In praise of depth – Pravesh

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2021-06-15 19:00:02

Imagine living in the 1800s. Books were few, libraries were fewer and information was generally hard to come by. If you happened to be a researcher working upon a specific question, chances were that a big portion of your time would have been spent on running between different libraries and gathering different sources for your perusal. All of this changed with the advent of the Internet. Now, researchers don’t run hither and thither for literature in their domain, they just use Google.

Today, not only is Information easier to come by, but it is also often shoved right into our face even if we aren’t actively searching for it. Getting up early and browsing HN, Reddit or any other aggregators of your choice should be a good example of what I mean to say. We are literally exposed to tens of different technologies, toolkits, interesting projects, research, and so on, on a daily basis. And thus are made people who are simultaneously interested in learning Graph Neural Networks with C++, SAT and SMT Solvers with Python, Natural Language Processing with Julia, French language with Anki, Kernel programming with Rust, Penetration Testing with Kali Linux, and Drawing with Excel

To us of the curious and zealous mind, this information overload coupled with our obsessive need of tinkering with every interesting technology that we come across has done more harm than good. Akin to how a processor shares its time with different processes, we keep switching our contexts to different interests that keep on expanding with each new article on our aggregators. We are no longer finding ourselves able to just sit down, select a technology, and work hard on it til completion, ignoring everything that comes in between. In short, we are increasing our breadth and not our depth.