willing to follow their own interests.


If you don't already, practice consuming zero intellectual content now and then, to give your brain time to synthesize. Let yourself be bored. Instead of swimming in the (highly engaging) sea of ideas, drift in intellectual deprivation awhile, at least breathing, perhaps doing something tangential like walking or physical labor (without music or other distractions from the important work of giving yourself mental space). Also, accept that you'll never learn it all, and that it's okay to keep learning despite that--it's the journey, and you're writing your book, which has a final chapter. Good luck!


Multipotentiate: https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Everything-Guide-Those/dp/0062...


Forget about all the topics you mentioned and study philosophy. It encompasses all of them so in a way you're studying multiple disciplines, ie. have your cake and eat it too. Second, philosophy can go wherever you want it to go, where as in the other fields you mentioned there is a high level of dogmatic norms that you have to stick to if you want to be published or rise to any sort of prominence. Third, social sciences, economics and the like are fields that want to do empirical science and copy physics, but fail at it miserably.

Often a Noble prize in economics detracts from the world instead of adding to it.


Find an easy job that involves daily routine. After a couple of months you'll find it easy, after a couple of years you'll be able to squeeze all your duties into one hour if you're smart. Then you can spend the remaining hours increasing your knowledge of chosen areas.

One thing that turned out to be particularly useful for me was testing my knowledge by participating in discussions with advanced learners and experts in the field. By just formulating your question or view in writing something changes in your brain. Very often trying to put my question in writing made me realize the answer.


Make sure to condense your learning in some sort of PKM system [1]. I think having many interests is a strength many people don’t have. The risk of this trait, though, is to have all your entry points to these newly-found subjects scattered and unconnected, leaving you with a sense of not understanding any of these subjects.

[1] I would personally recommend Obsidian as a tool; check out this recent discussion on the PARA methodology https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30916260


1) Satisfy your creative needs

You are highly creative and therefore need a creative outlet. Since you are interested in the intellectual side of things, you should probably write. A blog isn't cliche - it's an outlet. Nobody will read it nor care about it except you, but it serves the purpose of putting thoughts into words and coming to a clearer understanding of the things you are interested in. It exercises both the creative and the critical parts of your brain and you will eventually look forward to writing once you practice. You shouldn't write for a blog - you should write to think. Without writing down your thoughts, you are not really thinking. That creative want needs to be satisfied - so create something!

2) Drill deep down into ONE thing

The problem with the creative types is that they are interested in every shiny thing they see (speaking as one). This results in a bit of chaos if it's not kept in check. I would pick one thing you do in your job and deep dive into it - become the expert in your company in that particular area. This will pay dividends to both your job and intellectual satisfaction as you will be able to apply what you learn to the real world. Expertise in your job has the added benefit of being valuable straight away, something which is vastly important when you have time constraints such as family (which is not a bad thing by any means!).

Source: A fellow creative who started doing the above 2 years ago.


What is the one thing that you picked in the end? I believe its the hardest part, releasing the notion of the rest...


I'm a software developer by trade, but for the last 2 years I've been studying with the focus of becoming an organisation director / coach with the ultimate goal of a consultant in the next few years.

So I need to learn a whole range of tools to be decent in such a position - facilitation, psychology, therapy techniques (not therapy though!), communication, public speaking (which I hate). Few people in software have these skillsets so I'm trying to attack a niche and hopefully make a decent living off it in the future.

I agree with what you say regarding releasing all the other stuff. Two things happened to me:

1) I started a family. Now I don't have the luxury of spending my evenings procrastinating on youtube and half-reading books. I have hard constraints of time and energy and need to be very deliberate with my time.

2) Focus on everything = Focus on nothing. I am the breadwinner in my family and want the best environment for them to flourish. This means earning a decent amount in a job I (hopefully) enjoy that have potential to grow in the future. If I don't focus on 1-2 key areas in my life everyday, I see they do not improve nor progress.

Prior to having a family, I knew and understood the points above. But the constraints and responsibilities now means I no longer have the luxury of waiting around to get to it tomorrow.


Great stuff.

I totally agree that constraints help us, in fact it seems like people with families are more productive than me because they need to focus otherwise the goal will always be illusive.

Also I think the skills you outlined above are much more transferrable. Even things like writing, communicaiton, public speaking, relationship building will get you really far and are applicable in almost every field.

I kind of chosen the opposite, coming from tech sales - trying to focus on learning to build!

Wish you all the best!


Have been pondering about this a lot as well.

The question is usually two fold: 1) Do I expect an outcome for this learning? 2) Do I do it just for fun?

In the first case, you would need to really establish some goals, deadlines and delve into the topic and thats where it becomes tangible. Because you are trying to achieve something.

The issue I didn't figure out yet is time... For instance, I am learning design, programming and product management all at the same time and quite frankly its too much. So the only way is to do it step by step. Depending on the depth of the discipline (like nuclear physics would literally require you to study for several years), you might want to just focus on one given the limited time. I do it by time-blocking time after work every day.

Then comes the meta-learning part, what is the most effective way? There are countless of pieces written on it, but I recommend Barbara Oakley.

In general it really depends how much energy and time you want to invest and its purpose.

The only thing I recommend is to follow your energy levels and if you feel it's worthy an output, try to write about it TO YOURSELF. Don't try to adapt any sort of writing style to people who are popular, but perhaps you can gain a sense of "tangible" by creating some output to produce some sense-making on the topic for YOURSELF first.

If its just for fun. No pressure just do it whenever.


Hi. Maybe I am very much like you? I love reading and completing online courses. Day job as a software dev.

Sometimes it feels like I am wasting my potential; I know so much, usually way more than some dumb manager making decisions somewhere, but it doesn't always come to fruition. That's OK.

The career advice I received that really helped me was not to pick a profession (software dev) but an industry/sector. If you can work in an industry that touches many of your interests, then you will naturally be useful and excel in what you do. Opportunities will arise.

