How to Be a Know-It-All | Hacker News Reader

How to Be a Know-It-All

newyorker.com

181 pointsdiodorus48 comments

On the flip side, this approach to learning means you know next to nothing beyond the dozen first bits of terminology or buzzwords for each new topic, much less the concepts. The moment you finally meet someone interested in discussing one of these things, its going to be immediately apparent the basis of your knowledge is a brief article/book or a weekend watching videos on youtube. Furthermore, these are all going to be little self-contained treatises without any prerequisites -- they are written for a general audience, so you are completely limited to, as the article describe it, the appearance of mastery to people who don't know better.

What's worse is that you seriously have to question the qualifications of any single source claiming to be a valid resource for a wide range of topics. Even if the individual course is written/taught by an expert, they are paid or motivated by another entity with their own set of bureaucracy and expectations. What works for learning tennis isn't going to produce the same class format as what works for learning Film Scoring (I'm looking at you Masterclass, for producing that joke of a class).

In my mind, the best approach to learning requires you to initially commit to either a top-down or bottom-up strategy. If you want to master the topic, you should go bottom-up; focus initially on theory and gradually more on practice/experience. If you want to ramp up as quickly as possible, go top-down and experience something for a more general audience to get a taste. If you like it, you can keep pursuing that route or commit towards a more bottom-up approach, which provides a higher ceiling albeit on a longer timeline. But don't go to a general resource like the one in the article, go directly to the expert's material, first-hand, for the raw, unadultered version.

"expert's material, first-hand, for the raw, unadultered version" - Too many people jump to conclusions without valid resources, consuming information "TLDR" is more present today than ever before.

Yes, I agree. Everything is instant gratification.

Certainly there are diminishing returns to wanting to mastering a particular subject completely and maybe it is better to be merely "good" at a number of things, but its not really meaningful if the barrier to a particular level of expertise is a couple hours of commitment.

On what do you base this criticism?

I've not read any of these books, but they sound like more than a passing summary of the topics; at the very least they sound like a wonderful introduction, the start of the top-down strategy you espouse.

Is there a reason you believe these are not a good start to the top-down approach?

Is there a reason a person is better off avoiding this series entirely, rather than learn some facts?

It seems if I read 152 pages on (say) Teeth, I know vastly more than 99.99% of the population, and could quite enjoyably engage with a dentist or perhaps an anthropologist I met at a party.

>> t seems if I read 152 pages on (say) Teeth, I know vastly more than 99.99% of the population, and could quite enjoyably engage with a dentist

That depends on if you wanted to talk to him about teeth, or dentistry, which he might find more enjoyable

> The moment you finally meet someone interested in discussing one of these things, its going to be immediately apparent the basis of your knowledge is a brief article/book or a weekend watching videos on youtube.

Depends on what you're hoping to get out of the the learning and the conversation. For most people, even being able to carry on a conversation at a dinner party with an expert in the field is sufficient reason to read one of these books.

"Oh your dissertation work is on Ancient Egypt?! That's so fascinating! I read about <pharoah-name> and he's buried at <pyramid-name>. Have you done any field work there?" And so on and so forth. If you can ask relevant questions (which an introductory book will create plenty of in your mind) you'll keep the expert engaged and they'll be gratified that you took a genuine interest in their work.

And if you're conversing with another layperson? "I read the most fascinating thing about mummies the other day! Mummies <say fascinating thing, see if other person is engaged, continue conversation>."

Realistically those are the only outcomes people can expect from reading introductory books. And I'd regard them as being very worthy outcomes.

Yeah I guess that's fair. I guess my point is that when you meet that expert, your contribution to the conversation is typically going to be blurting out <pharoah-name> and <pyramid-name> because thats all you remember from that one read, then more or less passive listening until you change the subject. But probably that's more or less enough depending on your goals. What happens when your expert responds, "No I didn't work on that, I did <x>"? Yeah you can try to engage them, but at that point you may have no more context than before you read the executive-summary.

I would argue that having a more bottom-up learning would help you get more from that next conversation by having a lot more context and opinion then the handful of key-phrases you've managed to recall months/years after. That way, the next time you have access to an expert, you can are building on that knowledge, rather than growing a list relevant of words. To be blunt, its the difference between being a student and a tourist.

The point is that there are not topics you intend to be an expert in, so you can cover more topics. you can take a rigorous study for topics that you are passionate about, but there can only be so many of those. Otherwise, the alternative is simply to not know anything, even a little bit, about said topic. Now, if you know that you only have interest in topics you are very passionate about obviously you don't see this as a problem.

> then more or less passive listening until you change the subject.

The goal of a conversation is not to get to a subject on which you can pontificate. Quite the opposite! And there are options other than passive listening and oration. What about that famous other kind of listening, active listening?

