How to Get Into Things

1. What is interest?

There is one notion of interest you must thoroughly disabuse yourself of to ever make friends with well-adjusted people. It is the notion that interests are explainable as lottery tickets. An example of such sin is provided by Scott Alexander:

I couldn’t choose to be interested in sports any more than I could choose to be interested in math or a huge sports fan could choose to be interested in psychology or a gay person could choose to be interested in women. I mean, there’s probably some wiggle room, maybe if I put a lot of effort into finding the most interesting sports and learning everything about them I could appreciate them a little. But would I have comparative advantage over the kid who memorized the stats of every pitcher in both leagues when he was 8? Barring getting hit by some kinda cosmic rays or something, I don’t think that’ll ever happen.

If you assume this, you assume almost no flexibility in one’s interests. But people aren’t born with their interests – they evolve over a lifetime in a continuous process of picking up new ones and dropping old ones. There is flexibility to fascination over one’s lifetime, and it doesn’t seem to be quite predetermined by genes: We often become interested in things we previously dismissed. Many people report their favorite food is something they originally hated on first trying it.

If interest was a lottery ticket in a different sense, such that it was controlled by a hundred different latent variables and clusters of common interests were a mere illusion due to the central limit theorem, then you might assume the emotional investment of fans in a given sport was scattered evenly across the different parts of the game, such that just like brain damage has a muted impact on measures of cognitive performance due to the distributed nature of intelligence in the brain, there exists no central component to human interest and a gutted simulation of a sport should draw substantial attention. Is this true? Let’s test it.

You can picture a version of the NBA where animated rag-dolls struggle for dominance on the court. They look almost indistinguishable from real players. They mimic human movement, down to their individual playing styles and expressions. An equally verisimile puppet audience is strung up behind them. Due to the precision of control the NBA exerts over the animations, they sometimes exceed the quality of a live game. Now let’s ask: Would people watch this alternative more than they watch basketball? If interest in sports has no central component, then watching mere simulation would draw in a proportional crowd.

This isn’t a hypothetical! It exists in the form of the popular video game NBA 2k. While people may rack up thousands of hours on the video game, little attention is devoted to watching the game’s bot players battle themselves. Even if NBA 2k bots fully exceeded the visual quality of their human counterparts, it’s a bizarre assumption that people would knowingly watch bots more than people.

What do you have to add back to NBA 2k to attract human interest?

Nobody gathers around a TV on Friday night in college dorms to watch their Xbox’s bots wrestle themselves, yet with the simple addition of people controlling the players, the game pulls in a crowd.

This is a good illustration that people are interested in different things for the same reason. It’s a singular essential reason applying across almost all interests: people are interested in other people.

If you want to become interested in basketball, then understanding the history of how basketball was invented and the rules of play will take you nowhere. To stimulate a natural fascination with it, you have to catapult off your natural fascination with other people. Dive into the stories of players, soak in their drama, seek to understand their influences and impact.

2. Application

Here is a recipe for becoming interested in anything.

For a common interest, you can blitz through the main stories by looking up the famous people within the interest and watching videos or documentaries of their career. This is a preferred option over reading books at first because biographical material is of such varied quality that any random sample might not quite capture anything visceral. Good material will always connect in some part to other stories, giving you a general picture. As Dwarkesh Patel says:

It’s interesting to me how the best histories on any one topic are often histories of basically everything. Kotkin’s biography of Stalin starts with a digression on Bismarck’s legacy and how the age of colonization changed the way European powers thought about modernization. The Making of the Atomic Bomb has detailed descriptions of the culture of early 20th century European science and the progression of the second World War. Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biographies will teach you about 19th century Texas politics, hill country skirmishes with Indians, the history of the US senate, and much more.

After building a framework based on the central dramas of a given thing, then you can start reading anything and fit that into your basic concepts. Reading always becomes easier if you’re an expert in something, and every bit of information you learn at the start massively leapfrogs your efficiency in integrating the next tidbit into your knowledge.