For me, it was the off grid solar sector: It combines technology, renewables, microfinance, economic development, entrepreneurial energy and Southern Hemisphere countries. I enjoy spending my time reading books on the history of Africa (of which I knew nothing) and of renewable technologies. Even the cliche startup/business literature is applicable. I noticed people really valued my knowledge and engagement and opportunities have been coming in steadily. My career path is to climb up from Technical Expert (software dev) to Product Manager, to CTO-for-hire. And then... we'll see.

There should be more sectors like this. Though I understand it may be challenging to switch industries if you have a family.

Actually - in reality i betrayed my ideals and took a quick break from that sector in the wake of the corona crisis, and now I waste my time in a swiss bank collecting a high salary. It does not make me happy. Don't be like me. I really should get back to the off-grid solar sector.


This is really interesting! Being knowledgeable in various areas of a sector, which means people (in that sector) would probably find it directly useful or relevant. That's awesome :) Thanks! Wish you the best going back to off-grid solar sector!


As a personal experience share:

Consider becoming a consultant, either sharing your unique skills (marketing, programming, design, strategy) or if you don't have directly marketable skills, going to work for a larger firm and learning their process.

My partner and I started our (software development) consultancy because we wanted to LEARN. We wanted to work with lots of different founders on lots of different ideas. We wanted to know what made companies succeed and fail and how to avoid the classic failures.

In the years since, we've built nutrition apps, apps that help people manage end-of-life situations, 3d printing and scanning, made-to-measure clothing businesses, dog toy and cat food companies, social networks, real estate apps, a project that combined AI/ML and gaming, and a hundred more.

Between all the different projects and all the books we've read (we've also read dozens of business and self help books together over the past 10 years), we've grown and learned a tremendous amount. We've also built a business and a reputation that is now creating a fruitful future for us and the people who work with us.

Whatever you do, harness that love for learning and find a job that compensates you for being willing to dive into anything and get up to speed quickly. It's a rare passion and skill!


I suffer EXACTLY with your wonderful affliction!

The way I deal with this is constant invention, however I lack the forethought of journaling...

So I am changing this, I have a number of physical paper graph-paper-based journals that I capture my thoughts in now.

I FUCKING REGRET that IU have not been journaling all my life. 45 years down the drain.

The best engineers I know (Looking at you JDB) all keep good journals.

Write down everything you have done each day - even if it is *"slept on the couch and got a killer nap"*


A much different response than many below here, and also, more solidarity than actual advice. I too feel this way. I've found it gives me high relatability to coworkers and great problem solving skills. (I may not have as much grey matter as a local expert on something, but I make up for it in white matter thinking). While I haven't been able to spin the web together yet, my goal is to use this in people management (3 weeks into new job, wish me luck). Enough knowledge to respect and empathize with the experts makes people trust and include, and eventually respect you. Single track experts are constantly getting jaded in my profession (engineering) because they can't champion their own ideas. Humans will intrinsically fight and even die for their ideals, as long as they can see that their environment will not remain status quo. I'm not sure your background or profession, but this might be a perspective for you where the only necessary "training" or "learning" is strong empathy skills. Best to you,


I don't have an answer, but I feel the same when I try to extend my knowledge in interdisciplinary areas. Have you ever heard people say they love the beginning phase of relationships? I am like them with learning. I enjoy the introductory parts and primary levels, but I always struggle through advanced sections, so I can't apply anything I learned from those references in my studies.


No one can set a goal for you. You have to find your own goals within yourself.

If your goal is to enrich knowledge and educate yourself, you can just continue reading and learning.

If your goal is to become famous, you can start a blog, write articles, write a book, start a YouTube channel.

If your goal is to make money you can research some corporations, NGOs or think tanks that will pay you for producing materials that support their goals.


I'll give you an example.

Lets say that you love to cook meat at barbecues. You love all the aspects of the cooking: type of meat, time, taste, condiments...

Another guy comes and asks you to be the local meat cutter at a store, as a job.

Would you accept? My answer would be no (its just a hobby for me).

Also, you can do a vocational test. If every area has the same %, that means you could go study to any area, so just go for it.


I am just like you. Im 40 now and spent my career so far bouncing around different jobs, getting a real high off learning the “why” of everything. Love just connecting dots. Trade stocks. You get to dig deep into economics, sectors, products, strategy and human psychology. Its never ending and you will get great satisfaction if you are good. Piece everything together and you win money


Do this enough and you get a superpower (or at least a neat party trick): you can translate ideas across field boundaries and find really interesting links between subjects. Even just observing that some idea X has been discovered by fields A and B is, I think, really valuable, because so few people cross subject boundaries, and there are often wide terminology gaps that prevent ideas from cross pollinating.

> I like writing and can imagine having some sort of blog, but that's seems so cliche?

Writing on blogs might be commonplace. Good writing is not. Spend a little time thinking about writing well and you'll be ahead of the crowd.

That said, I don't think you should worry too much about how other people will see your writing. I treat my blog as a sort of public notebook. The articles are primarily for me; they are what I'd want to have read if I hadn't done the research myself, and/or a year later when I've forgotten everything. That takes off the pressure to be perfectly original or polished.


Don’t stop following your curiosity ever, just make sure you aren’t quickly moving on for emotional reasons e.g. fear of failure, etc


I've felt similar recently, though more in the arts direction.

In the past few years I've discovered a love for playing music, singing, drawing, and painting. All things I never got into as a child/teenager for various reasons (parental discouragement, lack of opportunites, then lack of time etc.).

All things I could spend a lifetime exploring with passion. But as for what to do with those skills? I honestly can't think of an end goal other than enjoying them for myself (though pursuing them with dedication and focus is still a goal).

