Syllabus

I notice a real gap in my understanding of my opinions about ideas and problems, which keeps me from making decisions about the kind of work I want to do. I revisit this problem quite often, and I'd be very happy if I spent the year making significant progress on this.

I believe developing taste for ideas and problems would be a good start, after all, taste is a guide for what is worthwhile. In Jacky Zhao's post, his explore/exploit dichotomy broadly matches my theory of taste:

...taste operates in two distinct and almost opposite modes:

1. Type I taste: Exploratory taste that surfaces new forms of beauty you otherwise may not have considered;
2. Type II taste: Conviction that drives you to sufficiently go deep on what you already find to be beautiful.

You can only express and know your taste through Type 2: going deep, making, committing, and seeing what resonates. In technology and art, where I have experience, that's mostly how I've operated: dive in first, learn the landscape as it is needed. It works well when you already have some intuition for the territory. But I've had years of education in maths, cs, and art. I severely lack both kinds of taste when it comes to the humanities, and when applying conviction without exploration, I don't even know what I'm missing: I struggle to form opinions and never test them against reality. I need more Type 1 to generate strong Type 2.

It is ideas and opinions that make up the answers to questions like "how should I spend my life", or "what problems matter". And there is benefit to standing on the shoulders of all the giants before me when trying to answer them. I'm not on a sabbatical like Arielle was, but I am in an intermediate period before I graduate where not much is happening in Oxford, and I have the capacity to try something new. In this light, I am putting together a bit of a syllabus:

The syllabus:

I lack a basic understanding of a few really general ideas, that would help act as a surface for new ideas to stick to and relate to. I'm looking for an overview of these:

• the key events in history - how did the world get this way?
• how does the world work now? (there's a lot here, but i'm mainly interested in getting an overview of government, politics, law, supply chains, agriculture, energy, cities, war and geopolitics)
• a bit of philosophy (mainly moral but maybe rationality, feminism, political phil?, epistemology?, phil of language?)

I'd also like to explore the following topics (this is highly subject to change, I think it is good to follow what actually interests me in a moment. these are interesting/curious to me right now. I think it is better to answer questions that I have than read random stuff because they are 'important')

• people and societies (religion/ritual/meaning, anthropology, class/sociology)
• minds and bodies (psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, meditation/malleability of the mind, cognitive science, longevity)
• history of technology, technology as a force, progress
• history of art/architecture, urban change
• various literature to get better at reading and experience the joy of storytelling and being human

Strategies

Many good ideas from Andy Masley, some of these are from there and some are from talking to friends

• the obvious ones that go for anything: little things every day add up, get friends involved, make it fun and treat it like a habit/practice not a goal
• core facts about the world (particularly in my general ideas section) are easy to learn by watching videos on youtube. save the difficult reading for difficult and interesting ideas, not things that everyone agrees on.
• commit to strong beliefs early and adjust them. write down beliefs early. there is no point reading without the writing part
• use a system: thinking of continuing link collections as always to remember what I read, as well as a digital garden of notes, and a monthly review where I collect up what I read that month and the opinions/ideas I had as a result

Progress updates

Here is my digital garden, that I have set up for learning this in public! I'll also be doing monthly / topic reviews of how it's going on this blog.