HACKER Q&A
📣 nanfinitum

How do you satisfy your intellectual curiosity?


For example, let's say I want to learn about Singapore: It's history, the history of it's leader (LKY), their education system and generally just what it's like to live there. Should I just start with Wikipedia? Sometimes I find the articles to have too many links and/or distracting details. I could supplement with Youtube videos or documentaries but there are too many of those and I can't watch all of them. I usually just go with the most popular, but I'm not sure this a good proxy for quality. The same goes for books: there's simply too many of them on any one given topic, and sometimes it is not clear which one is the most important/seminal.

I would love to hear the process/framework you follow when you're learning about a new topic of interest, and how you go from "curious" to "well informed"

  👤 JohnFen Accepted Answer ✓
> I usually just go with the most popular, but I'm not sure this a good proxy for quality

Popularity is a poor proxy for quality.

I often start with Wikipedia, just to get a feel for the topic. Then I try to identify those people and works that are widely considered fundamental to the field and focus on those. For the most part, I ignore YouTube and documentaries. The signal/noise ratio in them is too low to be worthwhile.

I also avoid using genAI, because you have to have some level of expertise in the subject in order to be able to spot when genAI is misleading you, and if I'm just learning, I lack that expertise.