Ask HN: I'm interested in so many disciplines, but what can I do with that?
I find it intrinsically motivating to move from ignorance slowly towards understanding. I love reading textbooks to learn basic concepts and looking through academic titles just to swim in their ideas.
While I loved university, I won't be able to handle the demands of formal schooling (especially not while raising a family). I also wouldn't want to do any advanced research degrees as I have no patience in studying a small set of problems (I tried it for science and it was horrendous).
While I have no issue just continuing to explore these subjects privately, I feel like something is missing. I feel like I want to do something more tangible with this breadth of interests, but I'm coming up empty in terms of ideas. I like writing and can imagine having some sort of blog, but that's seems so cliche?
Any suggestions? Perhaps examples of something others have done with their broad interests?
What does one do with an intellectual life other than swimming through intellectual content?
324 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadWrite a blog, and then create a video for each blog post, and upload it to YouTube (where the eyeballs willing to consume intellectual material are).
Also do livestreams.
Start interviewing anyone who will take you seriously. Set a goal for who your dream interviewee is.
Do this for a couple years, putting out content every week, and then glue & edit all that stuff down into a book that says something interesting, useful, and at least somewhat new.
Publish that book. Get interviewed yourself by other people.
Being a writer is not cliche. There's an enormous world there and a career you can build, and I think it's a very good idea to pursue that, so that you can get paid for pursuing your curiosity. In 10 years or so, if you keep at it, you could be doing very well for yourself and have "built" some things you're really proud of.
More what I'm saying is that the environment requires shedloads of marketing acumen. Not that that's impossible to learn, but it means you're either getting someone to sell it for you (i.e., a publisher) or have to do a lot of work you probably don't love (i.e., not writing).
Or you could be like me and make stuff for fun, and never expect to get paid for it!
There's bonus value in getting paid because it's a relatively simple metric for "how good of a writer am I".
I absolutely want to interview people, dig their brains, hear their stories, etc.! This reminds me of how I used to go to my profs office hours because I just loved hearing them talk passionately about their subjects.
A question, livestream of what?
He just reads a bunch of stuff and then does a livestream talking about current events and connecting them with what he's read (plus jokes). There's also a lot of reacting to YouTubers' video essays and the news.
Bullet points for livestreaming subject matter:
* Reacting to the news.
* Reacting to YouTubers / web content.
* Q&A sessions (this is key--the strength of livestreaming is audience interactivity, and that audience will be fiercely loyal).
* Spitballing -- You can give a rough version of a presentation you might give in a video.
* Live writing / creating -- This sounds crazy, but people actually watch people write code, create music etc.
Additional considerations:
* Create a ritual that people show up for. Livestreaming and video audiences love rhythm.
* You don't have to be that entertaining -- people often turn to Twitch/YouTube to fill a similar need in their life that they use podcasts for -- background noise / a distraction where they can feel like they're in the room with a public figure / community.
Whyyyyyyyyy?!
Seriously I'm curious, what happened? Do intellectuals (whatever that means) really not prefer reading any more?
A desire for Podcasts/audiobooks I can understand, as someone who occasionally has to drive places, but video?
And video is a more addictive medium.
> And video is a more addictive medium.
IMHO it is not about video but about smartphones. They are too optimized for consuming ads instead of sciences. For example, it is way more handy to watch videos while constantly being interrupted by social networks than to silent reading if you are already taking a smartphone in your hands.
I think videos are the best way to consume content in ~20 minutes.
I think that good videos add something on top of the raw script. Visuals, body language, sound effects and music, timing,... That's just for the kinds of videos where the bulk of information is in the script, which excludes things like videos about music production or the like.
Maybe if you spend 20 minutes reading a book, there's going to be a lot of interleaved information: kind of repetition, but with change, so that you really get a good feeling for the core ideas.
