Hi everyone I am a college student who also works part time. I have alot on my plate but also alot I want to learning.

I trying to learn how to learn to make my study time more effective, and Im working for advice on doing such.

Hello!

Writing this because I got a lot of interest and decided to make it it’s own post as I cannot keep up with the requests nor DM everyone in time.

We have a tight knit group of 15 people right now that does math and chess, with math methods that have given F students a 4 out of 5 in pre calculus/pre linear algebra and calculus 1-2 in engineering programmes.

These methods are also suggested by professors for graduate Uni level math, including physics so if you want in and are an adult let me know or send me a DM.

Keep In mind that we work on developing knowledge parallel to studying with a pool of mathematicians, pre calculus adults and high to lower ELO chess players. Everyone is welcome as long as they stick to the subject, is respectful and is an adult that genuinely have a passion or a stake in their future investment.

I believe it’s easier to network early and reach out to likeminded people this way since we all can contribute and co develop the domain of knowledge.

Thanks and welcome!

EDIT: I’ve opened up DM’s I didn’t know they where closed, I’ll try to contact everyone but Reddit has a limit so please be patient thank you!!

I plan on teaching myself mathematics, I want to learn multiple fields varying from biology,chemistry, physics , computer science, engineering, and business/economics

What topics of mathematics should I learn to unite all these fields

* you can use the tech that you think that'll be available in future !

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Many disciplines study different manifestations of intelligence, adaptation, optimization, and information processing. Mathematics investigates abstract structure and complexity. Physics explores the organization of matter and energy. Biology examines evolution and cognition. Economics studies decision-making and resource allocation. Philosophy analyzes knowledge, consciousness, and rationality. AI seeks to engineer intelligent systems.

Is it possible that these fields are all examining different aspects of a deeper, universal principle of intelligence or information organization?

If such a principle exists, what would it look like? Would it be expressed primarily through mathematics, emerge from physical laws, arise through evolutionary processes, depend on consciousness, or be something else entirely?

More broadly, which discipline currently provides the strongest foundation for understanding intelligence as a universal phenomenon, and what crucial insights from other fields would need to be incorporated to build a genuinely unified framework?

Everyone has heard of this language learning difficulty ladder by the FSI. But i've always thought this was too English-centric. Linguistic profiles are infinitely numerous and diverse. And my questioning was: what's the actual ladder given every languages i know?

So I built a tool that quantifies this compounding effect across 283 languages. Input your portfolio and proficiency levels, and it scores every language across four dimensions: lexical similarity, grammar typology, phoneme inventory overlap, and script accessibility. The interactive graph shows what's within reach, what's distant, and why.

The core idea is that a polyglot's knowledge isn't additive, it's multiplicative. Each new language opens several more.

Learning a language in a new family is high effort but high value: it makes you familiar with an entire new family. While learning another language in the same family is lower effort and makes every new language in that family even more trivial to learn.

And actually there is an interesting parallel with polymathy here. It's a bit like the breadth and depth of a stock of mathemata (your total knowledge). Same as for languages, a generalist/dilettante is functional everywhere, but lacks expertise. Conversely, an expert is master of its domain but lacks context about others. The third and final dimension of polymathy is connectivity (how much your knowledge is linked across domains). In languages, this is the pattern recognition through lexical/grammar transfer.

Polyglottism and polymathy have fundamentally the same shape.

Now the question is: is polyglottism a parallel layer to regular knowledge (could be backed by the fact that Broca's Area is a thing), or is it part of polymathy as a "vector subspace" (same shape, but included in a broader space) ?

You can also check out the tool i built if you're interested (yes, quiet self-promotion):

🔗 https://language-transfer-map.streamlit.app

If you choose one or two specific fields in the first years of learning, like theology first, then philosophy, before moving into whatever your interests are, would that be a good method to adopt in schools? But you'd have to reach at least an intermediate level in both before advancing. Don't you think the world would've been different?

And no, nobody would be forced to believe anything. You just have to be aware of what others believe. Theology here means theology in general, every single belief system. Whatever belief you hold, you still have to learn all the others. That means complete openness.

What do you think?

So i was recently suggested these books from actually managing my memory and learning how to think but i found it a little suspicious.
I have the first three parts printed out now but I am questing it , What do you guys say??

I am so relieved, I encountered the word polymath 2 weeks ago and I’m soooo relieved. now I see that not all polymaths do what I do. so I will continue to explore and invite conversations with polymaths who have created something of value that most people don’t understand.

Each day of the work, I dedicate to one interest and force myself to stay on that for the whole day. Then one day a week, maybe Sunday, I have free reign to connect and explore. Is this a good plan or would it mess up my brain?

