A fun thing to do when you need to wait around for a few minutes is to use your phone to ask Claude Opus the following question about some random discipline or field: “What would you say is THE core insight or analytical trick of crystallography?” Replace crystallography with anything you can think of. So far, I’ve tried: QED; the Standard Model; Biochemistry; Probability; Evolutionary theory; and many more. There’s something about forcing the model to do the impossible, to condense a vast, complex field into “one weird trick,” that makes it really search for the best deep, unifying principle in the field and then articulate it succinctly. This tends to be something that is obvious to practitioners but very likely to be unknown by most people with just a passing interest in the subject. Interestingly, you can also repeatedly press the “retry” button with the same prompt and sometimes get very different, but usually very fascinating, explanations. I’ve already learned a LOT from doing this, and it might just be the highest “understanding per minute” I’ve encountered in any self-directed learning. Because they aren’t just fun facts or cool tidbits. They’re, by construction, penetrating and unifying ideas that tie together a vast amount of theory and observed phenomena in the world. It’s certainly a lot more high-bandwidth than watching yet another YouTube explainer video with animations and ads for Brilliant/KiwiCo! Not that there’s anything wrong with those.