I feel too old to go about trying to join a band for the first time, and lack the many years of experience I expect it takes. Similarly on the drawing/painting side, it feels the internet/world is full of struggling professional artists, I can't imagine what I'd contribute even if I wanted to.

So happy to carry on for personal enjoyment, and accept that there's no obligation to do anything with any skills/interests I acquire.


It's only been an hour and y'all are already making me cry.


There is a danger in casting a wide net. Many will mistake knowledge gained from a book as experience, but even experts are wrong (all the time).

My advice is to seek truth and be humble in accepting it, knowing that it could change at any moment. Don't try to be a teacher, try to be a humble student who is willing to share their knowledge.


> I'm interested in so many disciplines, but what can I do with that?

> From psychology to history of science to anthropology and sociology, to economics and politics, to philosophy and religious studies and cultural studies, etc.

You guys may consider my comment as begging for down-votes but why to chose so lowball content only? Among the disciplines the topicstarter has chosen there is only one which may be awarded with Noble prize (Economy) and at least one which is considered harmful quasi-science (Religion). There is no any STEM and the formulation of the question does not seems like, for example, topicstarter has learned Economy and discover Bitcoin, or has learned Philosophy and discover Stoicism, or has learned religions and discovered Atheism. That begs one question:

> I find it intrinsically motivating to move from ignorance slowly towards understanding.

How do you know you are really moving anywhere but not standing?


There is no Nobel Prize in Economics. There is a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel, which is not the same thing. And for the "not STEM" = "lowball" thing... "no math" does not mean "simple". Read through any serious sociology or anthropology work, you'll see what I mean.


If before they didn't know anything about economics, and now they have a basic understanding of how a country's economy works, I wouldn't call that standing. Same with all other topics, going from "zero knowledge" to "basic knowledge" is already more than what 99% of the people on the planet will know about any given topic.


Of course you are right but the devil is in details. How do you know the level of "basic knowledge" has been earned? Keep in mind that topicstarter is interested not in STEM when the question can be answered easily, like you can or can not solve that tasks in the end of some chapters of your Physics textbook.


I wrote a general comment in response to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930012


This is something I’ve thought a lot about, and I think the easiest answer is to get yourself a job in a field that necessarily requires a broad knowledge base, even if doesn’t seem like a “Renaissance man” sort of industry.

I don’t work in the shipping industry, but I’ve always had the impression that it’s one of these fields. You need to understand global geography and shipping lanes, which leads you to understanding the history of these regions, which leads you to researching their religions and cultures, their currencies, their artworks, their relations with other states, and so on. I imagine that a high level executive in the shipping industry needs to understand most of these things at some level.

Other potential industries might be the art market, food and things like coffee, and basically anything that cannot be accomplished by focusing exclusively on a tiny problem.


What does one do with an intellectual life other than swimming through intellectual content?

Apply what you're learning to impact your reality :)

-------

Maybe this is a bit abstract but I feel like one of the highest impact things you can do is incorporate the learnings into your day job, experiment, write about the impacts w.r.t your dayjob. I believe that this happens naturally and subconsciously as we learn but I try to make it explicit.

Build your psychology learnings into your interpersonal/team dynamics. Write about the results of what happens when you incorporate them.

Take your history passion and apply it to analyze the historical evolution of your dayjob, or incorporate the learnings of the past to influence your teams success in the future.

I feel like History, anthropology, psychology are ripe with examples, case studies, prior experiences that are directly applicable to day to day human interactions!


> I won't be able to handle the demands of formal schooling

There are evening universities, certificates, part-time masters degrees (e.g. see The Open University), all meant for people who don't study full-time.

Degrees help in signaling that you're more than just a dilettante, which matters to get the corresponding opportunities. There's no way for somebody who doesn't know you to assess how deep you actually go when you switch from one topic to another, unless they are themselves experts in these topics. And indeed, it's easy to be stuck with a shallow understanding of a whole field if nobody ever questions it (compare reading a pop-science book and sitting an exam). I feel it's especially true with the fields you've mentioned where any ground truth is more subtle to discern than in e.g. mathematics.


What does an intellectual life mean to you? Are you happy just learning things or do you feel the need to communicate, teach or debate your findings?

Some people give talks on interesting subjects, some people write blogs, some people write books, some folks start podcasts. Some people make games to explore new ideas.


Keep studying and learning! It’s a lifelong quest and there is literally no telling all the ways some pecuniary random training will play a role in later unknown adventures.

Interdisciplinary is the way to go for all human knowledge, IMO. How many times does a biology question “why is cyanide poisonous?” Lead to a chemistry question “what is the electron transport ?” Lead to physics “but what properties cause the electrons to move?” Question… it’s all related!

Humans are still in our intellectual infancy, socially speaking, as we do not yet incentivize actually interdisciplinary study:

Yet, you will need many hats to bring some new technology to market.

You may do well as either primary or associate in entrepreneurial enterprise. True vision has a leg up on all the ants plodding along the line, IMO


You need to secure your source of resources.

Once you have that basis is fantastic if you can follow your natural curiosity to become a generalist. You go on and you'll eventually find your Logos [1].

One suggestion: map your ignorance.

That was very important for Aristotle. If your curiosity tells you something about a thing you ignore, make a node with it in your ignorance map and continue. You might not study all the nodes, but you'll know far better than most people the things you know and the ones you don't saving you of tons of bad decisions and words you would regret of having expressed (intellectual prudence).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgVA6nXCj1U


Since you mention that you like writing, and loves to swim to the ideas of others. I just thought that you should make notes on the ideas that you gathered. The related that idea to the other ideas. You need a system on how to organize those ideas.

After I read your post, I realized that you might be interested on how "Niklas Luhmann and his Zettelkasten" became a success.

You also might want to check the book: How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by S. Ahrens

Zettelkastenp[0] has been mentioned a lot here in HN.

