You can't learn a language by learning lists of words. You don't create coherent work by iterating through checkboxes and recipes. I remember sitting in Russian language summer classes with people cramming through lists of vocabulary. I didn't even try. Instead I would read, listen to the radio or talk to people (mostly during Moscow summer nights). When it came to making sentences and practicing, they had to iterate through lists of vocabulary, declinations and conjugations in their head in order to make a single sentence. I didn't know the grammar, but I could always find a way to communicate ideas. I had learned from practice and I was merely there to sharpen my understanding. They didn't have the words and ideas in a usable form. Lists are essentially arbitrary taxonomies that break flow, strip context from ideas and render them pointless, much like a butterfly captured, pinned and framed by a collector. It looks nice on your wall (if you've got horrendous taste, that is), but it's utterly useless. Knowledge, at large, is harmed by the stripping of context. Yet most courses are mere lists of topics, without care for the links between them. Learning this way pushes toward using those things in the wrong context. I wrote about how [[2026-02-20 - Designing a Document Management System from Scraps|trained engineers tend to think there's a forest every time they see a tree]]. Ayn Rand in *The Fountainhead* addresses a much similar critic through the voice of Howard Roark, the central character: > "Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. > > A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of its body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it." This why I don't learn "probability" or "stochastic calculus". I learn what I need to when I have a problem to solve. It's always less than you'd think. Period.