(2024-06-19) Winter Reinhardt Advice for Precocious Young People Get Technical

Tamara Winter shares a thread responding to new grads asking for career advice, so I wrote down a list of things I wish I’d internalized sooner. The key thing: being precocious has an expiration date.

Ben Reinhardt expands the thread in a different direction: Precocious young people should build a deep technical foundation. Reasons:

• Patterns of thinking: In solving technical problems, you’re thinking in a way that’s deeply unintuitive and rare: from checking an answer makes sense from units to conservation of mass, etc. Technical subjects bestow a ton of useful mental models that are applicable elsewhere.
• The world runs on technical things. Science and technology drive the modern world. If you understand how they work, you can become a much more active participant in the world, instead of being at the mercy of what is effectively magic. (systems thinking)
• The ability to call bullshit. People just say things. There are so many situations where you can call BS by knowing how physics, chemistry, and biology work and by doing back-of-the-envelope calculations. (Fermi Estimation)
• Grappling with a domain where you do not make the rules.
• Building technical intuitions requires time and focus that you lose as you age.
• I believe that at a college level deep technical subjects are harder and more rigorous than others. If you can master them, you can master anything else if you put your mind to it. (STEM)

He assembled these into a single post