Learning structures

https://medium.com/@michaeldsimmons/how-elon-musk-learns-faster-and-better-than-everyone-else-a010a4f586ef

• Learning across multiple fields provides an information advantage because it enables you to come up with new ideas and modes of thought
• Learning transfer: taking what you learn in one context and applying it to another
• Deconstruct knowledge into fundamental principles (underlying roots) - reconstruct them to create new solutions -- ask yourself: 'what does this remind me of? why does it remind me of this?' -- constantly make connections across different fields

“We are in an age that assumes that the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable… In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others.Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.”

Borges

Borges, 'Of Exactitude in Science'

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome and, not without Irreverence, abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

The idea that when the quest [for knowledge and creation] become greater than the subject itself, it becomes absurd and 'cumbersome'.