Software like notion, roam, emacs org-roam, obsidian, etc, can support this system.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten


basically you're hitting the wall that Aristotle was talking about- only aristocratic people can pursue knowledge, because the other people are busy working (to sustain the aristocrats)

you're to low-born to lead a satisfying intellectual life, sorry :/ I'm like you


Seems like you have a tool (an intellect), and you're looking for something to use it for. Kind of like "has hammer, looking for nails".

Furthermore, you seem to dismiss advanced degrees as well as science, so it seems you attention is fleeting. Did you consider if maybe you have ADD?

Anyway, "intellectual pursuits" in itself is nothing to build a life on, especially if you have children. At some point, it may help to leave the "search" mode and instead try to figure out what your fundamental values are. If you know what you value, you are in a much better position to set up a life path to maximize that.

If taking care of a familiy is not pretty high on your list of meaningful activities, starting a familiy may be a bad idea.


Mix things that can be a project/challenge all together.

Many disciplines or research are usually studied from one perspective only by experts in one field.

I thought of these things for a while with questions like: I am a CS by degree but I am interested in biology. How can I apply my skills there at the same time I learn and do something useful? Maybe a research about cancer?

Look at what some people achieved by self-learning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto,_Michaela,_and_Loren...

Pick something you are interested in. Go with it. I am pretty sure most things are enriched by muti-disciplinary perspectives.


You can start a science twitter, tweet every thought, every interesting fact you have found and you'll build a following and get your insights vetted, confirmed or refuted by the crowd. A very powerful way to increase your knowledge and accuracy.


> A couple of years back I started dabbling ...

Awesome. This is what schools and good teachers should be doing. That it comes from within you is rare. Take care.

> I feel like something is missing.

Never lose that feeling. It's precious. It's what motivates the greats.

> I feel like I want to do something more tangible with this breadth of interest

The answer is "Help people." How that unfolds is the journey. Nobody can tell you.

> What does one do with an intellectual life other than swimming through intellectual content?

Discover tools that can improve the individual lives of people. IMHO "the world" and any group of people is the wrong level of analysis and your energy will get blurred out in bureaucracy and money issues.


Edit Wikipedia. It will improve your writing ability and get your writing to a broad audience. It's the easiest way to get your content checked if you don't do this for a living or in an educational institution.


I kinda feel the same. Choose a field where you are already good and get a job/have a business in it for living. On other side become a ruthless learner of whatever you like. Go to different gathering of industries/disciplines, go to Expos,if feel like you can also join part-time university course or become a citizen scientist. Log your knowledge in any form of blog, journal, diary or personal knowledge-base. Hop between them when you feel like, if stuck read your past progress. It feeds my curiosity but it does not mostly create the positive cash-flow.


The most valuable thing I think one can apply that kind of mind to is reading about and practising leadership. Not for the potential power, but to learn how to lead and not mislead. Use your knowledge to recognize ability in others and scale it. In a similar position, I focused on learning harder things that required physical competence and taking lessons, and not so much reading without practice. Finding specialists in the field socially was also healthy because they could kindly show how dumb I sounded, and I still seek them out for that reason.


Could you have some form of ADHD? Merely to suggest there’s a repertoire of helpful skills that may be handy.

I have been fascinated in so many fields, and have very much been driven, neigh propelled by curiousity.

It would be amazing to weave the thoughts into a career, if you can pick stuff up fast that helps to make the most of the ephemeral fascinations.

Time to digest and reflect on those thoughts to see how they might connect can be hugely rewarding, perhaps even overwhelming.

Beyond that it is trying to do something with those ideas, honing them, sharing them, explaining them, and applying them.


The happiest person I’ve met in your condition is a real estate lawyer. Partner in a small firm, millionaire in their 30s, passionate leader in his chosen hobbies, for which he has ample time.

Maybe real estate closing attorneys won’t be sitting as pretty in time - something attainable will be.

In short - when you have money you can afford time spent not working, when you can indulge your passions. For some this may be getting another degree, for others this may be running something in their community, the only prerequisite for this club is available time.


Is there room for advice on what happens if you have this affliction in the programming language space?

I did the guru thing, and then went on a journey of polyglotism for the last 10 years. And hanging out on HN doesn’t help! Should I Rust? Or Zig? Or React? Or … the list just goes on … and FOMO kicks in.

But I find on the rare occasion when I check linked in, there’s lots of offers for one specific language or the other. Im not sure what the market for polyglots (or scanners as mentioned above) is anymore.


In the end, you can't do it all, and why would you? That would be extremely taxing. Most disciplines work with other disciplines, so pick a related cluster of disciplines. You'll get to work with them and experience some of their world, while having your own you can be competent in. In the end, it doesn't really matter, and consider that for many people in the world, they don't have a choice to begin with.


Bill Gates says that he can become enthusiastic about almost anything, so he chooses very deliberately. This can be very powerful, as we see.

Take a very close look at the way you move between interests. Did you move to a new interest based on enthusiasm? Or do you lose interest in the previous topic?

If you have the same flexibility as Bill Gates, why not choose to make the biggest impact you can, in the most practical fields possible?

Energy for example. Or water.


If you have knowledge across fields you're a prime candidate to consult for cross-pollination of ideas horizontally across silos of different fields.


Hey, I am working on a marketplace called SkillShack. It is a small-cohort learning platform for lifelong learning focusing on 'skills school should have taught you'.

Your dream job might not exist yet but maybe we can create it together It is rare to find curious polymaths like you. Trying to assemble a team of us. If slightly curious, DM me on Twitter: @productnerd

Power to you man. Don't stop


This applies to me as well. I have worked as a display artist, electronics technician, software developer, electronics manufacturing manager, extraction metallurgist (On a diamond mine), tv repair man, lampshade designer and a few other odd jobs. Be careful, you may end up like me, and have an interesting life. I am 60 now and looking for the next exciting thing to do, any suggestions?


