One additional point: the masters almost always had great ideas they took too far.
The "conversation" that spans centuries consists of brilliant minds each getting a little glimpse into something sublime, then spending most of their lives taking these concepts to the extreme -- past where they are useful.
This means that the pattern that many young learners have, where they latch on to a person and then hero-worship, (this is the guy who figured it all out!) makes for a really bad way to follow the conversation. You're always trying to find the best person, and you're always trying to make his/her ideas fit into all of the material. Much better to passively and fluidly accept new information. Think of it more like meeting a bunch of really smart people in a bar, listening to their philosophy of life, then meeting the next bunch. The question becomes absorbing and understanding and being able to apply the way they think, not the ultimate truth. Most things you consume are not physics. Hell, at some level physics isn't even physics. Humans are model-builders, and the models are always incomplete. The kind of certainty we yearn for just doesn't exist in the real world.
Perhaps another way of putting this would be "Deep learning lightly held"
The "conversation" that spans centuries consists of brilliant minds each getting a little glimpse into something sublime, then spending most of their lives taking these concepts to the extreme -- past where they are useful.
I agree. Theory vs. Practicality, Pure Science vs. Engineering.
Seems like in the article and the comments there are three categories of "master" here: Theoreticians, Mechanics, and Explainers. People who destroy and replace models, people who take models into places we never envisioned, and people who can explain models to others. (These categories work across both fiction, non-fiction, and science)
I wonder as we learn if we don't naturally move from one of these categories to another. I'd wager it's from explainer to theoretician to mechanic. It'd be interesting to see some research in this area.
The "conversation" that spans centuries consists of brilliant minds each getting a little glimpse into something sublime, then spending most of their lives taking these concepts to the extreme -- past where they are useful.
This means that the pattern that many young learners have, where they latch on to a person and then hero-worship, (this is the guy who figured it all out!) makes for a really bad way to follow the conversation. You're always trying to find the best person, and you're always trying to make his/her ideas fit into all of the material. Much better to passively and fluidly accept new information. Think of it more like meeting a bunch of really smart people in a bar, listening to their philosophy of life, then meeting the next bunch. The question becomes absorbing and understanding and being able to apply the way they think, not the ultimate truth. Most things you consume are not physics. Hell, at some level physics isn't even physics. Humans are model-builders, and the models are always incomplete. The kind of certainty we yearn for just doesn't exist in the real world.
Perhaps another way of putting this would be "Deep learning lightly held"