The vast majority of conversation has either pedestrian ends, or no productive end at all. Whether you have something novel to say on a subject is one of the least important variables of all in a dialogue. The ability to ask questions, to seek a novel angle, to subtly flatter, are all far more important.

For example, that's why Terry Gross is a genius. Not because she is deeply knowledge about physics, or oil painting, or acting. But because she knows how to talk to people about things she's less familiar with.

It's funny you bring up Terry Gross as an example. I've found, especially if you have trouble making small talk at parties, it helps to pretend to be an interviewer on a talk show. It puts you into a different mindset altogether. Obviously you shouldn't overdo it and spam the other person with questions; take care to chip in with a relevant personal detail about yourself.

I thought this superficial kind of learning was more due to the necessity of being brief than the conviction that it's the best way to learn about a topic. We really don't have enough time in our lives to acquire an in-depth understanding of very many things.

You can trade learning more things superficially with learning fewer things in but in greater detail, but if you don't want to make a career out of your knowledge (where specialization is best) it seems like either way is fine if you just do it for fun. (Though I agree that specialization probably is more intellectually fulfilling that fact collecting.)

On the other hand, the more sound generalizations you develop, the more connections you're able to make across topics. You can think of it like a form of compression that allows you to acquire a deeper understanding of things than is possible through memorizing the inner workings of various disparate systems. Deep not necessarily implying rich, as would come with heavy exposure to the minutiae as well.

no one is saying one should read a short intro and pretend to be all-knowing - they're for breadth not depth.

not very many people are such assholes that they'll be upset at someone for being passingly familiar with something they're expert in - if both people are good conversationalists a productive conversation can still be had (wherein the expert explains and the listener, since they've already been introduced to the basic terms, listens in an engaged way).

The moment you finally meet someone interested in discussing one of these things, its going to be immediately apparent the basis of your knowledge is a brief article/book or a weekend watching videos on youtube. Furthermore, these are all going to be little self-contained treatises without any prerequisites -- they are written for a general audience, so you are completely limited to, as the article describe it, the appearance of mastery to people who don't know better.

That's only if you insist on explaining things to everyone you meet. If you're smart about it, you can quickly recognize an expert and take the opportunity to ask them questions. I have had many discussions with experts in fields for which I knew only the scantest of concepts and terminology. I begin by asking questions and proceed to go deeper and deeper into the subject. It's amazing how happy people can get when you show a genuine interest in something they care about.

By arming yourself with a "Wikipedia summary" of each topic, you have the starting point for very interesting conversations. Don't let the article's title get to you. It's far better to be someone who is interested in everything than it is to just "know everything".

100% the objective is get the most out of experts given the opportunity. Its completely unreasonable to be an expert in everything. But it can be difficult to engage an expert if they aren't there to talk shop. Having the right framework to even phrase a meaningful question often requires quite a bit of context and prerequisite knowledge. If someone tried to strike a conversation with me with vague, malformed ideas and buzzwords, I may respond with a semi-scripted answer because I don't know this person and I'm not going to assume their background is the same as mine.

Its completely unfair, but the way that first question is framed, depending on that field, can demonstrate whether this individual is "in the club" and has sufficient information to carry this conversation beyond the most superficial layer. It would be nice have that fluency in many subjects, but browsing wikipedia is certainly not the way to go about obtaining it.

How do you get into the sea?

A fool rushes headlong, is surprised by the temperature or force of the waves and has to spend some time adjusting, perhaps dangerously so. They may even decide too late, that this was a bad idea.

I wiser soul might first dip a toe. Then once they know what they're in for slowly move to waist deep. Once adjusted to the temperature and wave patterns, they might decide to go deeper. After years of doing this, they will become expert sea swimmers or surfers. But to follow their lead at that point as a beginner would be rash: they'd tell you to first dip your toe.

And so it is with knowledge. Short introductory texts are not meant to be authoritative or to give you immediate mastery. They are there to expose you to the core ideas in a way that might make you think "that's interesting", or perhaps recoil and think "that's not for me", and you move on.

There are many reasons why this is a useful approach.

Firstly, introductions to a subject are rare. My first programming book (it covered BASIC for 8-bit computers) was written for children, published by Usborne and consisted of less than 100 pages of quite well illustrated concepts. Where is the modern equivalent? Or the adult equivalent.

The web is awash with short introductory pieces written by amateurs that often leave the beginner more confused than where they started. Your local library is full of outdated material. A bookshop will have material that is popular but perhaps irrelevant (MS Word, Excel, etc. instruction manuals) or is intimidating for a beginner (700 page slabs on the intricacies of a subset of J2EE).

