How to Understand Subjects We Don’t Want to Invest the Time in to Master

It’s an interesting process, learning is. I love when I delve into a new subject and the vernacular is like another language, but slowly you memorize words and then you can read the sentences fluidly and start grabbing concepts. You, then, have a bunch of individual concepts, and some of their interactions, and as your memorization of concepts and their interactions grows into a global network you achieve an understanding of the system and can then form strategies/opinions.

Often when we read about a new subject, perhaps one that we have no intention of making a central focus of our lives, we find ourselves in a position of reliance on the opinions of others. All too often I’ve caught myself parroting an economist I’ve read some article from, when really, while I may trust that economist for whatever reason (most likely the way they express themselves and the apparent cogency of their opinions), I don’t have the base understanding to disagree with them. This makes it incredibly easy to be manipulated without an understanding of a subject. I don’t have a strong opinion formed one way or another, because I don’t have an understanding or established knowledge base for the subject, and then any argument that comes along presents me with all new information, but it all supports that argument, and so now the universe of my understanding on that subject is slanted.

In general, it doesn’t seem to get pointed out much, mostly because the opposite (not relying on experts) is often so much worse, how much of a crutch reliance on “experts” is. At the end of the day, it’s a heuristic used to avoid real thinking or investigation. We listen to experts that interpret information for us and give us their opinions, sometimes as gospel. It makes for this somewhat unfortunate situation of mutual reliance. It’s almost like the market place — none of us could fashion or provide for ourselves all the goods and services available to us from other people — similarly we rely on others for wide swathes of our understanding of the world. But with the exceptions of very few in any given field, I find that real investigation leaves you feeling that it’s often smoke and mirrors: their real expertise is basically non-existent. They have all the info you could ever want at their disposal, but the conclusions they draw from it are only marginally more accurate as a result. Likewise, there is virtually nothing proposed by one expert that is not argued against by another. Often, we’re left deferring to the more credible sounding, or the more laden with accolades, or simply whatever side has more experts in agreement on it.

By no means should my argument be taken as some tongue-lashing against elites or people who have the audacity to have advanced degrees: These people are a gift to society, and we would be lost without them. I simply wish to put the nature of our understanding of a great many subjects in context.

Opinions are good cause they’re the finished product. They enable you to mimic, albeit often less successfully, but when you can really go through the process of data accumulation and derive an opinion/strategy through a distillation of the whole mess that’s where the high-quality learning is.

There is an irony in the process of learning, culminating in mastery, however: The road to mastery is one of combing through tons of useless fodder. If you were to understand Darwinism, you need only know that small, randomly occurring mutations in lifeforms are retained and passed on, if they happen to be advantageous for reproduction or survival, culminating in adaptive evolution. Yet, reading that sentence didn’t make you a master of the subject. You’d have to spend ten years studying changes in bird’s beaks and patterns on the backs of lizards and sequences of molecules to become a master of the subject. However, when you summed it all up, you’d likely say something just like what was said in the sentence above. The difference is that prior to mastery you believed it cause it sounded right and fits with your understanding of what Darwinism means — what many other people have told you it means. But, after extensive study, you have seen for yourself that it’s the case. This applies to any other subject as well. To be a master swing (intermediate-term) trader of stocks, you’ll have to learn a thousand different methods of stock trading. However, you’ll end up only using one fairly simple formulation for setting up your trades. There’re many traders who will readily share their setup with you, but it won’t quite work the same for you. Why? That is the question and the answer. You might choose that way of trading, but you’ll never know why you chose that method; you won’t understand the advantages and disadvantages of the method or how it relates to the universe that is the market as a whole. To master a subject you have to learn 95% useless (or not directly useful) information to contextualize the useful bits.

What if you’re a spoiled, uncompromising brat about learning who wants to know everything and isn’t put off by the inherent impossibility of the endeavor? Well, it’s impossible, don’t get me wrong, but not all distillations of or summarizations of (or teachings on) a subject are the same. There are books that will give you huge amounts of information and you’ll retain maybe 1% — people commonly say 10% — and I say, maybe that’s for the next week, but in the long run you’ll be left with crumbs of the feast you were once presented. You can engage in the prodigious effort of reading through a thousand page volume on this or that to feel you’ve achieved a real understanding, but honestly even that is not a good way to develop a real understanding of a subject. I know; I’ve tried it. It takes years to master a subject, no other way about it. I do believe, however, that there’s a way to get an outsized understanding of a subject, and that’s to read information formulated in a certain way.

When a theoretical framework complete with unifying principles is established, and then all of the information presented serves to bolster that frame, the author can transfer a real understanding. Not mastery, but understanding, as opposed to simple memorization — memorized facts, unfortunately, are stored in a bucket with a hole in the bottom. A great example of a book that does this is the pulizter-winning, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond. Diamond explains the advancement of human societies on the various continents as being the product of geographic differences: (spoiler alert) available domesticates, East-West axis vs. North-South axis, etc. These principles or determinants construct for the reader a basis for prediction and inference, as well acting as a cohesive to unite all the information into a whole. You may not retain any more facts than if it had been written without them, but you are left with an understanding that will not be easily lost.

Another good example is Howard Gardner’s “Frames of Mind.” Gardner sets out principles or criteria for what constitutes an “intelligence” and then examines the brain for various areas and abilities that meet that criteria. It weaves a tome’s worth of information into a simple, concise, and clear set of principles. You’re left understanding the subject matter, which means that, perhaps most importantly, you can apply it to your daily life.

There are a great many books that do not do this. Most textbooks, for that matter, do not. And, there’s something lost in objectivity cause ultimately a theory, which is likely the best way to describe this framework, holds an argument inside of it. If you’re going to dedicate the years to master a subject, perhaps exposure to texts formatted in this way is unnecessary and possibly even counter-productive. However, for the rest of us, whose curiosity is boundless and want an understanding of more subjects than we could master in ten lifetimes, a book with unifying principles is a necessity.