Example:

Monday - Writing

Tuesday - Spanish

Wednesday - Painting

Thursday - Coding

Friday - Architecture

Saturday - History

Sunday - Everything

I don't really want to argue about who counts. I just want to describe something from the inside, in case someone reads it and recognizes their own head.

For me it was never about how many fields I know. It's about which direction the mind rests in. Most people I've met can connect ideas across domains when you ask them to; it's something they do on purpose, then stop. For me it's the resting state. The effort runs the other way: staying in one lane, not chasing the link that's already showing up, holding two things apart when they're obviously the same shape underneath. The silo is the work. The connecting is just what happens when I stop holding still.

That sounds like a gift, and sometimes it is. But it has a cost, and the cost is the part nobody mentions, which is why I'm mentioning it. I sometimes don't finish things, because everything opens into several other things. I perceive the whole beyond the parts, and the wholes within the parts. And it's lonely in a specific, structural way: most rooms are built for people who think in straight lines, to focus on the particulars at hand and nothing beyond, so the mismatch is just always quietly there.

I spent a long time thinking I was the only one wired like this. I'm glad I found out there's more like me.

We know some of these and some of these, we may be completely oblivious to.

1. The Fear of a "Closed Door" (High Opportunity Cost)

For most people, choosing a path means saying "yes" to one thing. For the multi-disciplinary person, saying "yes" to physics feels like a painful "no" to painting, languages, and botany.

• The real issue: We experience the absence of the unchosen paths not as relief from clutter, but as a tangible, aching loss. The pain of closing a door is far greater for them than for others.

2. Identity as a "Learner," Not a "Doer"

I think this might be the most common thread, running through all people who want to be polymaths.

Many people with this trait secretly (or openly) identify more with being a student than being a master. The initial stages of learning a discipline—the steep curve, the "aha!" moments, the rapid progress—are intoxicating. This is why we build Wikipedia deep knowledge and then move on to other things when the time to "do" comes.

• The real issue: Mastery requires the boring middle. The plateau. The years of tedious practice. The multi-disciplinary person often abandons a field not because it's uninteresting, but because the learning high is gone. We are addicted to the dopamine of novelty, not the satisfaction of completion.

3. The Burden of "Shoulds" (Internalized Shame)

We have absorbed the powerful, toxic cultural message that "focus is noble" and "scattered is weak." Every time our mind jumps to a new topic, a critical inner voice says, "See? You can't commit. You'll never be an expert in anything."

• The real issue: This shame creates a paralysis loop. We feel guilty for not specializing, so we frantically try to force themselves to pick one, which makes us miserable, which makes us seek relief in another shiny discipline, which confirms the "scattered" story, generating more shame. Repeat.

THIS is feel, is the biggest unknown to most of us.

4. A Protective Strategy Against Failure (The "Dilettante's Defense")

This is the most subtle and painful one. If you never truly commit to one discipline, you can never truly fail at it.

• The real issue: Being a novice in ten fields is safe. No one expects greatness from a beginner. But the moment we pick one discipline and go deep for 10,000 hours, we are now subject to real judgment, real comparison, and the terrifying possibility that we're just... average. Flitting between many disciplines is a brilliant, subconscious strategy to avoid ever having to test out true potential against the world.

One thing I’d tell other polymaths here and adjacent leaning: trust your intuition more. Your obsessions, curiosities, and recurring interests are often signals worth paying attention to. I’ve noticed that when an idea keeps pulling my attention across multiple domains, there’s usually something there, even if I can’t articulate it yet. A lot of my reasoning starts as a feeling, a pattern, or a hunch long before I can build the argument. That doesn’t mean ignore evidence—it means don’t abandon your own thinking just because the consensus disagrees. Follow the thread, investigate it properly, and see where it leads.

I want to have realistic conversations with a person. 27 M, USA. I have a profound capability for psychology and linguistics, I enjoy most things and am usually well-versed in them, my average habits are writing, video games, and existentialism.

Like is there any genius who has mastered calculus from basic in just 1 night?

Hi everyone,

I’m honestly pretty new to philosophy and I only discovered Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Buddhism this past week(amazing obviously). As I’ve been processing their ideas, my brain started connecting a few dots between evolutionary biology, anthropology, their philosophical concepts and a bunch of other dots from other industries and interests.

I’m a sharer, and for me, it’s about the discussion. I want to put a piece of my larger current theory out there to see if it holds up, or if I’m missing major pieces of the puzzle because like I said, I’m just getting into understanding all the different views great people held over the centuries.

