If you’re new to the concept of polymathy (I personally ventured into the idea when I read Da Vinci’s biography by Walter Isaacson), a lot of counter-intuitive traps await you when trying to build competence in multiple areas.

You don’t need to be a generalist at all times during your journey into polymathy. I mentally grasped this fairly recently that you don’t need to shun specializing for smaller durations. Something like a day is obvious as a candidate but, in the past, I would shy away from even periods of a month to actually focus on a singular thing. I’m fairly comfortable doing that for upto three months now but would recommend touching a large span of domains over the span of six months for you don’t want to start losing out on the humility that interdisciplinary pursuits enforce on you.

People have been responding to emacs and my beard.

For a while I thought I did not have a lot to say. Turns out a lot of other humans are quite interested in the much of the same things that I’m into: my hatred for the mouse, and the consequent love for efficient workflows being some of them.

I’ll give the people what they want: I get to enjoy esoteric tech and spread the word, growing a cult, while other humans have enlightened experiences (believe me I do talk like this in person) and continue propogating the techno-propaganda about enjoying computer science.

Checkout the previous polymathy musings

Context

I intend to formalize my plans of getting good at multiple domains not for the reputation that follows but for the generic insight about the world that you may harness as a result.

This is the second refactor of the way I approach this subject and this time around I will be pushing for practical indicators that allow me to gauge my progress over time.

Writing is an involved process. A rough overview is as follows:

• you think of an idea
• you build upon that idea with what you already know
• you structure out some initial drafts
• you run it under a careful eye to scrape out the loopholes
• you edit it, to the point of satisfaction

The problem with that process is the last bullet right there. It makes the worth of a word in the moment diminish than the act of etching something down in stone.

I find most sources of information these days (since several years) to be too noisy compared to the actual signals of wisdom you expect from a popular source.

Rarely, I’ll pull up the news application on my phone and consume a whole bunch of generic, and some domain specific news.

Other than state of the art research in a technical domain, which is based upon a corpora of established citations, most other “new” stuff is noise.

Speech and the word written, are potential expressions of a thought. Each one of us enjoys a different mix of how we best convey ourself.

Ever since I began blogging when I was 19, I’ve been prioritising descriptiveness over precision. I feel I’ve entered a mental state where I value the distilled value of the transmission more than the exhaustiveness of the message.

I also notice a rift between the way I speak and the way I write. Not to say that any one of them is superior than the other but I could use an exercise in convergence - projecting them both onto a common ground.

I’ve been formally delving into epistemology and relevant lateral root domains recently and have been re-encountering several ideas that I’d previously casually explored with intrinsic motivation.¹

This isn’t my first accidental implicit intersection of thoughts with core philosophical theories like constructivist epistemology and ontology.²

Given my natural inclinations towards personal interdisciplinary research, apart from my core specializations, I do deliberately maintain an extensive scaffolding around several domains that I plan to build foundations in soon. This allows me to generalize over multiple realizations of similar concepts in different epistemological clusters and identify some interesting patterns.³

I partition my days in phases of different mindsets that allow me to cater to my varying epistemological hungers. One of them is a daily ninety minute ideation hunt and feast that helps keep my skills sharp.

The laws of thermodynamics do form a formidable devil that really does mess up your ordered habits if you do not inject in the necessary energy from time to time.¹

As a way to sharpen the intellectual axe, I envision myself going on domain hunts to allot myself a new class of game to look forward to during minor breaks from my usual, comparatively conventional endeavors.

I’ve been building up my vimrc again because emacs’ tramp mode just wasn’t cutting it when it came to speed for my remote work environments.

I’ve been a vim user for around 4 years now and having read some books partially and sampling a lot of blogs and conference recordings over this span, I decided I should commit and formally invest into a definitive resource to get me upto speed and beyond.

I’ve decided to increase my frequency of writing on the main blog to get more reps in and converge onto my style quickly than if I continued with long form content only.

I’m also going to practice being more concise, and blogging a little more on technical aspects as well.

My usual blog post goes to around 1500-2000 words and that isn’t helpful for covering some minor writing prompts I’d like to explore.