Why not learn multiple? Why make a false dichotomy? Math, programming languages, and alternative spoken languages are distinct useful things you can learn.
Otherwise what if someone said, don’t learn Math, learn Modula-2?
I've always had a suspicion that one person can't be a master of all things due to the physical limitations of human memory. Isn't that why we specialize?
Rather, it's that you have only so much time to dedicate to things... if you're focusing very much on one, then you're not spending time with the other -- and overtime, you'll lose that other thing. If you can manage to spend a good amount of time on two things (let's say, learning a new instrument and learning a language) everyday, consistently, then you will get both.
If your memory doesn't work, what does it matter how much you have?
You can create ungrounded abstractions all you you want, but as an older person who has commiserated with other older people, the common conception that it's harder to learn and retain things in older age is a real thing
Sure, but what you're describing is the difficulty of learning as age sets in. That's very different from the original assertion- "If I start specializing elsewhere I'll forget the intricate details of the thing I'm already specialized in." - unless that person was describing themselves as older.
Perhaps fixing degradation will prove to be a less difficult task than increasing memory, as the growth of new neurons is still a very newly-studied phenomenon compared to treatment into neurodegenerative processes, and soon medical science will benefit the learning of all demographics.
Every time I learn something new, a little of the old gets pushed out of my brain. Remember that time I took that wine making course and forgot how to drive?
Mastering a foreign language and math is not outside of realm of any human though - there's millions of people who learn both English and even more foreign languages together with math. Or anything else.
Or are you saying that non-Americans are less knowledgable because they learned one more language?
In life you usually want to be a master of one thing, but have knowledge of many other things to apply that mastery as widely as possible. Learning 10 languages at the 101 level can let you say "Hi, I'm a master of (whatever)" to many more people.
No, you want to be a master of 2 things: A human language, and something that everyone else on the planet isn’t also a master of. Mastering two things is hard. Mastering three things is near impossible. (Although If you naturally get multiple human languages, from parents from different linguistic backgrounds, for example, that’s great. And you might have a chance of mastering both. But one of them ought to be English.)
not really. if you are waiting in a line, or taking public transportation, you can use you smartphone to practice some natural language, but not math which requires deep focus.
Okay if you want to treat life like an RPG you need to minmax the right skills in, fine. That's a very strange, naively calculated, and from my perspective, totally unfulfilling way to live life.
Actually it's how most regular people live life every moment. Go with this or that profession, learn this or that language, study this or that framework. Learn guitar or drums?
You don't need to be from Vulcan to understand you can't have it all simultaneously.
And it has nothing to do with microptimizing and minmaxing everything - which is a caricature.
Even just at the very high level view you know you have x time after work, and you could go study a foreign language, or you could study math, or learn to cook, or whatever. Some things you can fit together, most you need to prune...
If we're talking about "opportunity cost" in a very fuzzy "you made an assessment that prefers another option" kind of way that's fine (though its goofy HN pseud-speak, but w/e), but it's also completely unhelpful in a discussion about what to focus on learning. To your point, everybody lives life this way, there's really no other way to live life than to make judgements, so why respond w/ that unless you're actually making some more targeted point about only learning things that provide you the highest utility.
Opportunity cost is an open-ended economic term, not some obscure math or physics arcana, and it's core is all about preferring one option over another after an assessment (of what you lose by not going with the other, etc).
Using it casually is totally compatible with the concept, it's not like using hard math (e.g. Godel's incompleteness theorem") in some pseudo-scientific fashion.
>To your point, everybody lives life this way, there's really no other way to live life than to make judgements, so why respond w/ that unless you're actually making some more targeted point about only learning things that provide you the highest utility.
Everybody uses O/C in some way or another in their lives (it's not some obscure idea of only academic interest), but not everybody uses it well.
Many waste efforts on multiple things ("jack of all trades"), others chose the thing that makes them worse off professionally or personally over better options open to them, etc.
So, that's the point I was making: choosing math over Chinese (as the author suggests) can work out well from a O/C perspective. Understanding math better is more approachable than learning a language like Chinese adequately to make anything of it, and can have a wide impact (especially to a programmer, but also in personal life, business decisions, etc).
> Opportunity cost is an open-ended economic term, not some obscure math or physics arcana, and it's core is all about preferring one option over another after an assessment (of what you lose by not going with the other, etc).
lol I know its not arcana or hard math, but framing a decision people regularly make in life without any means of holistic assessment or accounting for the options like its a micro-econ problem if you just informally mean "make a judgement call", is the type of terminology abuse that's the hallmark of a pseud.
