41–50 of 325 posts
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).
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.
1/ Postmodern philosophy: (re)consider the possibility of pursuing advanced studies in postmodern philosophy, because that is one of the fields where all your bits of knowledge can coagulate and be put at good use. There are academic institutions that can accommodate part-time schedules, or where most teachings are offered in time of the year that facilitate part-time learners;
2/ (Visual) Arts: An art practice can benefit greatly from a solid theoretical foundation of the subject-matter that it tries to address. I am not speaking of arts pursued for the sake of them. I am referring to contemporary art engaging with some of the most pressing socio-political challenges our societies face.
Set aside the fields above, all other fields can benefit from some non-zero degree of interdisciplinarity, but are hardly all encompassing and would leave part of interests less leveraged then others.
I salute you and wish you well.
Read a couple of books by Barbara sher: Refuse to choose [0] 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/
It's only a strength if you have a strong base and a way to tie things together. Being interested in a bunch of disparate fields is not in itself useful. In fact for most people it's probably completely useless, because you're going to suck at everything. 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 partic…
However, if a team consisting of an expert in each of your disciplines would outperform you, then you have to consider whether you’re mixing your disciplines creatively enough to have an edge.
One powerful mix is the ability to have breadth of knowledge as you mention but also the ability to dive deep into one specific problem when needed.
In my experience, people with wide breadth of knowledge were only taken seriously if they had an equally deep knowledge in one of the specific fields. This demonstrates they can go deep if needed.
Does this resonate? https://wildcardpeople.com/what-is-a-wildcard-person