Halfway Up the CS Mountain: A Defense Against Average-Making

I recently read a passage in a friend’s essay that struck me rather hard. To paraphrase:

Database System Concepts contains a great deal of mathematical derivation in the style of relational algebra, and Introduction to Algorithms is nearly the same damned thing; there is simply too much to finish, the exam is already closing in while one is still chewing through the material, and none of it seems especially useful in more entry-level development work.

I resonate with this almost too much. When I first encountered probability and mathematical statistics, I also began from the axioms of probability and worked my way through the derivation and construction of the entire system. Knowledge, to me, has always been naturally reticular; but the price of that sense of structure is that there is always too much to learn.

Was it worth it, looking back today?

My answer is: it feels absurdly good, and not in a cheap way. The habit of pursuing first-principles explanations of things began with my experience of learning mathematics; at the intersection of deduction and induction, I encountered the dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and the habit of reading classics extensively through a critical lens pushed me toward a pursuit of reflexivity. As for that reticular structure of knowledge, it gradually rooted me in systems thinking rather than leaving me dragged around by scattered techniques.

Most of the time, this path is not short on feedback. Whether it is the achievement that arises endogenously from the act of creating a complex system, or the recognition supplied by others after accomplishing uncommon things through uncommon means, both have been indispensable parts of my growth. Of course, climbing upward along a winding minor path inevitably carries the chill of sitting on the cold bench; all the more so because one often meets true masters on the same road, figures who make the mountain itself seem worthy of reverence. The halfway point may be much more sparsely populated, but the view it offers is also far broader than anything available at the foot of the mountain.

So this is neither perfectionism, nor greed, nor compulsion. It is simply the pursuit of computer science at its extreme, and a nearly obstinate form of pure love. The educational imagination inherited from the industrial age, with its assembly-line pursuit of the average, was never well-equipped to understand our aspirations. If exceeding some predetermined boundary and pressing toward the edge of knowledge itself must be called greed, then the word has become an insult to the sages of old.