A video that would take the same amount of time to watch might not have the same density of language (and I'm not even sure what the ratio would be: i don't think it's 10X, as you implied)--well, maybe it achieves a similar effect, that of increasing comprehension, not by repetition or extra examples, but by the non-linguistic information I listed above.
The 2 minute article just doesn't have the same sticking power.
I find it easier to concentrate for an hour or two on a video than a book. I'm probably slightly dyslexic or something. At university I made sure I never missed a lecture but hardly ever read a book. I did above averagely well.
This is a disadvantage though. I have friends who can read books in a couple of hours and absorb the content. I'd have to sit through more hours of video to get the same content, even watching the videos at 2x speed.
Wild speculation: being intellectual used to require being good at book comprehension. Maybe only 10% of the population are good at that. Maybe some of the remaining 90% are still clever. If so, video content could allow those book-comprehension-limited people to become intellectual. That'd be nice.
That is because video does not requires you to concentrate. Imagine a book which is required to be read in 1x or 1.25x or 1.5x or 2x only. Pretty impossible to read, isn't it? You know, some paragraphs may require several hours to be read. Video just doesn't support to be consumed at different speeds per paragraph.
My English is not enough eloquent yet, so I share my anecdotal evidence. Some sentences in books is not understandable if reading only once, and we usually do not go to next one if the previous has been not understood. It is OK to read a sentence 5 times and to read another 2 places in previous parts of a book in order to understand that sentence. Going to a special place from previous parts of lecture might be a pain because of needness to re-listen some extra materials.
While watching video it is too easy to skip that hard sentences especially if professor is too charismatic to let us feel the needness to stop his lecture for a moment in order to think. And it is too hard to re-listen only the part is needed for re-listening, like when you can not parse one word (0.5 seconds long), so you press backwards and you realize that you need to relisten extra 4.5 seconds each re-reading.
That circumstances leads us to just keep listening while the pyramid of non-understanding actually grows on.
[1] Admittedly crap 2D car sim https://github.com/abainbridge/car_sim
I suspect this is at the root of disagreements about 'visual learners', etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
And finally, I often go to YouTube for something specific, like say researching a camera, and as long as I’m already there I catch a few short videos on this or that idea.
I still read magazines (online because of where I live) and a few blogs and listen to maybe half a dozen podcasts regularly, but unless you show up on one of them, you’re much more likely to cross my radar on YouTube.
+1 for writing and also doing some YT videos, also +1 for interviews, and if you have time and a pleasant voice the. consider doing a podcast.
For strictly intellectual skills I find short introductory lectures on YouTube a great way to survey a topic. For a topic I know nothing about I find YT great place to find which direction is most interesting to pursue.
Is it possible they're more capable/interesting/competent than you are? Sure, but in all likelihood, it's actually just the discipline to keep doing it and iterating to make it better that separates you.
"Book reports" are better when they're not simply notes/summaries but engage the content from your point of view as a reader and go a bit deeper into the subject matter.
Most important: Just start putting your writing out there and getting feedback. Also study and imitate the styles of writers you appreciate. You'll probably suck for a few years. Keep going.
She calls people like us "Scanners" and claims that our diversity of interests is not a weakness, but a strength. Then goes on techniques to make this skill work for us.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594863032/
How it this a problem? It is just another way.
As a dev with 10 years experience and a masters who has not been allowed to specialize due to language/stack/project/product context switching, I can anecdotally say that generalists are not valued and that this breadth of learning generally prevents specialization. I am only a midlevel and make under $100k in a moderate-high COL area.
I think people hiring employees frequently don't realize that they need generalists and instead act like they are hiring permanent contractors.
The conversation began with the OP talking about wide cross-disciplinary pursuits.
"A couple of years back I started dabbling in the social sciences and humanities (my background is in ecology / evolutionary biology), and became interested in one discipline after another. From psychology to history of science to anthropology and sociology, to economics and politics, to philosophy and religious studies and cultural studies, etc."
My post was a reply to a response to "Refuse to Choose" and the concept of a "Scanner", someone who is looking at many different disciplines that do not all immediately relate to one another.
