The Worst Time to Learn What You “Learned” in School Was When you Were in School

School shows us topics worth learning, but it does not, I would argue, impart genuine comprehension. And yet, everyone’s life contains the same patterns that lead to what we are shown in school. This means that the knowledge locked away in textbooks is actually most useful to us later in life. In this episode, I argue that we should look to embrace scholastic information later in life, when our experiences give the collective knowledge of humanity meaning (and utility) to our lives.

Transcript

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School shows things worth learning. You are exposed to a number of topics, right? Physics, chemistry, biology, maybe some economics in there, you know, aspects of psychology, and then, of course, history and all the different topics. Those are all worth learning. They are worthwhile things to know. But I would argue that when you learn that in school, school does not really impart genuine learning. For example, quote unquote. Learning math meant being shown symbols and formulae. And of course, that's important knowledge. But unless you're a mathematician now, if you think back to when you were in school, none of that really meant a whole lot to you. I'm willing to imagine it meant as much as, well, I need to do this to pass the exam. I need to pass exams to pass the grade and to get some level of success in my life, I need education. But none of us had any idea of the journey it took to made those realizations that we were looking at in the textbook. A textbook really is kind of this compendium of realizations that were made throughout history, right? People were working hard at things and they were trying to solve some specific problem. And in doing that, out popped this realization, this thing that we might now call an invention or a theory. And because that was deemed important, that then got encoded into textbooks. And then we take those textbooks and we put them in front of kids, essentially, and through grade school and high school and beyond. If you go beyond that, we teach young people about these discoveries, these realizations. But when you were learning that in school, we didn't have any idea of the journey it took to make those realizations, right? The tinkering, the messy kind of all the different thoughts that must have gone through that inventors or that theoreticians or whoever, the scientist or the historian, all the things that were going through their head, the struggles, the things that we don't really have labels or names for, right? The kind of emotional states that eventually led to something that crystallized, I think, what everything that Darwin was doing to understand theory of evolution, we weren't Darwin, we weren't going on those journeys, we weren't on the boat, we weren't making the discoveries. But more to the point, we weren't wrestling with all those ideas in our mind to eventually come to this kind of crystallized or precipitated truth that popped out, which we now call the theory of evolution. We were part of those journeys. We don't have that context. We never had those emotional states. We never wrestled with all those decisions. So when we were looking at a theory that was presented to us in a textbook by the teacher, whoever. There was no way for us to really know anything about that other than this is supposedly important. And I guess it'll serve me later in life, which is not true for most people usually, although I'll talk about that in a bit. But it will serve to at least pass my exams and move on to the next level that society tells me I'm supposed to move into. So school shows us things that are definitely worth learning because people had these journeys, they made discoveries, they found something fundamental that was true about the world. But I would argue that school does not really impart genuine learning, because learning requires us to be part of that journey, to be part of the struggle, to have the emotional context, to wrestle with the different decisions, not just to be presented at face value with the discovery that was made. A discovery. You could sum that up in, let's say, a sentence, and then you look at that sentence, but that sentence only has meaning if you yourself took the journey to arrive at that sentence, arrive at that summary, arrive at the statement, or the full theory, whatever it is. So there is a difference between being shown information and actually appreciating and understanding information. A lot of teaching is kind of just showing us. If a teacher is in front of us or you're reading a textbook, that textbook presents us with information and we can understand kind of how it's consistent, and we can understand maybe some of the historical perspective, but that's not really learning. You kind of learn the mechanisms, but that isn't necessarily truly understanding what it means. You compare that to something like life's experience, which has core patterns that give meaning to what we see and hear. You go through your daily life, you get into relationships, you meet people, you get jobs, you do all these things that have really, really deep meaning to you. You probably don't put labels on them. I don't know what to call all those experiences, but we know that we really feel them. We understand, because there is this high dimensional context to all of it. And so I'm going to use this idea that what we are exposed to in school compared to what we are exposed to through life experience, to kind of argue that there are better