Pat Carroll

Tag: reading

  • Reflecting on What I Read in 2025; Specialisation vs. Generalisation in Learning

    Reading List

    I read and learnt about some pretty cool things this year. Here’s the list!

    Non-Fiction

    • The Molecule of More — Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long
    • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma — Mustafa Suleyman
    • Chip War — Chris Miller
    • Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari
    • The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains — Nicholas Carr
    • QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults — Van Badham
    • Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference — Rutger Bregman
    • The Soul: A History of the Human Mind — Paul Ham
    • War — Bob Woodward
    • Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir – Israel, Palestine and Beyond — John Lyons

    Fiction (this was my year of science fiction!)

    • Raft — Stephen Baxter
    • Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) — Jeff Vandermeer
    • House of Suns — Alastair Reynolds
    • Pandora’s Star (Commonwealth Saga #1) — Peter F. Hamilton
    • Exodus (Archimedes Engine #1) — Peter F. Hamilton
    • Grave Empire (The Great Silence, #1) — Richard Swan
    • Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater, #1) — Christopher Ruocchio
    • Deadhouse Gates (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #2) — Steven Erikson

    My favourite non-fiction was The Soul — Paul Ham, and my favourite fiction was Exodus — Peter F. Hamilton.

    I don’t usually like to think about my least favourite, but this year, it definitely goes to Moral Ambition — Rutger Bregman.

    Specialisation and Generalisation in Learning

    As the year comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on my approach to reading and learning. In particular, I keep returning to the idea of the “right way” to learn: specialisation versus generalisation.

    Specialisation is often presented as the superior path — and in many cases it is, but only for particular ends. If the goal is to become an expert in a narrowly defined field, or to qualify for a specific role, then deep specialisation makes sense. But I often wonder whether that comes at the cost of something else: the joy of following curiosity wherever it leads.

    I find myself drawn to a wide range of topic areas that, on the surface, can seem entirely unrelated. This year I’ve enjoyed exploring the topics of power and technology, history, the Chinese revolution, dopamine, AI, and more. Each of these threads brought its own excitement and reward. I know plenty of people are perfectly content to stay within a single domain, but my mind doesn’t seem to work that way. It jumps around — and often, I let it!

    Is this a “bad” way of reading and learning? I don’t think so. It’s certainly not the most efficient route to becoming an expert in any one of these areas, but that isn’t really the aim here. Learning, for me, isn’t an all-or-nothing process.

    There are areas where my knowledge runs deeper — areas of music, through my PhD, and areas of cultural studies that I’ve taught over the past few years. Alongside these sit other domains about which I’ve read and thought a great deal, but I’d never claim expertise. Taken together, this forms something like a T-shaped knowledge profile: depth in one area, with breadth across many others.

    What I actively try to do, though, is build connections between these different domains. This, to me is the overarching project of learning: the interesting mixing and connecting of domains. History, for example, offers countless cases that can be drawn upon to illuminate contemporary ideas. Films play out philosophical questions that appear in histories, but also literature and music; abstract theories unfold out in stories, technologies, and social systems, all explored through various media and domains. When viewed this way, seemingly separate fields begin to cohere around shared themes.

    For me, many of these interests ultimately converge on questions about the nature of knowledge and ideas, and how they shape the world. Reading Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus played a significant role in forming this theme, helping me see how domains of history, technology, culture, economics, and art are deeply so interrelated.

    In that sense, what looks like generalism from the outside can begin to resemble a kind of hyper-specialisation: an ongoing inquiry into a very broad theme, approached from as many angles as possible.

    It brings to mind a quote I heard from Robert Sapolsky:

    “…when you think in categories, you overestimate how different [two facts] are when there happens to be a boundary in between them. And when you pay attention to categorical boundaries, you don’t see big pictures.”

    I wish everyone a wonderful holiday period, and best wishes for the new year.

  • Building Mental Maps of Stories, Music and Arguments

    One of the most crucial skills for understanding texts is the ability to build a mental map of what is being read, watched or listened to, while doing so. I believe the ability to do this has allowed me to understand arguments in non-fiction books and articles, musical narratives, and stories in fiction books and films.

    Musical Structures

    I only really stumbled on the existence of the ability while I was studying composition, and was having difficulties structuring my works. I was always lost during the creative process whenever I thought ‘What should come next?’ I began to consider the importance of understanding the structural models that pieces exist within, in order to hopefully be able to use them in my own work. I wanted to be able to know what the section of the piece I’m currently listening to actually is, and thus what role it plays in the narrative of the entire work.

    A simple example of this is in popular music. Knowing that I am listening to the 2nd verse, or the bridge, or the final chorus, within a typical structure of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, allows me to understand where that section is in the piece – what has come before it, and where it might be leading to. It provides context for the musical ideas I am hearing.

    A way to visualise this is to be building a waveform of the entire piece (similar to those on Soundcloud) as I was listening to it, and knowing how to break that waveform into a series of sections, understanding what was in them and what their functions were in the entire piece.

    Structures of Arguments in Non-Fiction Writing

    I have found that the same technique is essential for truly seeing someone’s argument laid out in a piece of non-fiction writing. As I read more non-fiction books – especially over the last year and a half – I felt that I had to develop this same skill to see how the author was piecing together their point. The initial chapters laid out the contexts, then concepts were gradually introduced and importantly interlocked into that context, until the later chapters when the author introduces their main points, drawing on the proposed information in the preceding chapters. Much like a lawyer building their case, now that I think of it.

    So a fundamental part of literacy is to be able to recall the points from earlier chapters, while reading the later chapters; remembering what was proposed there, and seeing how it all links together. It requires building this same form of linear mental map of the structure of the book, and holding this in your head as you read the book.

    Structures of Narratives in Fiction

    The same goes for fictional stories. I noticed how much reading non-fiction books has expanded this capacity when I read a fiction book. This was clear when I had taken about 5 months off fiction, reading a bunch of more difficult non-fiction than what I had usually been reading. Reading the fiction book – Shadow of the Gods by John Gwynne – felt so much easier than usual. I recognised that I could keep track of the plot for the entire length of the book way easier than I could 5 months before. When I was in the later parts of the story, I could look back over the previous length of the book and trace everyone’s journeys and progressions.

    Usually with fiction, it had felt a little more like I could only focus on where they were currently, and maybe where they had been in the previous chapter or two. But trying to piece together a complete timeline of where the character had been throughout the entire book was always very difficult. I don’t think I ever actively tried to do that – it was more that I felt that I suddenly could do it for this book.

    Is It Becoming Scarcer?

    A tragic thing is that I believe much of the problem was an over-engagement with short form content, and the structures of internet media. This is a big part of why The Shallows resonated with me so much – the books describes just how much a medium itself (rather than the content transmitted through the medium) shapes our thinking. The medium shapes how we think, while the content shapes more of what we think about. Non-linear, fragmented content leads to the same styles of thinking, whereas consuming linear, long-form content leads to cohesive and deeper thinking. I very much feel that what I’ve described above is a clear example of this concept at play.

    Building mental maps of what I’m reading, listening to, or watching, plays a crucial role in my ability to understand what is being transmitted through the text. It worries me that this ability is becoming scarcer, or perhaps more accurately, that the technologies that attack this ability are becoming more pervasive. I wonder if this will, or already has, led to a rising sense of confusion, alienation and misunderstanding of the world, its events, others and ourselves.