So where to start? The _Very Short Introduction to Computer Science_ and the _Very Short Introduction to Information_ appear from their ToCs to give somebody interested in those topics a quick overview. They are likely more in-depth and better written than the corresponding Wikipedia pages, and a reader new to it who is intrigued will make notes of topics on which to find perhaps more in-depth material.

Piqued, they may pick up a copy of _Very Short Introduction to Combinatorics_ and _Very Short Introduction to Big Data_ and make more notes, do a few MOOCs, pick up some Python and start a business that ends up employing thousands of people.

Or, alternatively, these introduction might clue them in that this isn't for them, and they might decide to pick up some texts on poetry, philosophy, geology or some other curiosity, and their life becomes a little better in another direction.

Would you rather say "no, you must dive into a multi-year programme of study on a subject from the outset", or insist that all information worth learning must be learned in its entirety? Is your argument boiling down to "if you're not prepared to commit to a doctorate thesis on it within 10 years, why bother"? It feels that way.

It's OK to be curious, to have a bit of interest in a lot of things. I am interested in chemistry and physics, but will never be a chemist of physicist. I am interested in learning more about pure and statistical mathematics, but I will never be a mathematician. Introductory texts that are entertaining and act as a stimulus, clue to the broader field, and jumping off point into the subjects should be welcomed, and for most of us, are.

After all, it was my dip in the toe of programming that led to my mostly satisfying and enjoyable career in computing that is about to reach its third decade...

> “For the most part, the Very Short Introductions range from worth reading to wonderfully appealing.”

Cannot recommend this series enough. If you want to know the best way to be a good citizen, to cut through the shroud of fake news, opinions, and context lacking information, this is it. Any time I hear a term I’ve never heard before on the news I go straight for these books. It started with “neoliberalism” a couple of years ago, and recently “hermeneutics”. Also, I began to wonder what does “Citizenship” actually mean? Not surprisingly these guys have a book on it.

Ack, what is "hermeneutics"!? I know it's a field of study and I get a little what it's about (though I'd need to see some more concrete examples to really get it I think)—but what baffles me is why people use 'hermeneutic' as an adjective when they could just say 'interpretation' or something simpler like that. Is there a legitimate reason to use that word? (aside from referring to the field of study.)

Doesn't it mean interpretation of religious texts? That is, someone can say hermeneutic and we know they are not just talking about interpretation, but interpretation of a specific genre of literature.

That's historically true. But from the Wikipedia article, for instance:

> Modern hermeneutics includes both verbal and non-verbal communication[6][7] as well as semiotics, presuppositions, and pre-understandings. Hermeneutics has been broadly applied in the humanities, especially in law, history and theology.

For example, the hoax paper at the heart of the Sokal affair[0] was entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

It's probably a term favored by dilettantes, maybe VSI has that word covered too :)

In English, if you want to make a word sound fancy, and especially if you want to construct a fancy compound word, you have to build the word out of Latin or Greek root words.

"Interpret" has Latin roots. "Hermeneutic" has Greek roots. "Understand" has German roots; doesn't it sound childish by comparison? (The word "childish" has German roots.)

Historically, this was a way of signaling class and education to others, especially in England, a country conquered by the Romans and then by the French. Common folk couldn't participate in academic discussions because they didn't understand Latin, and even those who could piece together some Latin couldn't understand Greek.

Eventually, these "fancy" words stuck, especially in English academia, and now we all have to use them if we want to sound academic.

While most of what you say is true, there might be a bit of embellishment in the "common folk" part.

Education in much of Europe has its roots in the church. The lingua franca of the Catholic Church was Latin. Therefore educated people knew and spoke Latin.

Many Greek words were borrowed into Latin from Greek, so Latin speakers would know those, too. Other Greek words made it into English via other languages like French and Arabic. I think I'm leaving out a Greek component, but I can't remember what.

In short, for a long time, being educated meant you knew Latin because that's the language you were taught in, and Greek kind of went hand-in-hand with the Latin and Latin-learning context of the church.

There's also a massive influence of Greek thinking that is pervasive in western education from the lineage of Thales, Plato, Aristotle, etc. These people basically founded the tradition of non-trade non-hereditary learning in the west.

Naturally, they spoke Greek and so it comes through in things like geometry and philosophy quite strongly.

I think the uses I've seen of it have been recent enough that that authors probably aren't focusing much on that aspect. If you compare those three words, 'interpret', 'understand', 'hermeneutic', the first thing that stands out most to me is relative commonness in the English language. Hermeneutic is far less known than the other two—so you'd think you'd want to avoid it unless you really need it (assuming your goal is to communicate which, sigh, sadly it often isn't so simple of course).