I have a similar problem. I've found investing and working as a researcher at an investment firm (or VC firm) is a good fit as you get to learn a lot about different industries and companies without having to spend months on the same thing or get too deep into the weeds.

If you do MBTI you'll probably find you're an ENTP or INTP, and learning more about that can help guide you as well.


Hey, this may seem random but have you looked into infosec? Just suggesting based on experience and based on other folks I met in the industry.


I am trying to figure that out, too, working now on my PhD. For my work life it just means I can engage in interesting conversations. That's quite something, helps with networking a lot. For my PhD I can re-use a lot (not all) of the stuff, because the social sciences are much more eclectic nowadays. For sure I get criticized for showing extensively how the dots connect.


Don't believe for a second that anything is wrong with you. This book changed/revealed my life and it might be what you're looking for:

Refuse to Choose!

Barbara Sher

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/593218/refuse-to-ch...


You could start your own business, perhaps. All of a sudden your day job will have constant suprises needing your diverse knowledge.


As someone else said, your diversity of interests is a strength even if "the system" does not seem geared towards that end.


Without mastery of any particular skill or subject, only interest in many, then you're pretty much limited to writing about it, making Youtube video content about it as someone else said, and stuff like that. If you learn enough about something you may be able to write a book about it one day. But pretty much everything else requires mastery.


I have been in just the same situation, I ended up studying two of those things (philosophy, film/art). I never gave up on the others (music, electronics, design, programming), now I work in electronics and programming.

My worry back then was that doing all these things was a sure way to be mediocre at all of them, and good at none. This was not how ot turned out.


> but that's seems so cliche

Why does it matter and why would that sway from the only practical idea you had?

If you are passionate about something and find a practical use just follow that passion.

It seems to me that you're unconsciously eager to take excuses for your own inaction, but I would suggest you to be brave rather than correct on this particular itch you have.


You could try creating a Youtube channel, to share what you have learned with others. Your broader-than-average background should allow you to weave ideas from many fields together in unusual combinations. While there's lots of competition in Youtube (don't do cooking videos!), niche channels still can make a dent.


The obvious thing you could do to start with is review books on a blog. Use the book reviews as a way to explain yourself as a person, find your own thoughts, and as a pre-fabricated context to intersperse your own pieces.

Apart from that, more generally:

If you are writing at the moment, keep writing.

If you are not writing at the moment, start writing again.

Anything.


Embracing the fact that you are a lifelong learner (LLL), perhaps just the silly fact that it has a name and a cool acronym, might go some way toward helping you feel less anxious about it. I am a LLL myself, and this seems like an excellent way of living one's life.


You sound kinda like me tbh. You could be an author alongside the day job: it's not a bad job for someone who likes reading.

Imo if you have a bunch of different interests that are all equally interesting it doesn't hurt to choose one that pays well (e.g. software engineering)


> What does one do with an intellectual life other than swimming through intellectual content?

I study one thing in my spare time until that thing can become another revenue path.

Before it can on its own, I'm combining it with my software skills.

First as a hobby, next as a way to make a small side income.


I have a very wealthy friend (born into wealth but successful otherwise) who wont do anything unless he can be in the 99th or 95th percentile of people doing it. He tries stuff that seems like he would be good at and doesn't do the other things.


Another option might be product management. I just had discussions with a few friends and mentors about this.

As a product manager, you could study culture, arts, technology, politics, etc. All seems relevant to designing and improving products.


Seems like most advice here is to secure some kind of financial future for yourself first to be able to follow your passion.

But I think many here will never find the fulfillment you feel when you study new topics.

I think cultivating that passion should come first.


Learn to care about the world around you; find something you want to fix in the world, and fix it.

Given that you're able to hop fields easily, you can learn the tools required to do it. The rest is just a matter of will and focus.


Don't worry, at some point your brain stops being capable of processing all the new stuff and you'll have to focus all your energy on just keeping what you have, so the problem solves itself in time.


Explore some topics in detail, write a book explaining them to others in simple words. This is probably not half as easy as it sounds, but it might be fun. Atleast that's what I'd do-


I recommend Derek Sivers' essay "Don't be a Donkey": https://sive.rs/donkey


Read Vogler’s The Writers Journey to learn basic mythological structure. Read The Art Spirit by Robert Henri to give yourself permission to be creative. Then write a novel.


At the end of the day, nobody hires a generalist. So whatever you choose should either be private or creative.

But most importantly, the reason for the activity should be personal/internal. Otherwise the depressing reality of 0 will hit hard. I believe we're similar, with multiple interests, that's why I started my blog[1] and podcast, The Language of My Soul. But, the only audience is myself when I check it works fine haha.

I'd suggest writing. Trying to bridge together knowledge should be interesting. It's also very low commitment, just 5 minutes is good enough.

[1] https://langsoul.com


> nobody hires a generalist

I don't know about that. And I find the generalists do the hiring.


Internet fueled a jack-of-all trade effect in me. Not helped by Russian librarians.

Best wishes trying to find a useful outlet for your interests (but beware of spreading yourself too thin)


So you're interestd in science but not enough to study it? There is a lot of youtube of science edutainment, that's just the thing.


You haven’t said what you do for money. Is that all sorted out? Or, are you wealthy enough that you don't have to work?

It is very important to truly know yourself and design your life based on that.

I was born into enough wealth that I did not have to think about food, clothes, treatment, housing, etc. -the very basics. But, by no way were we rich.

So, I knew I had to work.

What work? After some disillusionment, a lot of naiveness-led-rigidity, I knew that it was anything that paid well, had any impact, was intellectually stimulating, and had smart, sophisticated (I am the judge of that, not the society's definition) colleagues.

I was focused on one particular field that turned out to be wrong.

The lesson here is not to be stringent and knowing yourself.

