Tunnel vision

• being invested in an idea that it blocks other ideas; this makes it harder to solve new problems where they expect to work similarly from their experience; it is a net negative if we force our way with the familiar solution while not understanding the new type of problem

• We are more associative than structured; we tend to create connections between different things including new things;

• we may also have to Learn how to forget; in a world of quick and constant changes, learning new rules and topics takes up mental resources; we have to assign some garbage day at some point; unfortunately, we cannot easily do that from our experience as we try to survive by sticking to what we know

• it is present on most experts with their experience on the field; but this is also a potential problem for students in training where certain principles are taught then encountering a new idea overall

• a lot of the teaching focuses on explaining things; one could try to use specific use cases as Specific use cases are better than step-by-step tutorials

• This is the reason why most of the discoveries are made either by young people or those who haven't formally trained for the original field.

• to combat against this, we do Switching between different topics makes new perspective

• by the same principle, we could also let our attention switch at times; Involuntary attention switch is good for preventing tunnel vision

• examples:

  • studying about different software engineering principles such as "Don't repeat yourself", modularity, and clean code; fully applying those principles even when it is not appropriate — e.g., modularizing files even if it consists of one line, creating a dedicated function if encountered two events even if insignificant

  • being entrenched in an idea that they overlooked simpler solutions by veterans; in academia, this situation is often manifested as a supposed school assignments solved by a student like how a long-standing quantum computing problem was solved by a student with simple modifications to the existing solution; in an unlikely manner, this is also present in speedrunning where tricks and techniques are often discovered by accident by a newcomer trying out things the veterans didn't think to do

• sometimes, this is when we go against the idea of Advice shouldn't be taken literally