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For what it's worth, this is very true for me as well.
I'm also reminded of a story of Robin Hanson from Cryonics magazine:
Robin’s attraction to the more abstract
ideas supporting various fields of interest
was similarly shown in his approach – or
rather, lack thereof – to homework. “In the
last two years of college, I simply stopped
doing my homework, and started playing
with the concepts. I could ace all the
exams, but I got a zero on the homework…
Someone got scatter plots up there to
convince people that you could do better
on exams if you did homewor