You can do high level research before committing to X. Skimming subject literature, asking others, googling (someone's probably talked about it before), wikipe

You can do high level research before committing to X. Skimming subject literature, asking others, googling (someone's probably talked about it before), wikipedia, even flipping through X etc. are all useful. Subject areas rarely exist in a vacuum. A big part of education is learning how to learn things -- it's a metaskill. Knowledge exists in a network, and knowing how to use the network to bootstrap is a tremendously useful skill.