If you want to develop expertise in a given field there are 3 main modes of doing so:
Studying the field, debating the field and engaging with the field.
When I say “field”, that can refer to recognized fields of study, such as the fields of medical science, trigonometry and philematology (who up studying that one?).
But it can also refer to more ordinary or abstract things, such as the emotion of anger, the evolving norms of discourse on X (*formerly twitter), or the enormous circumference of your mom.
What makes something a field is simply that it occupies a space in (or layer of) your reality which you can develop an understanding of.
As I mentioned at the start, there are different modes of doing so, and they lead to different types of knowledge.
By far the most common one in this day and age is studying the field:
Looking up all there is to know about it, hearing what other experts have to say, etcetera (“etcetera” is what you write when you’re too lazy to finish your list).
Another one is engaging with a field. Which consists of keeping a beginner’s mind (someone who hasn’t studied), interacting with the field, seeing how it responds, then updating your current understanding of it.
Engaging with a field takes time. If you want to study a field, you can ask Chat-GPT, Google it, or visit your local library (depending on which decade you live in) and you should be able to get the gist of it in a few weeks.
If you want to learn the same thing through engagement, it will take years. You need prolonged exposure. You need to see the field behave in many different places and circumstances. Watch it react to different stimuli. You need to see the impact of the field on you and others over time. Go through many different types of interactions and constantly update your beliefs about what the field is, what it’s like and what it tends to do.
However, engaging with a field over time does have a huge benefit:
More often than not, you’ll discover the literature people study about it is full of baloney.
This is not to dunk on literature or study, btw. It’s simply a result of how these 2 modes function.
When you study a field, you don’t actually learn anything “about” the field. You learn about the perspective of many people who (presumably) already know it very well.
When you engage with a field, you learn its nature, by developing intimacy over time.
Studying a field is not a shortcut for engaging with it. Because the nuanced nature of a field is often nearly impossible to capture into words (and, like I said, you’re studying other people’s perspectives, not the field itself).
No, the reason to study a field is to get a sense of what’s possibly in store for you if you were to engage with it.
This is not an argument about semantics, it’s actually a huge difference, and it’s often misunderstood.
Here’s an analogy:
If someone where to ask you to describe your best friend, you could probably describe them pretty well.
Because you know your friend.
How do you know them? Because of years of engagement with the field.
You know them inside out. You know them in a way no words could capture.
Now, if you asked someone else to describe their best friends, they could probably describe them pretty well too.
They could say: “Very friendly, funny person. High value for honesty. Don’t talk politics with them though, they get intense.”
Now, the next time you’re in a room with this person, you know that you don’t need to be scared of them (they’re friendly), that you should communicate directly (honest) and avoid politics.
…except you don’t.
It’s a useful roadmap, given by someone who is likely an expert. But you still don’t know anything.
Maybe politics get intense because their opinions differ too much from the friend’s, and they’re not good at dealing with that for example.
You can compare engaging with a field with getting to know someone, and studying a field with paying heed to the rumors about them.
You would indeed be wise to pay more attention to the rumors from people who apparently know them best (over just “word on the street”), but they might still be wrong.
Every single person might say “Ken’s a great guy” and you could be the first one to discover he’s a charming sociopath who has the entire world fooled.
The analogy in this case is the development of dogma in an industry.
For example: There’s lots of gossip about Ken, most of it positive.
Then some people get a weird feeling about Ken, so the gossip turns to debate. (Remember: Debate is the third mode of developing expertise).
Everyone compares their perspectives, but evidently, the “Ken is no one to worry about, he doesn’t even poop and if he did it would smell like strawberries” people win, and this is now the consensus about the field of Ken.
This consensus was reached in good faith. People did debate, they did compare their experiences.
You just happened to be the first person who noticed the world (Ken) isn’t as flat (good-natured) as we are all convinced it is.
This is something you could not ever have learned about the field of Ken, except by engaging with it.
More importantly, anyone who were to study Ken but not engage with him, would be convinced that he’s prince charming.
