One of the most valuable resource that everyone has is time. I have been always figuring out how I can optimize the use of my time to learn what I want to learn. Many people are so smart that they can just read everything and understand everything. However, mother nature gave me a smol brain, so it is important for me to be frugal on the way I obsorb new information. Before deciding to invest time into understanding something, it should be intentional what and how to consume, sort of like a brain filter. From what I found so far, that may include, but not limited to:
Is it foundational?
Intelligence is simply a cyclic graph of knowledge embeddings. Understanding one knowledge node is fundamental for understanding several other nodes. Otherwise, less foundational node would not do as good — it can give context, but it is highly situational; thus, produce weak leverage. The simple subquestion we may ask, “can we understand A, B and C, if we don’t know about X?” If the answer is “no”, X is foundational.
Does it have a significant temporal relevance?
It makes very little sense to invest time in acquiring knowledge that would be irrelevant within the next few days/weeks. For instance, the moment we depend on the mainstream media for obtaining knowledge, we are outsourcing our analytical thoughts to other people for the information that may be significant only for a short time. Thus, judging whether to expand the deep understanding on particular subject require durable time horizon of relevancy. The duration of significance is relative for different subjects and individuals.
Is it mimetic or pragmatic?
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” – René Girard.
Sometimes, it is funny how often and how easy people trick themselves into believing they understand something, while obviously they don’t (Dunning–Kruger effect). Wait, but why? One of many reasons could be that it is easier and faster to imitate others. Why spend all the hard work when the perception of the result is identical? If you “feel” very smart after spending on an hour lecture or an inspirational documentary, it may or may not be true as much as you think it is. Sometimes, watching people speak in a certain way, do a certain thing, or gain influence on a certain thing, it would confused you not to think very deeply about the substance of it — just because it feels good and makes you feel smart.
Human is an emotional creature. The source of political power derive heavily from exploiting the emotional mechanics of, not how people think, but how people feel.
One question to ask would be, “can you produce anything from the knowledge you just acquired?” It could be anything from explaining, creating, inventing, or good questions, excluding imitation. If there is only inputs without new outputs, there is a high chance you are fooling yourself that you get it.
Wrapping up
Despite being an imperfect creature living in the imperfect world, we strive to reduce the entropy — to bringing order to chaos. Knowledge is information compression. Having the right compression algorithms may be the crucial key in the pursuit of curiousity.