I am like you, too. I am generally curious about all imaginable things in life. My curiosity is all-encompassing. I just like to know how stuff came to be- how much can be known and how much can't. I understand the limit of platonic, epistemic knowledge. But I would like to form better pictures of everything around me. Is the Standard Model approach right? How did it come to be? Is quantized time real? How did the German nation come to be? What did Nagarjuna mean by zero? What effects do Godel's Incompleteness Theorem have on the future of Math?

None of these are directly related to my work.

But I like to know. Right now, I am learning Quantum Computing, Ethereum (I am opposite of a crypto-bro, and this tech interests me deeply), western classical music, and Madhyamika Philosophy.

But I do not get paid to do these.

My approach is- aside from work, family time, do things that deeply interest me. Let those areas influence my work and what I am, enrich myself, and be better. I also read a lot of interesting non-fiction and big fat novels like War and Peace and Don Quixote for entertainment.

I will tell you one thing that no one else told you in this thread-

_It is worth it to form deep expertise in a narrow area_.

By doing this, you not only become an expert in one area, but also learn how to become an expert in other areas.

Do not be opposed to the idea of "narrow areas". Because once you have the taste of "depth" in a "narrow area", you are forever hooked to that feeling. This will aid you to learn more in other fields.

I will tell you, but I have absolutely no proofs or reference, that true depth in some areas also helps you find connections better. It makes you learn better, in general.

Your aversion to narrow areas will cost you dearly, in my humble opinion.

Like others said, you can be a media person, but not a scholar with deep understanding of reality.

If you want to have a much better understanding of how reality works- in a much more informed, much more structured way- go deep into some and skim through many.

_Depth is a common meta_.

This is my understanding. I am not claiming to be truly right.

I have started reading something that might interest you-

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. They are both designers and taught a class at Stanford that taught students how to design their life based on design principles.

It is a short book- unlikely to "change" my life or yours. But might learn new helpful things. Very relevant to your current situation.


I second this.

In order to become an appreciated and appreciative generalist one also has to go deep down (at least one) rabbit hole of "specialized" knowledge.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is quite powerful and not only on a small scale of a couple of months but a couple of years, too. I must admit that I experienced the imposter syndrome quite intensely relatively late in my life only after really digging into a particular field (on/off >5 years): the amount of things "known" is truly and shockingly (infinitesimally) small like looking into a void after all that acquired knowledge and skill.

This (humbling) experience makes you a better rounded generalist i.e. team player in being able to connect with the sensitive issue of "horror vacuui" specialists see themselves inevitably confronted at times: What do I know.


Exactly.

A scanner knows enough vocabulary to fool non-experts and thus is susceptible to developing DK. This definitely enforces DK as one of many factors.

I have met several such people. I have expertise in multiple narrow areas, and they couldn’t fool me.

This has, in turn, made me skeptic in all other areas where I do not have expertise. I always have my guards up when I hear someone talk about anything.


> What does one do with an intellectual life other than swimming through intellectual content?

I've found myself in a similar point in life (currently 29). When I was young, everyone encouraged me to learn, and I think I get intrinsic pleasure from it, so like you I've done an enormous amount of reading on a variety of topics.

# Ways being extremely curious can be bad that nobody tells you about

Not long ago, I started to feel discouraged because it didn't seem like the rules I was following in my life were actually making my life better. I think this was for a few reasons:

- For a long time I was reading articles on HN, Twitter, and elsewhere, so my attention was being extremely divided. When I became aware of this, I killed all my newsfeeds and just started reading books. Obviously I'm still here on HN, but I'm happy to say I read a fraction of what I used to.

- I prioritize learning something interesting over doing things that would make my life better, so I struggle with taking care of myself (e.g. cooking, household chores). I often wonder if I'm actually using learning as a distraction from anxiety.

- I started to realize most of the things I learn I don't really understand. This seems to be for a few reasons. 1) Reality has a surprising amount of detail, 2) a lot of authors honestly aren't that good, 3) I'm not always criticizing what I'm reading to see if it makes sense, sometimes just suspending disbelief with the hope that it'll all come together in time. But, if you don't actually understand things, you can't really do much with them. I've been aiming to instead of generically learn, learn with the aim of building tangible skills, because I think that would make me happier.

- I prioritize learning over reflecting on the higher-order reason for learning things in the first place. This is mostly because trying to figure out a high-level system to organize what I actually want to do with my life hasn't really seemed to get me anywhere, so I've resigned myself to looking at all the things I'm interested in learning, sticking with it for a few months, and then reevaluating. Not a system I'd recommend but it sort of works. I think I need to study philosophy; self-reflection for hours in coffee shops doesn't seem to actually lead to anything but disorganized, loosely associated vagaries.

- An extreme emphasis on reading can cause you to miss a huge part of your life, which is your conscious, subjective experience of things, who/what that spontaneous process that is "you" really is, and how to express it. For the longest time, I dismissed this as being useless to discuss or learn about because I felt if something couldn't be expressed in words, it was bullshit and it wasn't worth spending time on. The objective is nice and rational, but the subjective is still something you can gain knowledge of, and some people who are really in touch with art/fashion/film/interior design/music are shaping our emotional responses in ways that you just don't even notice if you limit yourself to books. A friend encouraged me to pick up an art to help develop this type of self-awareness better, and it's been a struggle, but one I'm grateful for.

# Explorers

Still, I think pleasure from learning is a valuable trait. One thing I've been reflecting on is Bartle's Taxonomy of Player Types [1], which would probably categorize us both as Explorers:

> Explorers, dubbed "Spades" (♠) for their tendency to dig around, are players who prefer discovering areas, and immerse themselves in the game world. They are often annoyed by time-restricted missions as that does not allow them to traverse at their own pace. They enjoy finding glitches or a hidden easter egg.

