The wisdom to say no (is something I struggle with, lol)

Being a learning nerd makes you feel like you can learn anything
When you feel like you can learn anything, you want to learn everything
When you want to learn everything, you want to learn as much as you can ASAP, because holy shit there’s a lot to learn
When you want to learn as much as you can ASAP, your list of extant learning projects will grow at a silly pace
Eventually you’ll go “this is dumb” and, through the tears, archive some beeminders

Goodnight, sweet Prince(s)

John Boyd project. I spent like 60 hours on this (10 hours reading the Corram bio before I started the beeminder)
Absurdly fruitful, truly. And incomplete - I didn’t get to deeply read all of Osinga - I did a very deep dive on chapter 3 (scientific zeitgeist), a shallow reading of all chapters, and began a deep dive on chapter 4 (scientific zeitgeist continued)
I picked up more useful threads that I can enumerate here. Cybernetics, chaos theory, complexity theory, Boyd’s “destruction and creation” paper re: mental model formation, the necessity of open systems, the unavoidability of uncertainty. General systems theory, the cognitive revolution, first wave AI. Really just an insanely fruitful book. I probably (definitely!) spent more time learning about Boyd’s influences than Boyd’s actual models. But I got a solid grokking of the full, in-depth OODA loop. I even presented (to a CEO and chief of staff at an effective altruism org) about Auftragstaktik/Fingerspitzengefuhl, during my in person work trial (re: how I could rapidise achieving hive mind with them)

Would love to learn more, but I got the high level overview (hermeneutics and the ontological shift, zuhandenheit vs vorhandenheit, our thrownness, our anxiety at not being the ground of our own being, hermeneutics (interpretation and understanding) as our core way of being
Excited to instead be pivoting to Vervaeke, who I’m seeing as a kind of meta-Heidegger

I might regret this one, this was the most painful decision!!
I’d love to learn to code properly (I’m ok at Python (and SQL), but missing the full-stack tool kit)
However, it feels like something that I’d need to put a fair amount of time in, not the kind of thing you can just do like 15-30 mins a day (this may be wrong)
Maybe the time will come to treat it as a full time project and I’ll be able to do a proper sprint

I’m now in a lil group chat with some tpot people who are also doing it
I’m realising that I felt robustly intelligent until I didn’t do maths at A level and my friends would talk about maths stuff that I didn’t know
I’m excited to “catch up” and finally fulfil my mission of being a smart STEM guy with quantitative skills

I’ve set up my new “open workbook” website and learning in a whole new way, it feels like a deeply profound paradigm shift!!!!!

I’ve intentionally winnowed down my project list so I can have a dedicated day where (in addition to my actual stuff, like job hunting, and eventually, working at my full time job (hire me!) I can do multiple focused poms on 1 thing, rather than little bits of far too many things