I miss those days when I did not have to repeat things to memorize them. Recently, I have been trying to seriously learn french and my best language learning years and behind me by some 25 years. Still, one gotta do what one gotta do, and in a stable peaceful manner.
Learning is fun, and I am trying to find the best strategy for it these days. Productivity is a metric for machines and not humans and while it is important to build the world and oneself, it should never ever be the main goal. Productivity is what I associate with the workplace at most- these guys pay me and I owe it to them to deliver maximum output for the time they have engaged me. The definition of output has to align a lot with their definition, but it is the only place in the life of a human being where it matters.
Also, I should take a one week vacation from office and spend ten days entirely cut off from the world, with absolutely zero communication. The joy it is going to bring mw can only be paralleled by a few things in life.
Back to being a cog-I am a cog for financial reasons, but I have a life of my own too. So-NELL. Mitchell's research sounds very fancy and important, so I have never dared look closely into it, but I can toy with the idea.
Reading books about fun stuff is fun but acquiring knowledge requires some structure to retain it. So I think it is important to build one's own database and to make original contributions after acquiring a certain level of skill. There has to be some effort made into showing it to the world since the populace at large deserves to benefit from an exchange of ideas, but not too much because it is an extremely stupid goal to pursue. I am an extreme fan of people like Azad who are scholars through and through and it is their only passion in life. More than being a fan, I relate to it. The wanting part though, and not the achieving one.
So there are multiple questions around this problem: how does one select an area of study? Should one work on one area, or multiple in parallel? After reading something, how do you make sure that you retain something from it? Memory is notoriously bad, and mine is almost non-functional these days. There are a lot of solutions, and the search for the perfect one takes forever, so I'll have to settle for some sub-optimality. I guess I am going to start noting things down on paper. Summaries, so to speak.
As for single vs multiple, I really can't say. Right now I have my eye on a few things, all of them theoretical of course but that can't be helped at least for now. For now the solution seems to be to choose a few and stick to them. Focus is key, so I think I can do one thing a day, spend a few hours on it, but I'll have to make sure the work gets done with extreme focus. There is no point in doing things half-heartedly-watching youtube would be a better alternative.
I would like to read stuff up in the following areas:
1. ML
2. Philosophy
3. French
4. Poetry
5. Politics but maybe
6. Filmain, cause I love them
Okay I think we can skip politics(or serious study thereof) for now, but I'll be working on the rest of them. If I work on my so called research a lot of time gets diverted to ML but that is life for now, and I need this work for my backup plans too.
If I ever get the chance in the future, I might pick up something different like fencing or kathak but these are my only options for now.
It seems to me that writing stuff is a fundamental part of the learning process and just like it is needed to learn decision theory, it is needed for philosophy and poetry too. I might be reporting here to mention what I have learned in a day. I am a bookish bore and I am not going to try to escape it.
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