The other thing that stands out becomes clear when I try to find forms of 'interpret' and 'understand' that actually match the way 'hermeneutic' is used. I think they would be 'interpreting' and... well, there isn't anything very close for 'understand' really. I think the way it's used (when it's used as an adjective rather than referring to the field of study) the meaning is something like, "involving interpretation"; e.g., "the hermeneutic necessity inherent in all communication". It probably also has some connotations that authors like brought in, like an implication that the interpretation relativizes or at least colors whatever it is that's being understood/communicated?

In any case, I think it's still kind of unclear and annoying because even if there is a legitimate difference, I'm pretty sure people just use it to sound cool over frequently.

It's the interpretation of religion so I think it warrants a separate name (since if you let someone interpret your holy book for you you've essentially given them a great deal of power over your decision making).

My vague understanding is hermeneutics is interpretation + context. so, for a programmer 1 + 1 could be 2, or it could be 10, depending on what layer you're working at, and how you're choosing to represent things. and that's an easy one where you can just ask the computer. a better example might be all the variations of call by value or call by need. or maybe scope of variable binding. it's still interpretation, but it has a context that give weird answers if you're not used to that evaluation order.

Something more vague, like law, is interpreted, and it's important to consider all the prior interpretations and try to sort out what makes sense in context, and it's important to get whoever you're arguing with to agree to the relevant context.

anyway, that's how i think about it.

Funny. I just started reading these Very Short Introductions in the last year. They are a bit like "Que sais-je ?" series in France. I really like these small books that are bit like extended wikipedia entries, though the copy editing could be a little better to catch typos and whatnot. My favorite so far, "Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction Book by David Catling". I am currently reading a VSI on the Silk Road. I have not been disappointed with any so far.

I can't believe no one mentioned "Crash Course" channel on youtube. It follows a similar very short summary format (usually of 10 mins in video length) and it is very well made. I learned so much about history, geography, and science from that. It used to take up most of my evening TV time.

There's a touch of irony to this, but the best title list to the Very Short Introductions series is here-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Short_Introductions . The book titles are "$TITLE: A very short introduction"

Diderot's Encyclopédie has been a beaitful binge read.

See entry for 'Philosopher':

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=did;cc=did;...

Anybody have a recommendation to how to read from the "Very Short Introductions" series via an e-reader (kindle)? I'm searching San Francisco Public Library and Northern California Digital Library via the Libby app but can't find it in series format, and the wikipedia page [1] doesn't list titles but instead lists "topics," making it difficult to find, for example, the Very Short Introduction on the topic of "Classics" (the first?).

I guess if I have to I will buy the ones I'm interested in on Amazon, but I prefer to check out books from a library rather than purchase them, because otherwise costs adds up fast!

EDIT: Looks like here's a concise list, with some sort of purchasing option, but still not sure about e-format http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/series/VeryShortIntrod...

EDIT2: On oup.com, there is a tooltip for "ebook" that says "This title is available as an ebook. To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider." Looks like purchasing on Amazon is the only way. Shame as they clock in at 6-10 bucks a pop (12 if you don't have prime? not sure why it shows a crossed out 12$ for me), would add up very very quickly if you wanted to tackle a big chunk of the series.

EDIT3: The box sets don't seem to be a deal on Amazon (if you already have prime? Still don't understand prime prices). They are 30.75USD for 5 books that are 6.15USD each. So, it appears to me that the best option to read these books on an e-reader is to purchase them individually on Amazon when you find ones you're interested in.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Short_Introductions)

The book "The Know-it-all" by A.J. Jacobs was a great fun read a while back, on a similar topic. https://www.amazon.com/Know-All-Humble-Become-Smartest/dp/07...

Sorry if this is too snarky, but...

Anyone get a kick out of The New Yorker telling you how to quickly get up to speed on a topic? Since they pretty much wrote the book (er, magazine) on how to take forever to get to the point? I mean, if I absolutely have to know the fashion sense and mannerisms of the key players in a field, I know to go to them first...

and The Atlantic, right? Usually insightful, though

Ironically, I can't find a link to a master list of the stories they're talking about.

EDIT: See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15444991

If this is all a bit earnest, you may prefer the Bluffer's Guides:

http://www.publishinghistory.com/the-bluffers-guides-wolfe.h...

I already knew all that!

This is not how you should do it.

and I know you knew :P

The hard-cover encyclopedia died before its time. This is an interesting innovation on the idea of a consumer encyclopedia, with longer entries and curated subjects.

The irony being that this piece about a series of basic books extends too much on trivia; seven paragraphs was enough.

crap.. I thought this would be about imbibing large amounts of alcohol. Then I figured it involves reading. Never mind.

What's the New Yorker paywall workaround?

Ask Mike pretty please and he might hook you up.

Click the 'web' link under the main link then clickthrough via google.

Install uBlock Origin

Reply on news.ycombinator.com