> It’s so incredible how deep the rabbit-hole goes when you try to solve a real world problem and you have the capacity to understand and pull information from a vast number of seemingly unrelated works.

It's funny, I considered quoting this other part as well:

> The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside.

The nature of fractals is that everything is a new fractal bud. There's really endless complexity everywhere. So I don't think that alone is the "big prize". There's some other dimension, like utility or interest. Because I get that discovering a new subfield of topology is different from discovering the new sounds you can make banging on your stove. But it's not just that one has more to it than the other.

Real world problems with disparate fields involved are a rich of source of "medium sized" fractal buds by this unnamed measure. No one is dedicating their life to your application of measure theory to data dashboards, but it's meatier than searching in the absurd and easier to find than breaking ground in pure theory.

> The nature of fractals is that everything is a new fractal bud. There's really endless complexity everywhere. So I don't think that alone is the "big prize". There's some other dimension, like utility or interest.

Here's another dimension: try convincing others of this while they're discussing a specific object level problem and see how that goes.

I don't really follow. You've quoted a few statements and I also don't know what you mean by a specific object level problem.

Is it that it would be hard to convince people there's endless complexity in this domain while they're deciding what to get for lunch? Yeah, probably. They're too hungry.

There are certain complexities that only seem (currently) accessible from an abstract state of mind.

For example, people (including right here on HN) will often enthusiastically agree that they are subjective to various cognitive flaws when discussing a psychology paper on the subject, but this fact typically cannot be realized or even considered when discussing specific political matters. Ironically, genuine intelligence and knowledge often seems to make the problem even worse.

And of course, all of this theory is subject to the theory itself!

oh gosh I understand now and totally agree. I want to wire up an LLM to read a doc and just point out all of these sorts of flaws.

If you haven't read this (not LLM related), I highly recommend it: https://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/thinking.p...

Re. "this is the best time to be a polymath". I was noticing something like that. For a while it became impossible to know or do "science" ("philosophy", was it?) as a whole. Too broad, too deep. That was not the end of the polymath but it was the end of truly broad expertise in one individual. Then the net in general made so much info available painlessly. (Much faster to dig deep on a narrow issue and switch issues - than say, even with a large academic library.) So that now, it's still not possible to master the forefront of tech or science on a very broad front, but it is possible to dig deep as needed to address this or that problem in the pursuit of what is now just about always a multidisciplinary project.

With the very present danger that many feel that a couple youtube videos is as deep as they ever need to go.

Being able to gauge how deep and broad you have to go for each difficulty you encounter has become an important skill. But polymath seems very possible.

I second that, I feel like right now, with the rise of ML tools in audio production, demucs, audio to midi, voice clones etc, the rise of image generation and text. Coupled with some coding skills and interests in many different fields I could not get bored in a million years because there can be so much to jump into and learn/create/explore