times to learn things in life, there are better times to learn the stuff that we learned in school. Because, again, the stuff that we learned in school was really worth listening to, and being exposed to it was worth learning. But I'm going to argue in this episode that the better time to learn that stuff is when you've actually gone through a fair amount of life and can make these analogical connections between your own life experience and what those core patterns in those textbooks were talking about. The knowledge that was quote unquote, taught to us early, or at least displayed to us early. I'm going to argue that that actually matters much more later in life and that what we were exposed to in school. It's not best to relegate those to topics of physics and chemistry and biology or history, because those core patterns didn't really belong to those topics, even though that's maybe where they were discovered. Those patterns are actually agnostic to any topic. Those patterns actually have to do with life, and it's important to recognize that. And later in life, those patterns can actually be quite useful because you can truly understand what those patterns are. Those patterns being some math trick from calculus or the theory of evolution, or something from genetics or some scientific principle related to velocity, whatever. We were exposed to those patterns in the physics textbook, in the biology textbook, in the history textbook, because we thought just learning about those topics. But those core invariant patterns that make up human knowledge don't really belong to just those topics. They're actually universal patterns that apply to all kinds of areas of life. But we would never know that unless we, one, had enough life experience behind us to kind of build up a toolbox of patterns that we recognize, and two, made the connection to those real life experiences from those real life experiences to those core patterns that we learned in school. So I'm going to pick this apart a bit and hopefully convince you by the end of this episode that, as per the title of this episode, the worst time to learn what you learned, quote unquote in school, was when you were in school. And that doesn't mean there shouldn't be school or that we shouldn't teach history and chemistry in school. But I want to stress the point that that textbook kind of knowledge actually serves you a lot better later in life. And yet you don't see older people unless they are working scientists or mathematicians or something, or historians. You don't see older people typically dealing with that textbook type knowledge. It gets relegated to our younger years when it would actually serve us far better later in life. Okay, so the first point I made was that school shows us things worth learning. Yes, 100%, but I would argue it does not really impart genuine learning. School does not impart genuine learning because learning requires a life context, a struggle, a deep kind of emotional understanding of different situations to look upon those learnings that other people arrived at and truly understand what they mean. Okay, so that's the first point. The second point. Let's talk about life experiences. Everyone's life contains the same experiences that lead to everything taught in school. Okay, now that's going to sound od to a lot of people. Like, if I'm saying your life experiences will relate to something in the calculus textbook or really does relate to something from the theory of evolution, or your life experience really does overlap, or maybe even is the same as, I don't know, understanding how electrons behave in a molecule. I mean, that's a very kind of od thing to say, and it sounds like enforcing an analogy. Okay, but bear with me, because, again, remember what I said earlier? When we learned topics in school, the patterns that we were exposed to weren't really. They didn't really belong to those topics. That's just the place where they were discovered, right? It was the biologist doing biology things that uncovered some core pattern. And now that core pattern gets taught in the biology textbook. That chemist was mucking around with chemicals, and then something precipitated out and they made a discovery, and then that was a new theory, and then that went in the chemistry textbook, right? The physicist, the historian. But that doesn't mean those core patterns actually belong to those topics. These patterns exist in nature for a reason. They are universally true. And in fact, they exist in kind of a physically agnostic way, in an informational way. Informational things are not necessarily tethered directly to any specific physical instance. Okay? So everyone's life, I would argue, contains the same experiences that lead to the things that were actually taught in school, experiences, the same patterns that overlap with the things that were taught in school. So let's use an example. Imagine being in a situation, and it's too challenging to resolve in its entirety. So whatever the situation is, it'd be great to get a really holistic understanding of everything that's going on, but it's just too challenging to know everything, and yet we need to have a sense of how the whole system operates. So say your boss comes to you and says, okay, look, the company is planning to launch a brand new product. And because of that, our company needs to know how this new product is going to fit into our existing operations, marketing, and finances. Okay? This kind of knowledge is really essential for successful integration and long term success of our product. Okay? So that's