Precocious Young People Should Do Deep Technical Training
(Skippable Backstory) A few months ago, Tammy Winter published a thread of advice for precocious young people. My addendum to it was the following:
Build a technical foundation. Opinions differ, but I’ve found it very hard to develop deep technical skills later in life: responsibilities eat into the necessary huge chunks of concentration, low-level technical work is usually low-status, and frankly you lose patience for the grind you need to develop technical ~fingerspitzengefühl~. It’s much easier to pick up “soft skills” later: sales, writing, etc. Having a deep working knowledge of math, physics, chemistry, biology, and various engineering disciplines are a superpower that will last you the rest of your life.
One such precocious young person reached out, asking me to expand on it because they found their physics classes boring and didn’t see the value in them. I thought it might be worth sharing my (lightly edited) response:
To caveat: these are all things that I only learned to appreciate many years after graduating. I found many physics classes boring too! (But often that is because the class is boring – not the subject)
