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First, it doesn’t work on topics that aren’t simultaneously being worked by lots of other people. Preferably focused types who are likely to miss obvious things that are in peripheral vision or first-order “irrelevant”. So you can’t do far out stuff being worked by like 5 people.
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Second, it doesn’t work on things that require skill stacks deeper than 2. An example is building hardware/software integrated things, which is at least about 3 layers deep (physical design, physical fabrication, software). This is an interesting one...worth a <sidebar>
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I don’t think I ever made/hacked/repaired anything non-trivial more than 1 layer deep. For eg, I’ve built decently complex model gliders, rigged up electronics layer for stuff with existing hardware/software things, and fixed 1-factor issues (eg pure electrical or pure plumbing)
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...but I’ve never made or hacked anything requiring 2 stack layers. Eg full model plane with remote controls. Closest I came was a kit robot but I never got past a few hello-world programs that made it go around in circles. I quit when I couldn’t fix a simple coupled problem...
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If you’re curious, I couldn’t get wheel alignment perfect. So an open-loop straight line program would cause a slow turn. I’d have had to either true the steering, compensate in software or design and add a position feedback sensor loop... lost patience, gave up.
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Same story in software. Software has both stack levels (source, compiled, environment...) and lifecycle stages (dev/production). I’ve built complex single-level/single-stage things (Matlab basically) but go to 2, and I’ve never gotten beyond hello-world level complexity.
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Implication: I only hold 1 context in head at a time and largely surf natural dynamics in that context intuitively, and by learning patterns of “luck”. Go to 2 contexts and intuition breaks, coupled 2-context good luck becomes unlikely, “normal accident” bad luck becomes likely
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This is almost the definition of least-effort slacking. The one mitigating factor is that sometimes a context boundary that is taken seriously by others is not actually real so you can exploit a broader single context and seem like a holistic mind-like-water systems thinker.
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Example: sociology and management theory are pretty much the same. You need no context switching between them really, just some jargon mapping. Intuition and insight-luck patterns work in nearly seamless ways across them. Ignore the boundary and you’ll look like a genius.
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Sometimes you get really meta-lucky and see a really “long” single-context pathway cutting across multiple specialized stack levels/lifecycle stages. Like a wormhole through learning space. Any move you make in this wormhole context looks like magic to disciplined learners.
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I *think* this is what looks like “strategic insight” (coup d’oeil) from the outside. It’s really a cheap exploit in the landscape of other people’s socially embodied institutional ways of knowing, due to improbable concurrences of insubstantial context boundaries. End </sidebar>
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Third, it doesn’t work on things that take more time than social-cache-refresh time constants. For example, “blockchain” was in hive mind for a year, so I was having interesting thoughts about it. But serious work on blockchain takes 3+ yrs. So I’m recession-weak on the subject.
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If I had to name this thinking/pseudo-learning style given its tricks, strengths, and weaknesses, it would probably be “parasitic”. Low-energy, low-effort, derivative survivalism. Like the grasshopper in ant and grasshopper story. Occasionally predatory rather than parasitic.
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If you find this inspirational/aspirational at some level, curb your enthusiasm. It’s more curse than blessing. There’s something very unsatisfying about this, which is why every year or two I take a run at a “deeper” project that would come easier to disciplined learners.
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Hasn’t worked yet, but I’m optimistic I’ll eventually do at least one 2+ layer deep thing in my life that’s more than right-brained arbitrage/surfing or wormhole trickery of environmental learning.
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