I also feel like I was let down by my English teachers. Even in high school I would complain that they would suck all the enjoyment out of a reading a book. Every book felt like a chore and I was an avid reader, a get-in-trouble-because-I-stayed-up-too-late-reading kid. I was the "reading at an N+1/N+2/N+3 grade" student, but I hated English/reading classes with a passion.

I've gone back to re-read some of the books I read in school and disliked and I find myself wondering constantly "why didn't the teacher point that out?" or "why didn't they give me the context to understand that?". I feel cheated in a way. And I had good teachers (I think), I'm not sure if I just wasn't in the right mind-space to understand or appreciate it or what.

Oh sure, they'd talk about symbolism and all of that but it always felt a little like BS to me as a kid. Like they were deriving meaning from thin air. I unfortunately cannot remember specific examples or I'd love to go back and re-read the book in question to see if I could understand/see it now. It felt like they never "grounded" the book in the context I needed to "get" the joke or understand the reference/metaphor/etc. I'm sure there were countless clever passages that went right over my head and instead of it being explained I was just supposed to understand that this was a metaphor for XYZ (something I'd not experienced yet, was well before my time, etc). It felt more like I just needed to memorize what they said and parrot it back since I wasn't getting that from what I had read.

I have (and continue to) re-read books from school and find myself amazed to find myself enjoying books that I remembered disliking or merely tolerating. Did I need more life experience? Was I just too focused on "more important" things? I don't know. I look back on most of my education and wish I could re-do it with my current eyes/mindset, I feel like I'd get way more out of it.

I remember hearing once that a core element of collegiate humanities education involves teaching that a great work can only be understood and appreciated when the reader first understands the work's context. Only then should the reader attempt to summit the great work.

Of course, this is also true in engineering disciplines as well. Perhaps the greatest software engineering work is the Linux kernel. Open the repo, and navigate to a random line in a random file. The odds that you will understand exactly--and I mean exactly--what occurs on that particular line on your first read without an explanatory comment is relatively low. If, however, you consider header files, libraries, how the file fits into the broader kernel, language features, and additional contextual information, your ability to understand that line of code increases significantly.

This writing is so delicious. Just became a paid sub

"I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!

But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway. Making something thick—that’s a lot of pressure! But remember: you were built to perform under pressure, and that’s just what you’ll do."

This is so true. I should re-read this weekly and not feel like some ultra-philosopher trapped by his own laziness... I can just... not feel guilty, the ideas are not that good... yet.

‽ interrobang i like this one. I’ve got it to auto correct whenever i put a question and exclamation mark together.

A Chinese example of this for me is Jin Yong, probably the most influential wuxia (Chinese martial-arts fiction) novelist in the Chinese-speaking world. His books are popular fiction in the most literal sense: enormously entertaining, widely read, and for many people first encountered simply as page turners.

As a kid, that was how I read them too.

Only after I started working did I realize how perceptive some of the character writing was. Murong Fu, for example, is genuinely capable, but his ambition is even greater. Everyone around him, friends, followers, even people who love him, is ultimately someone he is willing to sacrifice for his goal. I have met people who seem to reproduce almost the whole arc: the ambition, the triumphs, the disappointments, the pain, the struggle, and sometimes even the madness. Suddenly Murong Fu no longer feels like an exaggerated fictional character.

The book never changes. I had finally acquired the experience to see what was already there. That feels like thickness to me.

This is also true in science; some things reward depth of study in a way that just isn't apparent from the outside.

https://xkcd.com/877/

There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it.

In high school we had to read and annotate this 900p Greek mythology book during our summer break. Our grade reflected how well we annotated it. I didn't do any of it (thanks Ultima Online).

The very first in-class assignment we had that year took about an hour and had about a 25% bigger impact on our grade than annotating did.

Not saying that grades are the end goal but it felt like a slap in the face that the exploration of such a deep topic just.. didn't matter.

I think teachers did tell us exactly this. But we were 15 and we didn't believe them or didn't listen.

> I’m sorry, but if you’re building or using a tool like this, then you’ve got slop for brains.

unfortunately a lot of people in tech tend to think in terms of technology - looking at this from one solution - not looking at the problem holistically. turning their brains into slop brains.