Ask HN: How do you satisfy your intellectual curiosity? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you satisfy your intellectual curiosity?

1 pointdonchuru3 comments

For example, let's say I want to learn about Singapore: It's history, the history of it's leader (LKY), their education system and generally just what it's like to live there. Should I just start with Wikipedia? Sometimes I find the articles to have too many links and/or distracting details. I could supplement with Youtube videos or documentaries but there are too many of those and I can't watch all of them. I usually just go with the most popular, but I'm not sure this a good proxy for quality. The same goes for books: there's simply too many of them on any one given topic, and sometimes it is not clear which one is the most important/seminal.

I would love to hear the process/framework you follow when you're learning about a new topic of interest, and how you go from "curious" to "well informed"

> I usually just go with the most popular, but I'm not sure this a good proxy for quality

Popularity is a poor proxy for quality.

I often start with Wikipedia, just to get a feel for the topic. Then I try to identify those people and works that are widely considered fundamental to the field and focus on those. For the most part, I ignore YouTube and documentaries. The signal/noise ratio in them is too low to be worthwhile.

I also avoid using genAI, because you have to have some level of expertise in the subject in order to be able to spot when genAI is misleading you, and if I'm just learning, I lack that expertise.

> Then I try to identify those people and works that are widely considered fundamental to the field and focus on those.

How do you go about this? Reddit is fairly good for this, but also suffers from the noise problem (too many suggestions).

You follow the reference chain backwards. As you research things, take note of what the references are (if there are no references, then you can pretty safely ignore whatever you're reading). For any field, you'll find there are a core set of references that underpin almost everything.

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