Now, if you manage to avoid the fate of Galileo, Jesus and many others who challenged the dogmas of their fields, and somehow get everyone to see that Ken isn’t all that great (for example, by finding the bodies), the literature will update and everyone who studies it in the future will say “Yeah, I know Ken. He’s the psychopath, right?”
And this new literature will help a whole new generation of people not get murdered by Ken. Even though they won’t know the first thing about him.
That’s why studying a field matters.
If everyone had to find out, individually, through experience, that Ken is a psychopath or the world is round, that would be a lot of high-investment, high-risk behavior.
That said, it’s still true that you’re mostly studying rumors (yes, even statistics are often rumors, but that’s for another day). And if you want to develop real understanding, engaging will be necessary.
After I quit high school, for example, I started to run lots of social exploriments.
I was somewhat shocked to find out that even though I had read 100s of books on the topic at this point, a lot of the most commonly repeated theories were extremely easy to disprove through direct engagement.
Why is this?
Because a lot of the literature is also written by people who study the field instead of engaging with it. And existing theories are often used as the context within engagement happens.
If you believe that all people of one gender are evil, and then you go engage with a bunch of those people from that perspective, guess what? Their response probably won’t be too pleasant on average, and now you’ve proven your theory.
A lot of things are this way.
But if you engage with a field as if you know nothing and design your exploriments carefully, you’ll often find the field is nothing like what it pretends to be.
Interestingly, when you gain this type of embodied experience, it tends to be hard to teach what you’ve learned. Because if you’d successfully convey your finding, the consensus will tend to overcorrect for it (it needs to do this to compress the information in a way that’s digestible for new students of the field, because adding nuance would just add noise and complexity for them).
The field of fitness, for example, is notorious for flip-flopping between extreme positions:
1920: Smoking burns fat
1960: Actually smoking is bad
1970: Carbs are bad
1980: Fats are bad
1990: It’s all about hitting precise macros.
2000: Eat “good carbs & fats”, not bad ones. And you should eat 6 times a day.
2010: Keto & fasting fix everything. Eat only once a day. Carbs are bad again, btw.
2020: Either be a vegan or a carnivore.
Interestingly, the fittest people I know mostly just ignore this and have developed a strong intimacy with their body and how various foods or dietary habits affect it.
But this doesn’t lead to a new grand theory of diet. Instead, they notice the changing internal and external conditions and adapt to them.
This, of course, is something you can’t capture in books.
And that’s why a field like psychology, for example, changes criteria for diagnosis all the time and parenting or marriage counseling advice radically opposes that of the previous decades.
It’s the sort of flip-flopping the consensus naturally does when it tries to integrate overwhelming evidence that challenges it but still waints to remain understandable for people who don’t engage with it.
In the end, perspectives can be studied, but the fields themselves can only be discovered through engagement.
And what you learn from your engagement is rarely a better label or theory to slap on it. It’s a nuanced intimacy with the field’s essence and behavior that continues to develop through relationship.
This doesn’t just improve your own ability to navigate said field, but it also makes you much more of a resource to anyone who is navigating it.
The kind of resource the modern world desperately needs.
Social media has made it so that we all studied many fields, but few people have engaged with them (and that anyone and their dog can propagate ideas about a field without having to).
It can be tiresome to listen to advice from armchair experts and people who know exactly which platitude to quote to invalidate your experience.
When my dad passed away, I first noticed this difference:
A therapist can know all the theories about the stages of grief and how they affect people. They can say “grief is complicated and it’s okay and normal that you’re feeling this way”.
But if you talk to someone who has engaged with the field of grief deeply, who has gained expertise in and intimacy with the field, it feels different:
They understand its nature, not just its map.
They will know exactly when to say something and when to say nothing. When to not try and comfort you. When to share an anecdote about their own experience with it. When to ask you more about yours. When to give you advice or when to just have a beer and forget about it.
Engaging with a field requires more effort than studying it. But it’s the only way we can ever really get to know it. Everything else is a mimicry of the shape of something we don’t understand yet.