the situation. It's a very real world situation. You're working at a company, your boss comes to you coming up with a new product. It's not enough just to know the minutiae of the product. We have to understand how to integrate this product into our existing operations, our marketing, our finances, and on and on. We got to know how this specific thing relates to the holistic, full operating conditions of the company. Okay? While any system or situation can be thought of as containing a function that describes how inputs of a situation produce its output. So if we're talking about business or we're talking about this new product that we want to bring to market, we've got all kinds of inputs. There's raw materials, there's labor, there's capital, there's information, there's time, energy, technology, processes. However you want to think about that, there's all these things that we start with, and then we've got to put it into one big black box, and then out at the other end is going to come the outputs, which are things like the products, the services, profit, customer satisfaction, employment, innovation, brand equity, social impact, environmental impact, market share, whatever. And maybe those are too high level, you can go lower level. But the point is, we always have a set of inputs, and we're always trying to convert those to outputs. That's a situation. And because those are inputs becoming outputs, you can understand that there is a function, because that's what a function is. A function is something that converts inputs to outputs. Now, normally, when we think of the word function, at least in kind of the scientific way, we're thinking of like a mathematical function, right? You've got y as the output, and then you've got one or more, you got an x on the other side and maybe some variables going on. And if you add some numbers to that, it's going to spit out the y value, right? But we also use function in a colloquial sense. What is your function in this business? What is your function in this situation? What is your function in the government? It doesn't matter. The point is, a function is always this kind of thing that converts inputs to outputs. That's always the case. Now, for most real world situations, we cannot exactly visualize what that function is, right? Because the function would be too complex. When I say visualize, I mean, again, if you go to that kind of calculus textbook, you might see the function drawn out like a graph, right? And that still applies to everything in the real world. But a real world function would just be so intricate and convoluted and high dimensional that there's just no way to visualize it. And yet, we do need a way to assess the behavior and properties of the functions in our lives, right? We do need a way to kind of do what we are doing in something like a calculus class. We do need a way to say, here's the situation. There are inputs, there are outputs. There is a transformation between inputs and outputs. And I need to know kind of what goes on, at least to some extent, inside that black box that converts inputs to outputs, that's my job. Again, if that boss comes to me and says, we have a new product, and the company needs to know how that new product is going to fit into existing operations and marketing and finances, that's critical information. It's very real world information. You have to understand the function between inputs and outputs. But that's a very broad, holistic, whole company thing. How am I supposed to understand the function of the whole company? Can't visualize it, and yet we need to assess the behavior and properties of that function. So is there a methodology or approach that could be used? In other words, we need a way to take a smaller, local view of something and have that inform us of something more holistic. Well, why am I talking about this? Well, what I just said there a smaller, local view of something in order to get some idea of how something functions more holistically at a bigger scale. What I just outlined in that situation is inherent in the mathematical concept known as the Taylor series. So why am I talking about the Taylor series? Well, back to the beginning. I said, look, school shows us things worth learning, but does not impart genuine learning. And I said, everyone's life contains experiences or patterns that lead to the same stuff taught in school. Well, the Taylor series is a good example that most of us probably learn. You might not remember, but you probably learned this in school at one point. It comes from calculus. You were taking a math class, you had to take calculus, assuming you took calculus, and you were probably exposed at some point to this thing called the Taylor series. Now, the Taylor series, if you ask 99% of adults, right, or maybe even everybody, even mathematicians, they would say, well, this is something that comes from math. It's very specific to math. So if you're not a mathematician, or you're not an engineer or a scientist, you're probably not doing anything with the Taylor series. Why would you? It's not relevant to the real world. It just sits there in that calculus textbook. That's where it belongs. It's a calculus topic. But that's not true. The Taylor series does not belong to math or engineering or science. The Taylor series is a fundamental pattern. It is a truth of something that occurs in nature. It's the way systems or information, under certain circumstances and under certain constraints function. It's how certain things just happen. We don't have to know the reason why it happens. Right? But