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Wow. I hope everything you read is written by a dyed-in-the-wool weapons-grade programmer, otherwise you might accidentally read a perspective on a subject uni

Wow. I hope everything you read is written by a dyed-in-the-wool weapons-grade programmer, otherwise you might accidentally read a perspective on a subject unique from your own.

anarazel 11y ago
I don't know why toyg felt the need to communicate that, but in today's internet one of the most important skills is to avoid spending time on stuff where you're unlikely to learn much. There's just too much stuff out there. So you end up building low effort filters, which obviously have a noticeable false-positive rate. Reading things adequate to your experience level seems like a pretty sensible filter, if you'd otherwise read the article with the intent to learn new facts. It's obviously different if you want to make meta-observations about learning, recruiting or something like that. How to not end up in a bubble is a problem, but imo a smaller one than wasting time, given how much stuff there's to learn and how fast the field widens.
- RankingMember 11y ago
  I really don't see why this person's level of development experience makes the core message irrelevant to someone with more experience. To your second point, I think that if everyone was able to filter their time to just the things they knew they had an immediate interest in, cross-pollination of ideas would be vastly constricted and the people with their massive thought-firewalls would be worse off and less able to relate to others for it. What you end up with is a bunch of people in ivory towers so concerned with not polluting their perfected thought bubbles that their relevance and avenues to impact the world at large are severely constricted. I can't speak for others, but I've stumbled into some of my greatest realizations while I was "wasting time", so I don't see it as a problem at all. You'll never be able to know everything, and forcing yourself to learn things simply out of a fear of wasting time or falling behind on a never-ending stream of new things seems to be an awfully rigid way to go about learning. Too rigid for me, anyways- people are different and evidently we are far apart here. :)
  - anarazel 11y ago
    > I really don't see why this person's level of development experience makes the core message irrelevant to someone with more experience. I wasn't speaking specifically about the original article; I, perhaps mistakenly, didn't read your earlier comment about toyg's attitude being specific to the article. > To your second point, I think that if everyone was able to filter their time to just the things they knew they had an immediate interest in, cross-pollination of ideas would be vastly constricted and the people with their massive thought-firewalls would be worse off and less able to be relate to others for it. Not being of immediate interest, and unlikely to ever be of interest are two very different categories for me. I regularly read stuff that I think is interesting but outside my current area of expertise/occupation, or too advanced for me to use immediately. E.g. for me, articles about new frontend technologies are only of passing interest. It's good to know what's roughly happening, but given that I used to do frontend-y stuff and disliked it, that I'm specialized in a way different direction, and that trends are changing rather quickly, I don't see why I would spend a lot of time on those. Another example is articles in my specialization, but targeted towards people with less experience in it. Those I might read, but not to learn technical skills, but rather to see where e.g. postgres is lacking, or to help people. > You'll never be able to know everything, and forcing yourself to learn things simply out of a fear of wasting time or falling behind on a never-ending stream of new things seems to be an awfully rigid way to go about learning. Outside of things where I absolutely can't avoid it, say taxes and visa procedures, I've pretty much given up on trying to learn stuff I don't find interesting. If I have to force myself to learn something, I'm usually incredibly inefficient at it. That's why, to this day, I barely ever miss school or university. I wouldn't, btw, phrase it as "fear of falling behind" - rather as accepting that it's unrealistic and very likely painful, to try to keep up with everything. > people are different and evidently we are far apart here. :) Maybe. If so, that's probably a good variety to have ;)
deleted 11y ago
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Wow. I hope everything you read is written by a dyed-in-the-wool weapons-grade programmer, otherwise you might accidentally read a perspective on a subject unique from your own.

anarazel 11y ago

I don't know why toyg felt the need to communicate that, but in today's internet one of the most important skills is to avoid spending time on stuff where you're unlikely to learn much. There's just too much stuff out there. So you end up building low effort filters, which obviously have a noticeable false-positive rate. Reading things adequate to your experience level seems like a pretty sensible filter, if you'd otherwise read the article with the intent to learn new facts. It's obviously different if you want to make meta-observations about learning, recruiting or something like that. How to not end up in a bubble is a problem, but imo a smaller one than wasting time, given how much stuff there's to learn and how fast the field widens.

RankingMember 11y ago
I really don't see why this person's level of development experience makes the core message irrelevant to someone with more experience. To your second point, I think that if everyone was able to filter their time to just the things they knew they had an immediate interest in, cross-pollination of ideas would be vastly constricted and the people with their massive thought-firewalls would be worse off and less able to relate to others for it. What you end up with is a bunch of people in ivory towers so concerned with not polluting their perfected thought bubbles that their relevance and avenues to impact the world at large are severely constricted. I can't speak for others, but I've stumbled into some of my greatest realizations while I was "wasting time", so I don't see it as a problem at all. You'll never be able to know everything, and forcing yourself to learn things simply out of a fear of wasting time or falling behind on a never-ending stream of new things seems to be an awfully rigid way to go about learning. Too rigid for me, anyways- people are different and evidently we are far apart here. :)
- anarazel 11y ago
  > I really don't see why this person's level of development experience makes the core message irrelevant to someone with more experience. I wasn't speaking specifically about the original article; I, perhaps mistakenly, didn't read your earlier comment about toyg's attitude being specific to the article. > To your second point, I think that if everyone was able to filter their time to just the things they knew they had an immediate interest in, cross-pollination of ideas would be vastly constricted and the people with their massive thought-firewalls would be worse off and less able to be relate to others for it. Not being of immediate interest, and unlikely to ever be of interest are two very different categories for me. I regularly read stuff that I think is interesting but outside my current area of expertise/occupation, or too advanced for me to use immediately. E.g. for me, articles about new frontend technologies are only of passing interest. It's good to know what's roughly happening, but given that I used to do frontend-y stuff and disliked it, that I'm specialized in a way different direction, and that trends are changing rather quickly, I don't see why I would spend a lot of time on those. Another example is articles in my specialization, but targeted towards people with less experience in it. Those I might read, but not to learn technical skills, but rather to see where e.g. postgres is lacking, or to help people. > You'll never be able to know everything, and forcing yourself to learn things simply out of a fear of wasting time or falling behind on a never-ending stream of new things seems to be an awfully rigid way to go about learning. Outside of things where I absolutely can't avoid it, say taxes and visa procedures, I've pretty much given up on trying to learn stuff I don't find interesting. If I have to force myself to learn something, I'm usually incredibly inefficient at it. That's why, to this day, I barely ever miss school or university. I wouldn't, btw, phrase it as "fear of falling behind" - rather as accepting that it's unrealistic and very likely painful, to try to keep up with everything. > people are different and evidently we are far apart here. :) Maybe. If so, that's probably a good variety to have ;)

deleted 11y ago

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