This model seems interesting to me for a few reasons:

- My friend, an Achiever type, and I, started playing an MMO game back in 2020 and we ended up completely dominating the in-game economy. I think this was because he was extremely pragmatic about moving us toward our goals, and I was able to really think hard about what we really needed to do in order to multiply our wealth.

- I've been reflecting on my career as a software engineer, and I think it wears me out because tech culture is so results oriented, which doesn't suit how I like to do things. I really don't care about making money or velocity, I just want to understand things and let my skills compound.

- I think this interest in deeply understanding how a system works and then being able to build new things with those principles was really valuable in being able to build/see the future in the game. I think it would work well in the real world as well. I've been looking for a word for this idea at a broader level, and I think it's essentially "critical thinking", something I don't think I ever properly learned in college. If I could do this in more parts of my life, I think I could do amazing things. I've been thinking of learning to write as a way to get better at this. But I agree, I don't really want to start a blog- I hate the attention economy and all it entails. I think all great writing is essentially criticism, but so is all great art and all great products, so I'd rather push in that direction after developing the ability to critically write/think.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...

I wrote this quickly, so apologize if it feels half-baked, but hope it stirs some thoughts. Am hoping others will have more to say on some of these points because honestly it's been an existential struggle for me trying to understand what to do with life. SWE hasn't really felt like my true calling lately.


I really resonated and agree with everything you've said. Thanks for sharing :) I really enjoyed reading all this, I think we'd make good friends (or twins lol).

I've had some similar issues as what you've described. Feel free to take a look at my other (more personal) submissions if you're interested.

:)


Hello again!

Would really love to continue the conversation with you somehow. Hope you see these replies eventually!


Maybe you should become a policymaker :)


This boosted my ego haha, thanks!


I recommend writing too. It clarifies your thoughts, bringing you closer to the insight you want.


100% agreed! What sorts of things do you think I could write? I'm fairly new to writing and don't have a lot of ideas on this.


I noticed I rarely have success if I intentionally try to write about a specific topic. It's usually an uphill battle.

Instead, just having a place where I can talk about whatever I want, without obligation seems to create the most opportunities. Sometimes that's Calmly Writer. Sometimes Roam Research. Sometimes even just replying on Hacker News can be useful. I particularly like writing on Hacker News because it gives you a sense of what really vibes with people without overwhelming an audience. It's a great testing ground.

Over time, writing often seems to clarify these cognitive structures in my head and give me a better intuition for what I want to say.

It's a very meditative process and I would say the best thing you can do is go into it without expectation.

Just have a place where you can write without expectation. And a place where you can write where people will watch.


That's really helpful! Thanks!


This is a good problem to have. Having a curious mind and taking pleasure in learning and growing, for me at least, is the highest pleasure. I'm into computer science, piano, European history, politics, Buddhism and a few other things. I get frustrated that there aren't enough hours in the day and it can feel a bit overwhelming. I also fear becoming a jack of all trades. I'd rather be masterful in one or two areas and proficient in a few more.

My solution to this is to prioritise. Comp Sci, as well as being fascinating to me, is related to my job and is my main marketable skillset so that takes precedence. Music is an important part of relaxing and recreation so that also ranks highly. On the other hand, politics and history, whilst being deeply important to me, are less so. They don't pay the bills and they don't maintain my wellbeing to the same extent. I invest less in these therefore.

So the tldr is that it's great that you like so many things, it's a great gift, but you should learn to prioritise in case you spread yourself too thin. Find a prioritisation metric that makes sense to you. Where does meaning / ability and fulfilment intersect with these areas for example?


This is really good food for thought! I especially like the part re music being important for relaxing and recreation. I used to be more musical, maybe I should get back to that. Especially since it requires less brain juice, might be a good candidate for solving my problem with self care :) Thanks so much for sharing and for your point on prioritisation!


Become a software engineer and solve problems in the areas you are interested in.


I just want to mention here that "swimming in ideas" does not equal understanding.

For almost every discipline you need years of practice and appliation to be able to understand it deeper than most.

Don't take this the wrong way, but here's an XKCD somewhat related to this topic: https://xkcd.com/863/


I appreciate the warning. I made a general comment in response to this topic here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930012


If you pick certain goals, it might help you converging a path of interests.


Any tips on getting better at picking goals? I'm exactly confused because I can't pick!


Choose two. Try to mix them.

Always be curious. But realise you only have so much time alive.


OP here, the second of my general response, to these types of comments:

> I just want to mention here that "swimming in ideas" does not equal understanding.

> How do you know you are really moving anywhere but not standing?

> OP wants to read "textbooks to learn basic concepts" and "swim in their ideas". That doesn't equal competence.

> The reading/learning you are doing is entertainment. It's not that much better than watching TV - if anything it's worse because you can kid yourself into thinking you are doing work, or that it's important.

> AKA procrastinating.

To clarify, I completely understand these sentiments, and I am fully aware of the distinction between "understanding" vs simply "reading/learning", "swimming in ideas", etc.

I was once a young naive soul celebrating how I was such an honorable keen "learner". But as I matured, I started to become aware that this habit of learning that I (and many others on the internet, including on HN) was so proud of, was (often) mere accumulation of knowledge, without synthesizing or juxtaposing anything together. We consumed "knowledge" like some baby food, instead of actually engaging actively and critically with the material, chewing through it, etc.

Over the past several years, I've spent a very long time thinking through topics just like this, trying to dissect and discern basic concepts like "learning" vs "understanding", as well as a host of other fundamental topics that many people (including intellectuals) seem to misunderstand. The only reason I've been able to do this is because I've jumped from discipline to discipline, getting an overview of how they relate to one another, trying to piece together certain universals, or spotting points of disagreement between disciplines. Of course, I lack actual expertise in any of these topics, but I do understand the nature of complexity that underlies everything (I think my background in ecology and evolutionary biology has trained me well in this regard).