Mr. Taylor was working away at math problems. That was his domain, and he understood something fundamentally true. He discovered that. That's why his name is attached to it now. That's why it goes into math textbooks. But just because that's where he discovered it does not mean that discovery belongs to math. It can't just belong to math. It's something fundamentally true about nature. For some reason, there is this pattern to reality. And actually, we just saw that pattern when I said, hey, we've got this business problem. There's inputs into outputs. There's a function there that we need to understand, and I need a way. There's no way I can holistically see the workings of the entire business. The company is too big, and yet I somehow have to get a sense of the function of the full company. That pattern, that idea of only being able to do something in a small, local sense, but getting a sense of what the larger function overall is doing is what the Taylor series is about. That's what it actually is. Okay, so the Taylor series, when you learned it, quote unquote learned it, basically, it's a representation of a function as an infinite sum of terms, and each of those terms are calculated from the values of the function's derivatives at a single point. So that sounds very mathematical, sounds very sciency, because in that view of it, it is. So if you had some mathematical function and you had to approximate, it was too complex to do it exactly, so you had to approximate that function. You could use something like the Taylor series to get a sense of what is the mathematical expression of this whole function. And you would solve differential equations to do it. And it's basically just this way to do something at one point of the function in kind of a simple way. But then, thanks to the properties of the Taylor series, it will tell you something about the full function at large. Okay, so for example, let's know, again, maybe in physics, you were learning about the motions of bodies and things like this, and then you were told in calculus that you could take derivatives to understand the motion of those things. So, for example, the first derivative would be like the car's speed. And if the speed is positive, the car is moving forward, and if it's negative, it's moving backward. A speed of zero might indicate that the car is standstill. So if I take the first derivative, doesn't matter if you don't remember how derivatives work. Doesn't matter. The point is, if you do this thing called a derivative, it's going to tell you essentially the speed of the vehicle, right, and the direction. And then you can take a second derivative. Derivatives have these higher and higher orders to them. If you do it again, then you get the car's acceleration, right? So the acceleration is positive. The car is speeding up. So now it's not just how much distance is being traveled per unit time. Now it's the rate of change of the distance per unit time. And then you've got the third derivative, which would be the change in the acceleration. Positive value might indicate the car is changing, how fast it's speeding up or slowing down, and you can keep going. Now we're going to take the fourth derivative. Now it's the change in the. Change in the acceleration. You might call that, like, the jerk or the jerkiness or how much. There's abrupt changes in the acceleration, right. You can take the fifth derivative. That's the change in the change and the change in the acceleration, right. It gets a little bit goofy when you keep taking higher orders, but they have, at least for the first few derivatives, they have some physical meaning to them, right? The fifth derivative might be higher order aspects of the car's motion or the subtleties in how the jerkiness is actually changing over time. Okay, now, this would be, you know, maybe you're doing this in physics and you're applying calculus, and you pass your exam, and then you just forget about it, right? And that's all very scholastic sound. So, the Taylor series, that's from math, that's from calculus. I did that. But again, it's not really what the Taylor series is. The Taylor series is a core pattern or truth that has been found and thus applies to many areas of life. Okay, so let's do an example. Let's do the same thing. But instead of doing this kind of toy example with car speeds, which you would only find in the physics classroom, let's go back to our business example, okay? So, again, just to remind you, the Taylor series says we can approximate the whole function by just picking one point on the function and then taking a bunch of derivatives at that one point. Take the first, take the second, take the third. So, in that car example, it's like you really needed to understand what this car was doing, not just the direction it was heading. You need to know the speed, whether it was accelerating, whether the acceleration was changing, whether there was a change in the change of the acceleration, whether it was jerking, all the things you could kind of say or definitely say about the car's motion. If you had to do that, the Taylor series is a way you could do that. You could get a sense of the full function of that car's movement by going to one part and just taking these successive derivatives. Okay, that's the Taylor series. And it seems to be. While that belongs to math, that's a mathematical know. Obviously, physicists, if they're studying the mechanics of something, might find that useful. Maybe an engineer, because they have maybe a signal that's coming in from, I don't know, a radio telescope. And