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SquirrelInHell comments on Education as Entertainment and the Downfall of LessWrong - Less Wrong Discussion
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I may not have communicated the intention behind that sentence well enough. If you are exposed to an abstract idea A, and you have no use cases for it, it's totally OK to invent a fictional scenario in which it could be useful, or other ideas it could go well with. I still think there needs to be something.
The important thing seems to me to not only consume knowledge passively but to do something actively with it. When learning calculus it's alright to simply focus on doing calculus problem without thinking about the calculus problems that you can solve in real life. On the other hand simply reading an article about calculus without doing any problems won't bring you far.
For myself a lot of active engagmenet with ideas on LW is by writing comments.
Sure, that's the whole point - my claim is that to get to the stage where you do something actively, you need to pass through the stage where you grasp what an application of the thing would even look like. So I guess the post can be seen as pointing out it's useful to notice when this intermediate step is missing, if you care about the quality of your learning. Note that it's a heuristic that can be applied instantly and subconsciously, as opposed to "doing something actively" (which may require resources, waiting for external circumstances etc.).