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Comment by andrew_wc_brown | Hacker News Reader

I think such books are pointless if you aren't going to use them in your day-to-day work.

You don't believe in knowledge for the sake of enjoying the perspective that more knowledge gives you?

I do, but with a kid my time is now limited. Unused knowledge has this habit of being forgotten. It turns out to be a terrible waste, at least from my POV.

Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses. It's a terrible waste.

>Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses.

And swinging a bat is one of the skills baseball players need to use for their job. The comment you replied to was talking about skills that are not going to be used every day. So I don't think your analogy is very useful.

Also, people who get paid to play baseball never have a batting average that low

Batting average will be higher than the percentage of swings that don't miss.

Yep, we don't use our brains every day.

That is indeed a perfectly valid trade-off, and not one the grandparent was mentioning. One thing worth mentioning is that if you don't read those books, you will probably not get a job that involves reading those books, nor will you turn your job into something that involves reading those books and applying their content.

If you are a software engineer, you can pretty much use linear algebra, calculus, algorithms in your dayjob, right there! Even if you write CRUD apps or the xth tower defense on android. It's all bytes and numbers and numbers stored in bytes and asymptotic behaviour and relational algebra and type systems and transistors, it just depends on how deep you want to look.

There is a good video from Niel deGrasse Tyson talking about learning.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=utedyJ7QRBs

His argument is learning is never a waste of time, even if you don't ever use and forget everything you studied. The simple act of learning is beneficial, it helps build connections in your brain. You develop skills that can be applied to other problems.

It's always beneficial but is it always more beneficial than going to the gym, being with your kids/SO, sleeping more, etc?

Everything has a cost.

I'm very heavy on learning for learnings sake but I don't like the way it's framed as the correct thing to do.

Learn with your kinds/SO. Let's be honest, a lot of your time with them is spent watching TV or something like that anyway. Turn it off and read together.

FWIW, I read a lot and while I often find it difficult to "recall on demand" particular things I've read, I have often experienced that I'll recall what I read in a relevant situation. I first experienced this when I did engineering calculus in college which covered a lot of (for me) obscure parts of calculus. And frankly I couldn't recall much of it at all, but when I took electromagnetic field theory and needed it to answer a question, it would bubble up to the surface.

That experience lead me to keep reading interesting things even if I couldn't recall them a week later on the assumption that when the need arose, if it was relevant, my brain might somehow surface the information for me.

I'm currently a stay-at-home twin dad, and I absolutely crave to learn something new in my spare time (which varies from none to even two hours a day if I'm lucky). I don't care if I forget, but for me life just becomes too stressful without constant learning.

Of course, if I was working, I'd probably have enough to learn at work.

Here here, constant learning is the only thing to save our sanity.

Regarding work, I do have a fulltime job, yet one has to fight hard to ensure any amount of learning, constant or otherwise.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hear+hear&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Whoops, thanks, how did that slip past my brain filter ;-)

So what you meant to say was with your current situation it is useless to you.

"Mr. Potter, one of the requisites for becoming a powerful wizard is an excellent memory. The key to a puzzle is often something you read twenty years ago in an old scroll"

I skim technical books that are not immediately useful to i) build a mental index and ii) fill the gap of my unknown unknowns.

When I hit a problem, sometimes much later, I won't remember the details, but I'll remember that there is a concept that could help me, and know where to look to find more information.

For example, I've read much more about low level networking and messaging than was immediately useful at the time. Months later, a messaging pattern I read about turned out to be a good solution to a problem I was facing. If I hadn't read the book I wouldn't even have known what to search for.

(I also read about some technical topics more deeply for my own enjoyment/future career prospects, but the value of that is more uncertain.)

I've actually ended up having to let go almost every person working for me that takes your view.

Learning such things expands what you can do at work, no matter what it is. We no longer live in a world where you can punch a clock and do the same thing for decades until you get the gold watch and are send home to wait to die watching TV on your barcolounger (I don't think I've seen one of those in 30 years). Things are changing so fast that the only way to stay ahead is to learn, learn deep and actively practice your art or craft.

it nice being reminded how boring and simple my job is...

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