I just added to my book recommendations post that I want to read nerdy books about the principles of baking and power-lifting [separate books to be clear, though tbf I would totally read a book that was like "the optimal cakes for building muscle" or something. Though that is probably just "cakes with as much protein as is practical to put in a cake".]

Anyway, the common factor is: I think in some domains, I'm under-utilizing my bent towards/talent for understanding systems/principles, or something?

i.e., there are various practices that throughout my life I've worked on and been either informally or formally educated in, but that I've not learnt very 'systematically'. By that I mean, it wasn't like someone sat me down and was like 'ok, here are the basic building blocks of this activity, here's what all the different moving parts do, here are simpler techniques that you can build into complex techniques...'

And two of those are weightlifting and baking - other examples might be singing and social or emotional skills of various kinds. In most of these cases, I haven't learned these things systematically partly because I've been a casual learner and wasn't prioritizing them. But it's also partly - and I think this is especially the case for social skills - that I alieved that they were not the sort of thing that *could* be learned systematically, or even *had* a system. When I've had teachers (as in for singing and weightlifting), they haven't approached things in a first-principles way. And for e.g. baking, most people get into baking via "try some recipes", not "understand exactly what certain ratios of sugar to flour to fat tend to do" - so that's also what I did. And for social skills, people call them "soft" skills, which I guess means "you *can't* learn this systematically".

But now I think that there must be some kind of system behind all these things, and maybe they are not generally taught systematically just because most people have limited appetites for that and learn better by imitation/trial and error?

It's kinda like how, on Duolingo, they don't teach grammar. I assume this is because for most people, immersion and repetition works better than grammar-learning, grammar just confuses them and makes it boring for them. But *I* have studied lots of complicated grammar (when studying Latin and Greek and such), and so it *wouldn't* confuse me, and I'm often like 'just tell me the grammar dammit! I'd be able to remember the sounds easier if I knew the system behind them!'

Similarly maybe most singing or weight-lifting or baking learners don't want "let's start with an extensive 2 hour lecture where I tell you about the science of your lungs/your muscles/flour", but I would totally enjoy that and it would probably help me a lot.