they need to understand something in the signals function, and so they apply the Taylor series, whatever. But it sounds very kind of sciency and mathy. Let's go back to business, though. Does this possibly have any relevance to a real world situation? Well, of course, because derivatives don't belong to moving cars and moving bodies. It's an informational thing. These things aren't relegated to specific physical systems. They don't belong to specific things. They are generally true. That's why they've survived as pieces of truth. So, in business, the first derivative, of course, we wouldn't call it that. But that might be something like business momentum. If the business is gaining momentum, that could be a positive first derivative. It might be expanding, acquiring new customers or increasing sales. Okay, what would the second derivative be? Well, maybe that would be like strategic acceleration, right? A positive second derivative might suggest that the business is accelerating its growth through effective strategies, innovative products, or improved market positioning. Okay, what about a third derivative? Well, that could be adaptation dynamics. Maybe positive values are signifying successful adaptation to changing market conditions, or, I don't know, dynamic shifts in the business environment. The fourth derivative, I mean, does this even have meaning anymore? Well, maybe innovation agility. Positive values can signify a high level of innovation adaptability, while negative values might suggest challenges in embracing new ideas or technologies. The fifth derivative, maybe that's strategic flexibility, right? Indicating a business's strategic flexibility. Maybe it can quickly pivot or adapt to emerging opportunities or challenges, and on and on. Okay, now, some people would look back and say, oh, okay, you're forcing the analogy here, right? You're taking something from. It was discovered in math. It was used for math, used for physics, used for engineering. And now you're saying, well, it's kind of analogous to what happens in business if we pretend that business has momentum or that strategy has acceleration. But that's not pretending. That's not pretending. Velocity is not something that just happens to physical things. Because the ultimate reality of reality is informational. It's not physical. We know this, right? We know that it's best to look at even physical systems in the informational sense. And all of mathematics, for example, is abstraction. Most of science and mathematics and statistics and probability is abstraction. The patterns that you look at in history and economics, social Sciences, these are abstractions that we create. They are informational patterns. They're not specific physical things. You might be studying a specific physical thing, but the pattern that matters is not a specific physical thing, it's informational, right? We have to abstract above specific physical things to truly understand the truth of something. So businesses do have momentum and direction and acceleration and dynamics, and agility and flexibility. And it does literally make sense that if you look at the business from one angle, such as its momentum, that you could also think about how that momentum itself changes in terms of strategic acceleration. And you could think about how that strategic acceleration changes in terms of adaptation dynamics. And you could think about how that adaptation dynamics, or those adaptation dynamics change in terms of innovation agility, and how that changes in terms of strategic flexibility. Those are real things. And I'll tell you, people in business do do this, but they just don't call them derivatives. They don't think they're doing a Taylor series. They think that they're just looking at how businesses function. And there are many ways and facets to think about how the dynamics of a business happen. But that is what you're doing. You are looking at business momentum and acceleration and adaptation, and agility and strategic flexibility. And these are successive derivatives of the dynamics of the situation. And you are looking at what can be thought of as a function of the entire business. And it is true that one way to understand the entire function of a business is to home in on one part, let's say, of a specific product that you're bringing to the market. And to understand how, let's say, that product fits into one area of the business, maybe marketing, and to understand what that means for momentum and acceleration and dynamics and innovation, agility and strategic flexibility. And that in doing that, it's going to tell you something about the larger function of the business with this product at large. Let's use another example. Maybe you're tasked with uncovering a terrorist cell, groups of terrorists that are infiltrating the country. Okay? So you're being called upon to do this. This is a complex situation, a very real world situation. There's a threat, there is all kinds of convoluted aspects and facets to this situation. Information coming in and out. Some you can trust, some you can't trust. Where are they hiding? Okay, I need to understand the function of the terrorist organization and how this terrorist organization relates to the security of my country. Well, they're probably not calling them derivatives, but could you apply the methodology of the Taylor series here? Well, yeah, you can. The first derivative might be something like intelligence momentum. A positive first derivative might represent successful intelligence gathering, increasing awareness, staying ahead