And my original post was to the effect of "Yes, being a scanner is a weakness if you can't synthesize your cross disciplinary knowledge into extremely valuable non-obvious insights and/or awe-inspiring products".
Basically, think of ideas as being distanced apart from each other. Some of them are in your head, others in mine, some are in a book, or a movie. If we are specialists working together on a project, then to access and synthesize ideas that exist in both our heads we need to have a meeting, which takes significant time. To access it from media, we're going to need to consume media and study, which takes even more time. A helpful analogy would be the memory hierarchy if you know a bit about computer architecture.
But, if many different ideas exist already, only in one person's head, no meetings are needed. They can just work, synthesizing as they go. That is where the "Scanner" emerges from their cocoon and inverts what has been up to then a weakness sapping the ability to excel in one field, instead becoming what one might call "A Renaissance Man".
95% of the time you'll be greeted with a "huh...interesting" and no follow up, but in my experience that remaining 5% can be pretty awesome when you stumble upon something that solves a problem in a way nobody else imagined.
That sounds great, but it also sounds rare and potentially low paid.
When it comes to the job market I think it's important, for those of us who are generalists, to NOT attempt to compete in fields where there are massive numbers of candidates all aiming for the same kinds of jobs. In any "hot career track" one would be competing against others who are much more narrowly focused. There's always going to be someone who is more capable and has gained more achievement in any particular activity "silo".
Ironically, generalists do much better in niche jobs where they can apply peculiar combinations of skills. The hard part is these jobs are hard to find, and worse, the situation can be miserable for generalists early in their career.
I have been lucky enough to turn my passion into a successful software career working for someone else but I’ve always wanted to be self employed.
https://joeldare.com/im-a-scanner
Ex: OP wants to read "textbooks to learn basic concepts" and "swim in their ideas". That doesn't equal competence.
However, if you have strong expertise in a particular field and can find a way to utilize the ideas/learnings from a different field you're interested in then it might be useful. Big if though.
Single-field people tend to be hilariously bad at diffuse reasoning relative to what you'd expect from a person that competent.
No one is going to pat you on the head for learning the basics of a field 10x faster than someone else because the basics have very little value by themselves.
I say all of this as someone who is very curious and likes learning about new things.
A big part of being good at something is really mastering the fundamentals. I tend to think it's possible to turn 'master the fundamentals' into a kind of transferable skill.
Another big part of mastery is pattern recognition, which develops from sheer experience. To some extent, learning to recognize important types of patterns is also a transferable skill.
A luthier that can play guitar will make a better guitar, most likely.
Edit: Someone else said it better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30928437
Think back to college, to your friends who actually got degrees in various specialties. How many of them actually closely read even five of the books in the curriculum, took detailed notes, and thoroughly understood the material?
A motivated autodidact can do that in a couple months (about how long I manage to stay interested in any one topic). Understanding that 20% of the knowledge in the field really does tend to make you 80% "competent." I find that I can have "competent amateur"-level conversations with specialists in a subject after just that much effort.
From there, it's all a question of whether you want to move toward expertise. Becoming an expert takes MUCH more time, energy, and effort.
What normally happens for me is that, after reaching the level of competence on a broad subject, I may come across a subspecialty or two that inspire me to reach competence on them. That's the layer deeper.
That doesn't usually happen right after the broad review. It usually happens a few cycles later, but because I engaged the material and made notes on it, I can refresh what I knew from my overview and be prepared to dive deeper.
It opens up interesting conversations (I know something about an incredible variety of things, so can usually engage someone in a conversation about something that matters to them). It allows me to connect ideas that make me seem "creative" in any one particular field.
In other words it's a very engaging, fun way to live! And not nearly as daunting a thing as it seems if you mistake building expertise with building competence.
Being a polymath is just really good fun if you let it be!