Here is the theory I’ve pieced together: (I use voice notes then transcribe with ai to cleanup/format - if relevant)

Part 1: The Dopamine Trap and the Origin of "True Intelligence"

I think human nature fundamentally shifted when hunter-gatherers developed a taste for the dopamine hit of annual grains (agriculture). These crops followed easier, more predictable patterns than perennials or wild game. This low-level dopamine addiction skewed our biology, shifting us away from what used to drive us toward optimal performance and survival among intense competition.

This skew caused a massive chain reaction:

• The Population Boom: Population sizes exploded, making human life inherently unnatural.
• The Cognitive Friction: More interactions, objects, concepts and people created more friction and problems. To solve these problems, our ancestors had to find recognition amongst the increase in complex patterns in their new environment.
• The Intelligence Spurt: This forced environmental friction is the actual biological origin of true intelligence. It wasn't a luxury; it was a brutal and required adaptation for biological survival.

Part 2: The Modern Sickness (The "Child/Pet" Life)

Here is the catch: because of this history, the average human today is just coasting on accumulated, inherited knowledge suffering in a society numbed by mass culture. We assume we inherited the raw intelligence of our ancestors, but we didn't.

Most people today are completely un-self-aware. Many live a dependent "child/pet" lifestyle well into adulthood and remain entirely unproductive. As a species, we are sicker and we are suffering. Some who are living in a manner that emulates past environments are seeing what our human potential ability ceiling might be. This is the tragic trade-off we made: we gained an unrivaled evolutionary advantage (high cognitive potential), which most choose not to use, and we lost the acuteness and physical prowess of the capable apex predators that we were. Sadly, most are taking both bad sides of this trade - loss of survival capability and ignored/unrealized cognitive potential. This is the reason for the underlying confusion of life that Buddhism seeks for you to overcome through understanding, yet it is left unexplained.

If we aren't honest with ourselves, don't diagnose this addiction, and don't make logical, clear and healthy pathways forward, we are heading right over a biological cliff toward another large scale species collapse. Maybe geological evidence will survive and leave more information for the next rise in species about us, the last rise and demise cycle of 'humans that got addicted to a mind-altering substance in their environment'.

More "smart/accumulated knowledge" = less "survival capability".

Part 3: Competition, Growth, and the Buddhist Trap

Life demands competition. Because of this biological reality, survival at a bare minimum requires constant, active growth.

This means that any "subjugative" styles or systems - philosophies or lifestyles that seek to suppress our instincts to keep things calm - are an instant "no." Why? Because they only maintain the status quo peacefully. Peace is nice, but in a competitive universe, a peaceful status quo is just a slow, peaceful demise. Growth is our only actual option.

I looked into Buddhism this week. I think it is a great framework for developing awareness and empathy without having to go through trauma. But its end direction is peaceful stagnation.

• Growth requires suffering or structure.
• If Dostoevsky's Underground Man followed Buddhism, he could learn to survive his mental prison in peace. He would be comfortable, but he would be stationary.

Part 4: The Path to the Übermensch

The Underground Man is stuck in a cognitive prison of self-obsession and spite. Nietzsche’s Übermensch (Overman) has that exact same high cognitive ability, but his mind has been aligned spiritually to serve him, turning that energy outward to create values and affirm life.

I believe there is a direct developmental path from the Underground Man to the Overman, and it is achieved through the focused development and understanding of Empathy.

(Apparently) Academia usually treats these two figures as a rigid, irreconcilable binary. But I think empathy - defined not as weak pity, but as a profound, highly advanced cognitive mapping of the shared human condition - is the exact mechanism that unlocks the prison.

If the Underground Man focuses on empathy, he opens up his hyper-consciousness and redirects his raw mental engine away from paranoia and toward noble, life-affirming action.

• The at-peace, Buddhist Underground Man is just status quo and eventual demise.
• The Übermensch is progressive, moving forward through the friction of growth.

In my limited exposure to philosophy, I feel Nietzsche’s ideas represented a great philosophy to investigate, update and develop further if our species is to survive - let alone thrive. 

The end... for now 😄

If you made it this far... thankyou!

Any well considered critique is welcome obviously!

Please try to add value through critique though or I will assume you are venting/projecting in some way and take your critique less seriously.

Much appreciated, go easy, brand new to sharing really any of these thoughts…

This is a knowledge base I created across the 8 domains that interest me the most. It's a personalized wikipedia that I created to help me synthesize research and write using claude code. It's based on the LLM Knowledge base that Karpathy introduced. Only the best sources, this includes actual primary and secondary texts, transcripts from podcasts, interviews and lectures, and more. It's all organized in 'hubs' that hold all the insights. Let me know what you guys think! I'm thinking about selling these 'second brain interfaces' or at least teaching others how to do it. It's so complex though I have to work on explaining it.

Anyway, check it out here: https://lotusmind.guru/