of potential threats. Right. We're talking about the dynamics of it. If it was negative, maybe there's challenges in collecting relevant information, or maybe you're falling behind in understanding the evolving threats. Okay, let's look at the change of the change. What's that? Second derivative? Maybe that's operational agility, the effectiveness, and adaptive, the ability to adapt to operational responses to intelligence. Right. If you have a negative second derivative, maybe there's difficulties in executing responses or gaps or delays in addressing the threats. Third derivative, maybe that's the adaptation, dynamics and tactics, right? And on and on. Okay. Technological innovation, encounter terrorism, strategic flexibility and policies. Again, it's not forcing or stretching an analogy. Whether you like it or not, whether it's business or a terrorist cell, if you're tasked with understanding the function which you are in this given situation, then whether you like it or not, you need to find a way to do something that is cognitively possible. Meaning, I can't look at the full function of this, but I can only do a narrow facet of it. But I have to do it in a way that tells me something about the full function. That's what the Taylor series is. It's not a math trick. It's not something that belongs to a calculus textbook. That's just where it was discovered. And that's, unfortunately, the only way we teach it. It's a fundamental methodology to homing in on a specific part of a situation and thinking about that homed in on part in a certain way. And mathematicians would call this taking derivatives, but really what we're doing is just taking higher order versions of the dynamics of something. Start with how this affects business momentum, then think about how that business momentum itself changes as a strategic acceleration. Then think about how that changes in terms of adaptation, dynamics, and so on. Business people are doing this. They're just not calling it derivatives. People who are hunting after terrorist cells are doing this. They just don't call it applying the Taylor series with successive derivatives. But that is a way to do that. Focus on intelligence momentum, then operational agility. Then adaptation dynamics and tactics and on and on. It's a way to get at the behavior of the full function of the situation. That's what a Taylor series really is. Okay, so let's go back. I said, look, there's a difference between being shown information and appreciating information. When we are taught stuff in school, we're being quote unquote taught. We are being shown the accumulation of human knowledge and what that this is not random information. This is the stuff that is deemed important because it's universal, it's survived. It kept coming up again and again. But to understand that, I mean, most people, hopefully you followed me with those business and terrorist examples. You probably feel like you have a much better understanding of the Taylor series now than you did when you learned it in school. I probably could have done a better job, but hopefully you got the sense that I said, look, a Taylor series is just a way to understand a big full function by just going to one part of the function and taking derivatives. Okay, now, when I first said that, you're probably like, okay, whatever. So that's like a math trick. But then I said, here's what that means for business, and here's what that means for terrorism. When you put it into situations you can relate to. I don't know if you can relate to terrorism, but probably to the business example or something similar. Now it's like, oh, so that's what the Taylor series really is. A methodology to understand the function of a complex situation by going to one part of it and just taking successive changes in the dynamics and thinking about the situation in that fashion, hopefully you have a much more intuitive understanding of what the Taylor series actually is now. So there's a difference between being shown information like we are in school, when we don't have much life experience to relate to, and it's not taught in that fashion anyway. And later in life, when you've worked for businesses and maybe worked for the government or had many side projects or ran your own company or done something in your church or your community or whatever it is you do, what I'm trying to tell you is that those life experiences, that's where the understanding for the things like Taylor series come from, because that's what a Taylor series actually is. That's just the Taylor series. I'm not saying the Taylor series applies to everything. I'm saying there are thousands and thousands of examples of core patterns that are taught when we are young that actually mean something when you are older, because you can connect your real life patterns and experiences to those truths and actually understand what they mean. And more to the point, now, if you understand what they mean, you can use them. I can go into a business situation and say, I'm not going to apply the Taylor series in the sense that I'm going to go write out some math equations or program it into a computer, but I can use the Taylor series in a real situation because I can say, hey, my boss just said we're bringing a new product, and we need to understand the full function of the company. How is that going to happen by just focusing on this one little part? Well, I'm going to think about the dynamics of how that one little part happened, and then I'm going to take successive changes in those dynamics. I'm going to understand the momentum. I'm