learning stuff
the process of learning stuff is something that has always been very satisfying to me but i worry lately that I am losing grip with it somehow. if you're just dropped in a sandbox and you get to aimlessly wander and explore what's going on around you, like a player dropped in a new videogame, it's a really fun and engaging journey. and i'm not trying to express a naive "school ruins learning!" sentiment but I think in college you reach a certain point where you're so caught up in deadlines and exams and extracurricular obligations and stuff that you end up learning so that you can be done with it. like you're learning fast as an obligation so you can get on with other things, or quickly apply it to something, in a way that is not nearly as satisfying for me as learning something for the hell of it.
i do enjoy reading about stuff that is completely out of my knowledge set. I think i was a lot better at this before I came to UCLA, in that I had a lot more free time and mental bandwidth to do a bunch of stuff that was completely unnecessary, like staying up late reading wikipedia and xkcd/smbc. And I don't even think that this is necessarily a tradeoff that you have to make; I don't really believe that once you start committing to diving deep to some particular area of study you sacrifice a broad knowledge base. I'm sure there are countless counterexamples, and I do want to know how they find the time.
i also often find that in courses I "learn" many things at face value, for the sake of completeness, and then end up rediscovering them later in a way that is much more interesting to myself. for example in quantum mech you're taught that the expectation of some observable is . and I kind of just took this at face value and wrote it on my formula sheet. but then later I spent a lot of time studying probability & stats on my own and realized that no prof had ever given the very simple motivation that would've made it so much more satisfying/intuitive: since essentially gives the probability distribution of the system, the formula is exactly just the definition of expectation - observed value probability of observing it. quantum mechanics always just obscures it in the language of hermitian operators and hilbert spaces, when it could not be conceptually more simple. another one i've had is realizing that the ugly matrix that you're given to operate lorentz boosts is a rotation matrix. professors always make the analogy that it's "like" a rotation, but it straight up literally is one if you express beta and gamma as cosh and sinh.
eventually later courses do explicitly define it as a rotation in minkowski space, and then you hear that the spacetime interval is invariant, just like how in euclidean space, length is invariant under rotation, and then it all clicks and you wonder why you wasted a quarter staring at drawings of boosted reference frames to begin with. sometimes I wonder why professors don't lead in the way that is most intellectually satisfying. that is what drew me to physics in the first place anyway, and I think is generally my reward function for learning anything ever.
my point in saying all this is that the above concepts/examples will now forever stick in my brain because I happened to stumble across some connection that made concepts very satisfying to me. but as I kind of find myself falling into a learning void, ie doing less exploratory learning just for my own fun but really grinding out stuff that I now need to know, I wonder how many of these serendipitous connections that I am missing (obviously exacerbated by how much I use AI now to keep up with the expected pace of learning). over the summer I did an entire project at amazon whose design relied heavily on AWS services and their properties. I still couldn't really tell you anything about AWS besides the stuff I absolutely needed to know, but AI has raised everyone's expectations of pace to the point where I cannot do the process of making these satisfying connections in my brain anymore, i just have to learn the minimal set of knowledge as directly as possible so that I can ramp up, or pass an exam, etc.
i do keep telling myself that once I reach certain milestones I will have the time and space to back off a bit and get back in my actually learning stuff era again. honestly at this point I am not sure if school counts anymore, at least the way that I've defined "satisfying learning" for myself. i am hopeful that this is soon because I get bits and pieces of it sometimes when I have some time for myself, and I would be sad for that process to fade from my brain.
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