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> learning without purpose sucks, I mean it's still very valuable, but it sucks in that sense that it is "unpredicatbly effective". Your presumption is that pe
by a4isms 4y ago
> learning without purpose sucks, I mean it's still very valuable, but it sucks in that sense that it is "unpredicatbly effective".
Your presumption is that people are only interested in learning things that make them more effective. This is certainly true of many people at least some of the time, of course. This can be established by direct observation: How many times have you ever heard someone in a classroom ask, "Will this be on the test?"
Bt as a universal proposition, it can also be contradicted by direct observation: People learn things for "the pleasure of finding things out," the title of a Feynman book.
Why else would anyone read a book like Raymond Smullyan's "To Mock a Mockingbird?" There are precious few occupations where you will become more effective if you know how starlings and kestrels can combine in various permutations to compute anything computable.
The first half of your sentence is correct: Learning without purpose sucks. But there are many purposes for learning, including fun (like learning combinatory logic via songbirds in forests) or a desire to understand the way things work or the desire to be viewed by our peers as a learned person.
- tester756 4y agoDon't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should only learn for "material" "monetary" "measurable" value, fun/thought has value too, but I think that in the context of this thread we are talking about learning to get better at job/craft, so - languages, frameworks, concepts/theories/foundations, tools, and so on
- a4isms 4y agoOh I totally get that, and as someone who likes to program for fun... One of the ways you make more time available for the things you learn for fun (esoteric programming, rock climbing, ultimate, playing music, flying gliders) is by being very intentional about what you choose to learn for "your job." Another comment made a good point: Perhaps we should call such learning "training." We expect automobile mechanics to know the basic physics behind ICE, but nobody expects the person changing their oil to learn about the computational fluid dynamics involved in designing fuel injection systems. If you ask, "How can I learn about programming," I would expect the answer to involve a mix of both CompSci basics and practical direction for writing actual programs in a reasonably accessible programming language. But if you ask, "How can I train to get a job working as a programmer in BigCo," I totally get that the answer should lean in, hard, on the practical and the currently marketable.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoYour presumption is that people are only interested in learning things that make them more effective. I feel like deep diving into conceptual things makes more effective. There's no longer dark corners in my mind when I think about certain problems. It helps me move forward with confidence knowing I've done the research and I know I'm on the right path, rather than following a heuristic.