going to understand change in the momentum, the change in the change of the momentum. I can call this agility. I can call this adaptation. I could call this product pivoting, call it whatever you want. You're still doing that whether you like it or not, you're doing the Taylor series. That's what the Taylor series actually is. There's a difference between being shown information like we are in school and appreciating what that information means. Life's experience has the core patterns that give meaning to what we see and hear. There are better times to learn things, and that's quite often. And when it comes to fundamental truths and accumulation of human knowledge, I would argue that better time is later in life when you have experiences that you can overlap with those core truths, because that's what they actually mean. The knowledge taught early matters far more later in life. Hence, again, the title of this episode, the worst time to learn what you learned in school was when you were in school. Okay, so hopefully that made sense. That's the big kind of conclusion or the main argument I'm making. The worst time to learn what you learned in school was when you were in school. So imagine that you're walking by and you see an adult reading a calculus textbook, and it's open to a page on the Taylor series. You might not know that's what they're looking at. It's got some equations there. Most people would probably look at that and they would say to themselves, I wonder why they're doing something scholastic. Like, let's say this is an older person. You might think maybe it's an adult student, but most people would be like, why is that older person holding a textbook? Like, isn't that something that younger people do when they're in school. But the reader of that textbook has what no student does, which is deep life experience that engenders such otherwise dry content with meaning. That difference between showing information and appreciating information. Right. That adult looking at that scholastic information actually is in a much better position to truly understand what those patterns mean. Right. Their life experience as an older person has the core patterns that give meaning to what they see and hear in that textbook. There are better times to learn. That person sitting there with the calculus textbook at an older age would be the better time to pick up that calculus textbook. Okay. The knowledge taught early in today's society would be far more useful later in life. And I gave some examples. Business, counterterrorism, stuff like that. Let's turn this into something practical. So, if it's true that the worst time to learn what you learned in school was when you were in school, what should we do about it? Right. Most of my listeners are probably done school, maybe not. Maybe you're in university. That's fine. I think this definitely still applies to you. But what should we do? Well, we should look towards the quote unquote, scholastic type information later in life with life experiences that give such hard won knowledge meaning in our own lives. So don't relegate a math problem or an evolutionary principle from biology. Don't relegate that to the past. Like, oh, that's what students learn when it never really matters to you beyond getting a job. I get know you had to learn it, quote unquote, to get the job, but I would argue you didn't really learn it. Now is the time to look upon humanity's wealth of collected knowledge and let it help your life. Right? Who would have thought the Taylor series was particularly useful beyond some niche math example in a calculus textbook? Well, it's actually really, really useful at the conceptual level, which is really where it matters. Not in the niche, super specific, technical way, in the. This is an invariant truth about the universe, about life, about the way the world works, that you can apply to very real world situations. If we face a situation where we need to understand something globally, but cannot access all that information, which is true in a lot of situations, then we can use practically, not scholastically, the truth inherent in something like the Taylor series, it is relevant. Now, I would say, don't read textbooks. I said, the older person is reading a textbook. They are in a position where that is more useful to them. But most textbooks, they're taught for students. They're written for students, they're written in a very specific way for the mathematician or person doing calculus or the engineer or whatever. And quite frankly, most textbooks are pretty awful. They just are. It's like how people complain about how math is taught when you actually use math later in life, and then you go back and you look at how it was taught, or you just think about how it was taught. Like, no wonder almost everybody hates math when they're growing up. It's not because they were actually bad at math, they were just bad at the way it was taught, which is really, really stupid. That's a whole nother episode. I don't need to get into that right now, but it's just not taught well. So I wouldn't say go pick up textbooks because you're going to be looking at just technical versions of things. And again, they're showing you the final summary that someone discovered through a lot of trial, but you weren't part of that trial, so you don't have that same. I would pay attention to science. You might call them science popularizers. I don't really like that term. But people who explain science in layman terms, and here's what's important. It is not a weaker form of science. It's not