TL;DR- Learn a bit of the history of an idea to gain substantially deeper understating of the ideal itself, and apply it better to other domains.

I think a lot about how to learn, how to learn things better, faster and more completely. Thats not a typo. If you know me you’re aware that I recently changed careers and left my previous line of work to enroll in a three year Engineering Masters program that I am just about to wrap up this May. While I’m absolutely in love with this new career choice and excited to do it professionally in the near future, I suffer from a particularly upsetting condition… insatiable curiosity. It kills me! Even before I made the switch, I was always reading, picking up new hobbies, learning the languages of the next country into which I was about to travel, and just always interested in the next level deeper of how something worked. In conversation with friends I often exclaim in frustration “I just want to know all the things about all the things!!!”¹ This is where I tie things back to meta-learning. Since the probability is somewhat high that I will live a normal human lifespan (stay tuned later for posts/rants on cyborgs and the future of life extension technology), about 80 years +/- 20, I have a rather long, but ultimately finite time to enjoy learning. Sadly, I understand I will never learn ‘all the things’. So dedicating a non-insignificant amount of time to learning learning is a strategy I’ve been interested in to maximize this enjoyment.

This is the first of many articles I intend to write on meta-learning in general, so an introduction was needed, but today I want to write about how learning the provenance of an idea is not only entertaining, but in my opinion leads to deeper understanding. This seems like more of a truism than I intended now that I type it on the screen. I think many of my professors in an effort to dump all their vast knowledge cultivated from decades of experience into our tiny brains in a few short months, they often completely gloss over where an idea came from. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand it; They show mathematic proofs, demonstrate a concept practically works, or give convincing arguments as to why we ought to believe a particular idea, so in general I absorb the concept and move on. But on the rare occasion, more often when a professor is passionate about a certain obscure idea, they take the time to explain the story about how an idea was developed in the first place and the challenges the inventor went through to conceptualize it in the first place. These are the ideas that stick with me the best because they were taught to me with a story. A-la Grant Sanderson 3blue1brown and his “Essence of <mathematics topic>” series on YouTube, learning a concept in this manner gives you an intuitive perspective of what it would be like to invent a maths idea, or some other concept in general. It gives you such a deeper understanding that then carries over into other domains of knowledge all for roughly the same instructional time/level of work to have that idea in your head.

I’ve been thinking of this specifically as of late when it comes to various topics involving the internet, cybersecurity and hacking. I’ve taken a number of courses in the last year on Networking, Algorithms, IoT, and each topic is presented in a matter of fact approach something akin to the following:

Interesting Engineering Topic:

• Here is what this idea is used for
• Here are the parameters of the protocol/syntax/parameters-returns using the idea gives you
• Here are one or two use cases and how they are applied in modern systems.

Often it isn’t too hard to decipher why, for example, the Carrier Sense Multiple Access - Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) Protocol is a good idea, but it’s dry and once you learn it there isn’t much lateral thought to how it might be applied elsewhere (Admittedly, I’m having a hard time doing that even now). But If you learn it from the perspective of the University of Hawaii researchers that were trying to solve problems with the ALOHA-net you get a much richer story and deeper understanding. Since I had seen a Numberphile Video of this exact topic, I was able to apply my understanding to solve a problem with a LoRa Radio project I was working on that I honestly don’t think would have occurred to me without the analogy rattling around in the back of my brain.

To this end, ever since I took a Cybersecurity class (and subsequently realized studying it with ANY deadlines or homework attached immediately kills the joy in the topic for me) I’ve been low key figuring it out on my own. Unfortunately, since I’ve only taken one class in this incredibly broad topic, in someways I found myself back in the position I was before starting my masters program; a lot of ideas about what I would like to do but with very little knowledge of what questions to ask or where to start. This is where these stories come in again. I read books. I’m not referring to technical manuals or instructional content, (although I absolutely have put in the work and read those as well), I mean long form, sometimes pop-Journalism that catalogs the stories of the origins of hacking and hacking culture. I love it. Not only is it interesting, it also gives me a somewhat through but also expedient understanding of some of the more notable players, locations and hacks that have occurred in the last 3-4 decades. It has given me a brain full of keywords, ideas and concepts so when I’m studying one of these topics deliberately and get stuck, I all of a sudden have an idea in the back of my head “Hey, Psychedelic Warlord of the Cult of the Dead Cow was know for this adjacent topic, maybe I should look there” or, “Kevin Mitnick used such-and-such technique in this scenario, maybe I should give it a shot”. And more often than not, it works.

Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of some of the Hacker history books I’ve read recently²:

• This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race - Nicole Perlroth
• Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet - Katie Hafner , Matthew Lyon
• Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World - Joseph Menn
• Unmasking the Social Engineer: The Human Element of Security - Christopher Hadnagy , Paul F. Kelly , Paul Ekman
• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order - Kai-Fu Lee
• Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick , William L. Simon

If you’re unconvinced let me restate my point; While knowledge can be applied to multiple domains, the story behind why something was developed is often incredibly insightful to the nature of the topic itself.3 The aphorism, necessity is the mother of invention comes to mind, and understanding the necessity helps understand the invention. There is something about conceptualizing a topic from a different point of view that not only reinforces the concept giving you deeper understanding, but also the very change in approach itself yields a type of understanding that helps you understand ‘other things about all the other things’, in addition to the thing of interest itself. Lateral thinking creates non hierarchal understanding which pays off exponentially instead of linearly when learning other topics in the future. <

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4 March 2022 addendum:

As I was thinking about this post when I was winding down for the evening last night I couldn’t help but think it was incomplete. Of course I said I was going to write more on this topic in general in the future, but for this specific sub-topic, I basically gave one example (cybersecurity/hacking) and said I read some books so I understood more… Yes these books were non-technical so they aren’t specifically what you would expect in terms of increasing practical ability, but I don’t think this is a very profound statement in it’s own right.

I think the piece that I danced around and was missing what the efficacy of investing time learning the provenance of an idea versus learning the idea itself. If you’re familiar with Pareto’s Law(the 80/20 rule) I think I was trying to argue that diverging from the hard facts to indulge in some of the play of the subject, in my experience, is invaluable. For Cybersecurity, other examples aside from the books would include Phrack, textfiles and Darknet Diaries. These gave insight to the original thoughts of some of the forerunners of hacker methodologies today. When I worked in the military, reading accounts of WW2/Vietnam soldiers helped me understand and develop my personal tactics and leadership. Reading history of previous wars is not only a way to increase your knowledge in this domain, it practically IS the way military science is taught. Perhaps what I’m saying is that applying the social sciences to the technical and vice versa, has a multiplicative instead of just an additional benefit to your personal growth. I’ll think about this more and expand later, but I just thought I’d add this bit with a heavy does of disclaimer that I’m not done here. Thanks for reading!

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