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I feel like boring to some extent means that poor communication is happening. What you're learning when dealing with a boring subject is how to deal with someth

I feel like boring to some extent means that poor communication is happening. What you're learning when dealing with a boring subject is how to deal with something/someone that is unengaging, dense or confusing. Although this is a skill, I feel like learning the material isn't really taking place. For example I read many, many scientific papers in college and they were all very boring. I feel like the big take away was how to deal with this type of communication medium which was dense, verbose and contextual. I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
> I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way. What is the alternative? Only learning from curated, well crafted sources? It would be great to raise the floor of educational material. Ultimately though people will need to grow beyond well trodden paths, so they'll probably need to work through some noise to find the signal.
atoav 4y ago
I think it is a good skill to have, to know that sometimes the information you truly need might exist in a shape that you cannot appreciate (yet). Note that boring is subjective and it very often also means "this looks complicated I am not going to bother trying to understand it". For example for a beginner when there is no programming tutorial for some library they wanna use, it might help to try reading the example code. This is something actual programmers do all the time, but to a beginner this might feel like a fruitless (and thus boring) path. Being able to go into something without that dangling carrot of "this solves your problems directly" attached to it, is an immensly valuable skill. The reason for this is that a beginner cannot know what they don't know and going through "the boring stuff" might answer a lot of questions a beginner never knew existed and give them a feeling for the problem space. It is essentially the difference between additionally reading the documentation and the source code vs just searching for answers on stack-overflow. I don't say that one is better than the other, my point is that people are lazy and impatient so they often want answers that solve their problems without realizing that their question makes not much sense if they had read "the boring stuff". Making the boring stuff less boring is always a good idea, but it won't solve this problem, because many people want answers and they don't want to learn the basics beforehand.

paulryanrogers 4y ago

> I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way. What is the alternative? Only learning from curated, well crafted sources? It would be great to raise the floor of educational material. Ultimately though people will need to grow beyond well trodden paths, so they'll probably need to work through some noise to find the signal.

atoav 4y ago

I think it is a good skill to have, to know that sometimes the information you truly need might exist in a shape that you cannot appreciate (yet). Note that boring is subjective and it very often also means "this looks complicated I am not going to bother trying to understand it". For example for a beginner when there is no programming tutorial for some library they wanna use, it might help to try reading the example code. This is something actual programmers do all the time, but to a beginner this might feel like a fruitless (and thus boring) path. Being able to go into something without that dangling carrot of "this solves your problems directly" attached to it, is an immensly valuable skill. The reason for this is that a beginner cannot know what they don't know and going through "the boring stuff" might answer a lot of questions a beginner never knew existed and give them a feeling for the problem space. It is essentially the difference between additionally reading the documentation and the source code vs just searching for answers on stack-overflow. I don't say that one is better than the other, my point is that people are lazy and impatient so they often want answers that solve their problems without realizing that their question makes not much sense if they had read "the boring stuff". Making the boring stuff less boring is always a good idea, but it won't solve this problem, because many people want answers and they don't want to learn the basics beforehand.