All this was why I specifically used the phrase "swimming in ideas", because I know full well that I am not (currently) doing much to actually understand these concepts and topics. I also stated "moving from ignorance slowly towards understanding" because I am deliberately moving very slowly through topics knowing that my goal is to gradually understand them more, rather than to simply accumulate "knowledge".

This isn't meant to be a hit-piece on people who simply love to learn for learning's sake. It's just my own philosophy and my path in trying to figure things out. Hope this clarifies things. :)


I posted above before I'd read this -- I'd really stress again that, at least in the humanities, writing is the difference between mere 'accumulation of knowledge', which we all know will eventually be forgotten, and understanding. I would actually recommend Umberto Eco's book How to Write a Thesis as a great foundation for how to structure your cross-disciplinary studies and synthesize, again even if just for yourself. If you do start a blog, however 'cliched', you can also start to seek validation (or, even better, critical commentary!) from individuals in your fields of interest.

It feels very 'old internet' and his particular objects of study may not be of interest to you, but http://www.autodidactproject.org/ is the very interesting record of one man's lifelong studies outside the academy, as well as reflection on that process.

Best of luck! Certainly ignore those who say this is no different than watching TV if you feel a genuine 'conatus', i.e. striving and desire, for these pursuits.


Thanks so much for your comments! Super helpful!

One question: what sort of things do you think I could write as a novice in these fields?? I don't think I'm interested in writing study notes or summaries etc. I think I'm more inquiry-inclined, something more critical, more engaged.


Apologies, missed this response. Do you have an email address I can reach you at? It depends somewhat if you’re really interested in the “human” or “social” sciences, but I really do recommend that Eco How to Write a Thesis book regardless. It conveys the old secrets of how to enter humanistic scholarship — and was originally written to allow even working class Italians who might only have access to a library for an hour a week to do so.


Hello! Not sure if you were going to send me an email or not. I did have a question: How do you discern the human and social sciences? To be honest I'll probably love dabbling in both :)

> originally written to allow even working class Italians who might only have access to a library for an hour a week to do so

Btw this was very encouraging for me to read! As I'm definitely struggling to find enough time/attention in a day to do intellectual stuff.


Yeah I'm realizing that HN doesn't have a good way to check for replies. Makes it hard to have any discussion lasting more than a few days... I would really love to follow up on all the comments I'm getting and thank everyone etc. So much missed opportunity :(

My email is my username, but replace h with huang, at gmail.com :)

Yes I've been looking at Eco's Thesis book, looks very relevant!


This is great advice, saving, thanks!


Become an educator, presenter, or communicator. Like James Burke.


Didn't know about him before this, but now I'm intrigued! Thanks!


Enjoy it and find like-minded knowledgeworms to discuss with


If anything, the world needs more interdiciplinary scholars.


Thanks for this. I appreciate it :)


Study economics. Starting with Mises Human Action.


Oh this is cool! Thanks! Any other recommendations? Love collecting potential books to read :D


you said you're raising a family so the answer to your question is easy

you help your kids with their homework and projects

a broad interest is perfect for this


You're right, but too bad my kid is smarter than me facepalm.


Make writing for online magazines your goal.


What kinds of online magazines? I don't know that arena well.


> What does one do with an intellectual life other than swimming through intellectual content?

Psychology: I've used it.

HEXACO/Big 5, I've used it to find my girlfriend and test on compatibility. How do you do that? Well, I score high on "openness to experience", I can spot other open people from a mile away. Conscientious vs non-conscientious people are also quite easily recognizable by how rigid/organized they are. When a person disagrees sometimes and agrees a few times then they're moderately agreeable. Extraversion/introversion is easy to spot as well. Neuroticism is harder to spot but anxiety (or lack thereof) is correlated. There! No questionnaire needed! Though, when I knew my GF for 3 months I also gave her a questionnaire for fun which was stating the obvious: her personality was like mine. The most fun way in which you can see that is by looking at both our YouTube feeds, it's quite similar.

Priming: the idea of priming is nebulous due to the publication crisis, but it did teach me to care about the atmosphere you're setting.

Statistics: using statistics in psychology made me better at data science

Neuropsychology: one topic raised interesting questions, which was: can we want something and hate it (yes!)? Can we like something and not want it (yep)? This taught me a lot about certain aspects of addiction.

Neuroplasticity: awesome concept. Neuroplastic behavior has been observed in meditators and hardcore gamers. My guess is that anything you'll do intensely for a few hours will change your brain somewhat.

The publication crisis: many things in psychology are bullshit because there's too much of a publish/perish culture and because of that reproduction of research is an issue. This is especially why you need to put whatever research you read into practice. By using it yourself, you'll find out quickly whether it's research you can meaningfully build on yourself.

Intuition: you can trust your intuition iff (1) you've had many examples of whatever you're intuiting about, (2) the rules were structured like chess or poker (expected value + law of large numbers is needed -- see (1) ) and (3) you can sense you're own intution in the first place. Because of this I immediately realized that people that say "yup I'm good with people" might make the catastrophic flaw of thinking that they're also good with people from an entirely different culture! I've seen this happen up close. The reason is simple: you haven't seen anyone from an entirely different culture, so whatever intuition you have I would not trust it.

Just some thoughts about psychology. I've been an enthusiast about psychology for about 15 years and got academically schooled in it 10 years ago.


Awesome stuff! Agree with everything. The neuropsychology and addiction part, I need to look into that! Thanks for this! :)


Feel free to shoot an email. I don't look at it every day but when I catch it, I'll send over some info :)


I don't have anything to add to finding a solution to your problem, but I think you're not alone and a lot of people have this exact same feeling. Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/863/


I appreciate this :)


Join a hackerspace.


Seems fun actually.I would love to join analogous spaces for other disciplines 'cause I can't hack :(


Teaching


Expand?


be a broken comb




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