(Skippable Backstory) A few months ago, Tammy Winter published a thread of advice for precocious young people. My addendum to it was the following:

Build a technical foundation. Opinions differ, but I’ve found it very hard to develop deep technical skills later in life: responsibilities eat into the necessary huge chunks of concentration,  low-level technical work is usually low-status, and frankly you lose patience for the grind you need to develop technical ~fingerspitzengefühl~. It’s much easier to pick up “soft skills” later: sales, writing, etc. Having a deep working knowledge of math, physics, chemistry, biology, and various engineering disciplines are a superpower that will last you the rest of your life.

One such precocious young person reached out, asking me to expand on it because they found their physics classes boring and didn’t see the value in them. I thought it might be worth sharing my (lightly edited) response:

Why building a technical foundation is important

To caveat: these are all things that I only learned to appreciate many years after graduating. I found many physics classes boring too! (But often that is because the class is boring – not the subject)

Patterns of thinking

You may not notice it, but when you’re solving physics problems, you’re thinking in a way that’s deeply unintuitive and rare: from checking whether an answer makes sense by conserving mass/energy etc, figuring out which missing quantity you probably need by looking at units, deriving things from first principles, etc. That way of thinking is excellent for seeing patterns and holes in logic, getting to the heart of a matter, and figuring out how something works even if you’ve never seen it before. There’s a reason the first colonizers of new technical fields tend to be physicists and hedge funds consistently hire physicists who have never seen a financial model in their life. 

Technical subjects also bestow a ton of useful mental models that are applicable elsewhere, from eigenvectors to control loops. 

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. 

The ability to call bullshit

People just say things. A stupid example is if someone says “zinc-based sunscreen doesn’t work” you can be like “no. I understand how absorption spectra work and how blackbody radiation works and zinc oxide absorbs across the frequencies that cause sunscreen.” If you understand how statistics work you can actually read a paper that someone claims shows that coffee is actually disastrous for your health. etc etc  One of the best way to do an intuition check is a quick back of the envelope calculation. In physics you do these all the time whether you realize it or not – ‘assume a spherical cow’ etc. In order to do them well you need to have a working sense of the relationships between many physical quantities and which things can be assumed away – the work that you find boring (I did too!) is hardwiring those things into your brain.  

Grappling with a domain where you do not make the rules

When you’re dealing with atoms (or electrons or photons etc) and things they make up, there are rules that will not yield to any amount of cajoling, cleverness, or determination. This isn’t the case in the realms of bits or people: the rules are mutable and relative. If you’re skilled enough, you can get computers and people to do basically anything. In these worlds, you can just make shit up and be right. Not so with atoms. I’m not quite sure how to describe it, but I’ve found a mindset difference between people who have grappled with the world of atoms that is rare elsewhere.  

Building technical intuitions requires time and focus that you lose as you age

Technical training requires a level of immersion, undivided attention, and frankly – discomfort that you can only really devote when you’re young and relatively responsibility-free.

Finally, maybe I’m old school or wrong, but I hold the controversial opinion that deep technical subjects are just harder and more rigorous than others. If you can master them, you can master anything else if you put your mind to it.