Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Being good at the basics, published by dominicq on November 6, 2023 on LessWrong.

(crossposted from

my blog

)

In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, there's a notion of being "good at the basics", as opposed to "being good by knowing advanced techniques".

How

you want to be good is a question of personal preference, but the idea is that these are the two ways, and most people do one or the other.

I think this is a concept that applies outside of BJJ, and one that's useful if you're trying to learn a field, but you're not sure how to approach it.

I'll take physics as an example, because that is a field where I would like to be good at the basics. The "basics" of physics would be things that you learn in high school, while "advanced" stuff would be what you would learn in university, maybe at a graduate level. (There's probably other ways of separating the basics from the advanced topics.)

You may roughly remember some of the simple formulas that you have learned in class during high school, you may orient yourself through a textbook problem, you may perform some basic calculations. You sorta know the basics. But how does it look like when you're

good

at the basics?

It might mean that you know the equations by heart, that you've really internalized their meaning.

It might also mean that you know the quantities or values for things around you. You can correctly approximate how much things weigh, how fast they move, or what their kinetic and potential energy is.

You can approximate how much joules of energy an apple contains, or how much energy hits a m2 of the Earth's surface on a sunny day. You have a good feeling for how much compressive stress a piece of concrete can withstand, and you can quickly and accurately calculate what the kinetic energy is of a car that you're driving in. You can also quickly convert between different units, and compare the quantities of different things.

Being really good at the basics of physics in this way requires a sort of

embodied

understanding. It requires a level of "closeness" to the subject matter that allows you to apply this knowledge to the world around you, to the extent that you start seeing the world around you in terms of that subject. You take a walk outside and

you can't help

but notice the physics of it all.

You'll notice that being "good at the basics" is actually a linguistic misdirection. This type of understanding is drastically different from the level of understanding you have after high school, yet both refer to the "basics". If you are really good at the basics, you are in fact an expert - an expert in the basics. The word "basics" here hides a huge amount of complexity, or time and effort.

Why be good at the basics (as opposed to the advanced stuff)? These things sometimes depend on the field, but mostly because being good at the advanced stuff will be required for a career in that particular field, but useless for other goals. I, for example, have no ambition to become a physicist but I do have an ambition to closely understand the world around me, and to make accurate estimates and good decisions. For me, being really good at the basics of physics is much more important than being good at some advanced thing within physics.

There are other fields where you can notice the two ways of being good at them. Writing is one of those fields. "Being really good at the basics" in writing looks like really plain and simple language that's easy to understand. By being good at the basics, you're actually hiding complexity. It's not like there is no complexity involved, it's just hidden from the reader. The reader is served a simple and clear text, but the complexity was in the process, from developing clear thinking about a topic, to the editing process that tries to simplify the resulting text. Compare this to being good at writing, but ...