like, oh, well, the experts really understand it, and I'm just getting the high level. It's actually a far superior and extremely useful communication of science. If we understand that, it's not really about science as much as it's about the core patterns that have been discovered by humans that can help our lives in the real world. Okay? There's a difference between being shown information and appreciating information. Your life experience has core patterns that give a lot of that quote, unquote scholastic information, genuine meaning. There is a better time to learn that stuff that you learned in school. The stuff in school does not belong to school. The stuff in school is the accumulated knowledge of humanity. That's something you want to call upon later in life when you're making money, when you're running a business, when you're an employee at a company, when you're joining communities or churches or whatever you're doing. That's where it's relevant. That's when you want to use humanity's most true invariant, timeless knowledge, not as some supposed foundation that sets you up as a kid so that you can go do things later in life. Anyways, that's a completely bogus premise. Anyways, the idea that that's going to provide you a foundation, that's just not true. You want to call upon that information. When you've lived life experience, when you're living life experience, when you're in the muck of it, when you're getting your hands dirty, when you're facing real world situations and have that deep emotional context that you can now analogously overlap with the core patterns that have been figured out for thousands of years, which now sit, unfortunately, just inside textbooks and are only shown to people who largely can't use it. You want to do that later in life, there are better times to learn. The knowledge taught early matters later in life. Okay, I had a tweet about this. I'm just going to read this now, and then I'll end the episode. I did this a few weeks ago. I said, the worst time to learn what you quote unquote learned in school was when you were in school. Most people in today's society, if they saw an adult doing logic or math or science in a coffee shop, they would wonder, why are they doing school stuff? Right? This reflects the sad structure of modern society that takes the most profound mechanisms discovered through trial, not academics, and quote unquote, teaches it to kids who will never use it again. The scholastic topics deemed most important are not quote unquote, school stuff. It's a foundation for how the human mind arranges thought. It's the invariant truths nature tends towards. Your. Life is nature. When the driving mechanisms behind the vagaries of life are expressed and anchored on rational thought and known phenomena, one is empowered to reflect, understand, and decide. The human endeavor to contemplate structure and truth is best achieved later in life, when one's younger self has experienced the trials of existence, when one has filled their life with the context that gives the topics taught in school meaning. Quote unquote taught. Don't relegate your exposure to humanity's biggest realizations to the earliest part of your life. You may have grasped some methods to regurgitate knowledge, but you most surely did not learn why any of it matters. Okay, so this is kind of a primer for nontrivial season five, which is the next season coming up. I spent four seasons going over what I believe have been some profound and important patterns that I've noticed, and most of these were spoken about fairly generally. But going forward, I want to show how logical, mathematical, and scientific truths can be applied to real life. To me, this is far more important way to understand logic, math, and science, or whatever, quote unquote scholastic thing pattern you might be talking about, because it doesn't belong to logic, math, or science belongs to life. These are core patterns that have survived for a reason, now is the time to use them because they speak to the ultimate universality of the patterns in our world. We shouldn't be relegating those to specific topics or courses. Okay, so school shows us things worth learning. But I would argue school does not impart genuine learning. Everyone's life contains the same experiences that lead to everything taught in school. Because of that, I would say that the worst time to learn what you learned, quote unquote, in school was when you were in school. I would say that if it's true that that's the case, that we should look towards scholastic type information later in life when life's experiences give us the meaning and the context to make humanity's hard won knowledge meaning, to give that meaning. Okay. Don't think about it as just belonging to textbooks, belonging to students. I think it really belongs to those later in life that have the experience to give those heart, those pieces of hard won knowledge meaning. And it is useful. You might think something like the Taylor series is this esoteric thing that belongs in a calculus textbook. It's actually a fundamental pattern that absolutely applies to real world life and can help you in real world decision making. Okay, so I'm looking forward to season five. We can do a lot more of these kind of taking the fundamental pattern of something that maybe was locked away in some textbook, maybe you haven't looked at from a long time, for a long time, or maybe you never have. I'm going to show you just how applicable it is to real world, complex, nontrivial situations. Okay, that's it for this episode. Until next time, take care.