It could be genetic too my Mom's sister's children are all doctors but one of them or some of them don't use their degrees and work manual labour jobs. Maybe I have that but to a lesser degree due to procrastination and my environment.
Would love for you to take a look if you don't mind :)
ADHD doesn't necessarily present as "hyperactive child" or the other stereotypes to which it often gets associated. Many people receive an ADHD diagnosis in adulthood after years of (more or less) successfully coping by employing organizational strategies, e.g. good list-making, appointment reminders, setting extra alarms, and so on.
In terms of OP's rotating interests, the colloquial term is "hyper-focus" and it occurs because people with ADHD are dopamine deficient and generally crave novelty. That can lead to both regressive behaviors like substance abuse or more progressive behaviors like adopting new hobbies and interests.
For the latter, it's easy to get quick dopamine hits when you first dive into a new subject/hobby. But as time goes on and you dive deeper into it, the novelty you first experienced begins to wear off. The quickest antidote is to find a new fixation and start the process over again.
I've experienced this phenomenon many times myself, and much of what OP described resonates with my experiences.
> ADHD doesn't necessarily present as "hyperactive child" or the other stereotypes to which it often gets associated. Many people receive an ADHD diagnosis in adulthood after years of (more or less) successfully coping by employing organizational strategies.
That's pretty much been my case so far :') (though yet undiagnosed, only suspected).
It's not necessary to know that you have ADD/ADHD to tackle these issues, but it gives you a good idea of what's going on.
Would love your input! :)
Hope you can contribute! :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952648
Then there are some who are able to manage their schedules and pursue multiple interests at the same time.
There might be more types of scanners that I cannot recall but another type was scanners with one core interest and then various interests around it. This is what works for me, programming is my core interest and luckily pays well to let me pursue my other hobbies. Over years, I have had various hobbies and learned so many things. I feel I can find a common hobby/interest with almost anyone now.
Keep doing this! It’s more fun to learn a little about a lot than a lot about a little. It’s easy, feels good, and is a good way to pass the time.
Why change?
Huh.
At least in my life, I've discovered that it's important to NOT identify with your interests. While this is a generally important rule, broad interests are toxic to the psyche if you declare your worth by them, since the implementation will vary (e.g., your psych and history may be spot-on, and you might suck at understanding philosophy).
I've read a few Paul Graham essays on the subject, and they're worth poking around. My takeaway is that you are free to do what you love, but find a day job in the meantime. My bias is to steer clear of academia, but you may fare better in that group of people than me if you're not the out-of-the-box thinker type.
And, for your second question, find a way to create. You're clearly hitting up against the wall I've hit against: how do you make an "original thing" that thousands of other people haven't done already?
The answer to that, put very simply, is that you are a unique person. Your personality, sure, but whatever we philosophically represent as the "soul" is the thing that fuels all your creative endeavors, and it flavors everything.
For example, I used to be a fan of the Myst computer game, and have recently been poking around with its sequels. You can actually feel over the series the dilution of original "spark" that the two brothers had in the original.
So, find an expressive form to make what you want. It doesn't have to be fancy, but once you incubate a vision of it, you'll naturally fill in the blanks of what it would be. Off the top of my head, building out an LMS using existing information would be a good start, or finding a way to index/archive more finicky aspects of large repositories of information (such as associative keywords toward economics).
But I suspect that if you love learning about lots of different things, you'd enjoy sharing those things too (and teaching!). Blog, podcast, youtube videos.
If you're in a major city, check and see if there's groups that could scratch your itch. Odd Salon (https://oddsalon.com/) is really cool if you're in the bay or NYC - people give talks about weird bits of science and history.
Turns out this guy's just like you! He took literally every single paper built up to 500 credits for his post grad. And it is exactly this multidisciplinary approach that lead to his invention which is only commercialisable due to his intuitions in manufacturing processes...
I firmly believe there's value in broad interests and no time is spent unwisely. Just remember to step up when it's your queue, best of luck and even if you don't think you did anything I'm sure at least the swimming through the content was enjoyable trip all by itself..
