Dwarkesh Patel: recommendation

Transcript context

…t of cognitive demand that's placed on me by the subject is just much lower than it is for other subjects. So much of it is familiar already that I can deploy my own planning more effectively as I go. But it's also the case that because I know so many things about the subject, I can do a better job from the get go of making a plan. Because making a plan requires modeling a path or predicting a path or saying, “Well, I guess I'd need to see how this connects to that or something like this.” And if your destination and your starting point are very far away, then you can't necessarily see all the things in between or how to draw those lines. But if those things are only a couple hops away, you can maybe infer pretty accurately. Right. I guess this maybe implies that if you do want to learn about a subject, it might just be helpful to just do an Intro to X subject course or textbook, not necessarily because it is instrumentally valuable to whatever problem you're interested in but because it'll give you the context by which to proceed on, the actual learning. That's true. It's also the case that you don't even know all the stuff there is. This is another key problem and this is another reason why we outsource stuff. There's a fundamental tension in unschooling, for instance. Just let the kids pursue what they're interested in. That's cool. There's a lot of good things about that. But say that a kid's true passion turns out to be ocean geology or something and they're in a landlocked country and there's just no one around them that talks about ocean geology, then they're missing out on some great opportunity. But if the school had a program where they are bringing in guest speakers and then there's a special lecture on ocean geology from this person and it lights up the kid's world, even if they wouldn't have chosen that lecture, that's a good thing.…

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