> but not everybody uses it well. Many waste efforts on multiple things ("jack of all trades"), others chose the thing that makes them worse off professionally or personally over better options open to them, etc.
And this is at the root of my objection to this, what could you possibly mean here by "not everybody uses it well"? To what or whose criteria can you possibly make such an assessment?
> So, that's the point I was making: choosing math over Chinese (as the author suggests) can work out well from a O/C perspective. Understanding math better is more approachable than learning a language like Chinese adequately to make anything of it, and can have a wide impact (especially to a programmer, but also in personal life, business decisions, etc).
You might fall in love with a Chinese national and want to learn your partner's native tongue. You might have your life wholly changed by a work of Chinese literature. This is why this whole framing is utterly insane, there's no way to account for all the ways your life might be bettered by both these pursuits. Why even make some facile pseudo-analytic attempt. It's just dumb STEM dick measuring to pretend like there's a way to assess this.
>And this is at the root of my objection to this, what could you possibly mean here by "not everybody uses it well"? To what or whose criteria can you possibly make such an assessment?
Well, I'm not an alien that just landed. So I have personal experience with life, an understanding of culture, an education, some historical knowledge, etc, and so I can make judgements (even without writing some full formal paper of citing stats) about people making the wrong choices in their lives.
Maybe not perfect judgments, but it's not like I'm some alien that has just landed on Earth from space, and one has to wonder how could I ever possibly "make such an assessment" for others.
But even if you ignore me as a non-authority on the matter, I can argue that people themselves frequently lament their own previous life choices and with they'd gotten with X or Y, or lament how their choice on Y brought them to the bottom, and so on.
So from that alone, we can safely assume that "not everybody uses [their assessments on what options to follow] well".
>you want to treat life like an RPG you need to minmax the right skills in, fine. That's a very strange, naively calculated, and from my perspective, totally unfulfilling way to live life.
It's not naive to try and optimize learning to help maximize a fulfilling life. The available time in life to learn is finite and therefore choices have to be made.
Not every subject has equal importance. It would also be naive to think every subject or skill has equal relevance to a particular person's life and therefore one can just choose randomly.
(I learned that lesson very late in life. In my 20s, I was very careless and carefree about what I learned and I squandered away a lot of valuable years. I wasn't discriminating enough about the topics I spent time on.)
> It's not naive to try and optimize learning to help maximize a fulfilling life. The time in life to learn is finite and therefore choices have to be made.
There's lots of enjoyment to be had in learning things that aren't immediately (or even remotely) useful, and there's often a lot of unanticipated utility in learning things that are pursued for pure enjoyment. There are entire fields in mathematics that were/are pursued for personal enjoyment and later proved to be incredibly useful (or might never be!).
> Not every subject has equal importance. It would also be naive to think every subject or skill has equal relevance to a particular person's life and therefore one can just choose randomly.
I'm not saying you need to choose your pursuits randomly or without account of the time they take, but I think making these choices only for monetary gain or purely on some basis of what utility you think they'll provide is a pretty joyless existence in either case, and w/ the latter consideration is a pretty naive accounting of your ability to meaningful assess an "opportunity cost". Leisure activity, learning for learning's sake, broadening your cultural horizons, etc. are all worthwhile things in my book.
If you're talking about opportunity cost in a fuzzy "there are other things I'd rather learn, or some particular thing seems more useful to me now" kind of way, that's a goofy metaphor and an unhelpful insight in the context of offering advice about what things to learn.
> (I learned that lesson very late in life. In my 20s, I was very careless and carefree about what I learned and I squandered away a lot of valuable years. I wasn't discriminating enough about the topics I spent time on.)
Without any context into what you think was squandered by learning other things, it's impossible for me to appreciate your POV on this, but it seems unlikely to me that you lost all that much.
> There's lots of enjoyment to be had in learning things that aren't immediately (or even remotely) useful, and there's often a lot of unanticipated utility in learning things that are pursued for pure enjoyment.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against. Enjoyment is utility. But if I would enjoy learning two different things equally, I should pick the one that would also satisfy me in other ways, or the one that would deliver that enjoyment more efficiently, so I can also have time to do something else that I also enjoy.
There's a cost to spending time, that's why people call it spending time.
Otherwise what if someone said, don’t learn Math, learn Modula-2?