Right now I'm expanding that to slowly build up a hosting company (a cluster running on Docker Swarm and Gluster with a lot of tools and scripts already), jammed basically all fundamental music theory in my head and working hard to apply that, make YouTube videos, do streaming on Twitch, do 3D stuff, work with a game engine, graphic/web design, being capable to have professional-level conversations about therapy and always interested to learn more on the sidelines, doing voice acting and impressions.. well.. etc. because basically I gravitate towards more stuff and the list goes on. It turns into this rambling list real quick because I still have no way to synthesize it all into something that can be quickly and simply understood. I don't know if I ever can. My theory so far is that that becomes easier once all those skills go more into the unconscious competence stage.
It comes with the territory of being profoundly gifted for me and I wouldn't want it any other way. The main challenge for me is trying to find a way to have income and still be busy with all these things. Perhaps in some time in the future I'll be able to combine a lot/all of these things and sit in some ridiculous hyperniche.
So with all that, I have no idea where I'm going but going there is too much fun to let up and I'll fight forever to keep going that way. A confusing state and a paradoxical one since it goes past understanding to understand a lot. Wish I could help. I just wanted to share.
You gotta do some work.
David Perell's dime video was the final clue I needed — pick your center and just go https://youtu.be/gRDopONrnHE
Happy to chat if it helps. Who knows, maybe you could help me. I’m relearning software engineering now after being out of it since school (2004).
More recently, AI, software engineering, business strategy, and a tiny bit of marketing, data science, and venture capital.
The other thing that helps is that I always try to have a showable/shippable output. Nothing that's just in my head or scattered notes that wouldn't make sense to others.
A fav quotes, "The reason you want to be creative is because you consume every day. To balance out your energy, you also need to create every day." and “Don’t tell me. Show me!”
Psychology: I've used it.
HEXACO/Big 5, I've used it to find my girlfriend and test on compatibility. How do you do that? Well, I score high on "openness to experience", I can spot other open people from a mile away. Conscientious vs non-conscientious people are also quite easily recognizable by how rigid/organized they are. When a person disagrees sometimes and agrees a few times then they're moderately agreeable. Extraversion/introversion is easy to spot as well. Neuroticism is harder to spot but anxiety (or lack thereof) is correlated. There! No questionnaire needed! Though, when I knew my GF for 3 months I also gave her a questionnaire for fun which was stating the obvious: her personality was like mine. The most fun way in which you can see that is by looking at both our YouTube feeds, it's quite similar.
Priming: the idea of priming is nebulous due to the publication crisis, but it did teach me to care about the atmosphere you're setting.
Statistics: using statistics in psychology made me better at data science
Neuropsychology: one topic raised interesting questions, which was: can we want something and hate it (yes!)? Can we like something and not want it (yep)? This taught me a lot about certain aspects of addiction.
Neuroplasticity: awesome concept. Neuroplastic behavior has been observed in meditators and hardcore gamers. My guess is that anything you'll do intensely for a few hours will change your brain somewhat.
The publication crisis: many things in psychology are bullshit because there's too much of a publish/perish culture and because of that reproduction of research is an issue. This is especially why you need to put whatever research you read into practice. By using it yourself, you'll find out quickly whether it's research you can meaningfully build on yourself.
Intuition: you can trust your intuition iff (1) you've had many examples of whatever you're intuiting about, (2) the rules were structured like chess or poker (expected value + law of large numbers is needed -- see (1) ) and (3) you can sense you're own intution in the first place. Because of this I immediately realized that people that say "yup I'm good with people" might make the catastrophic flaw of thinking that they're also good with people from an entirely different culture! I've seen this happen up close. The reason is simple: you haven't seen anyone from an entirely different culture, so whatever intuition you have I would not trust it.
Just some thoughts about psychology. I've been an enthusiast about psychology for about 15 years and got academically schooled in it 10 years ago.