When you're assigned 30 pages of a textbook, the diligent students read them, then move on to other things. A truly inquisitive person would struggle to finish those 30 pages, because there are almost certainly going to be many more interesting threads they want to follow within those pages.
As a really straightforward example, let's say you commit to reading a review article on cell senescence. Just forcing your way through the paper, you probably won't learn much. What will make you learn is looking at the citations as you go.
I love going 4 layers deep. I try to understand the mechanisms that underpin the experiments that generated the data that informed the facts that inform the theories that the review article is covering. When I do this, it suddenly transforms the review article from dry theory to something that's grounded in memories of data and visualizations of experiments. I have a "simulated lived experience" to map onto the theory. It becomes real.
I think that for anything except scholarship, those aren't terrible. I'd attack them from the other side: They aren't shallow enough. In industry, most often you often just want to find some specific piece of information, so reading the whole 30 pages is a waste of time, as is following your deep curiosity down into rabbit holes.
I agree with you. It’s a good point that I should have clarified this is for a specific use case - rapidly scouting out a field that you’re unfamiliar with. When I take this approach, I also do not read entire papers. I just read enough to get the gist and find the next most interesting link.
So for example, I am preparing for a PhD, where I’ll probably focus on aging research. I need to understand what’s going on broadly in the field. Obviously I can’t read everything, and as I have no specific project, there are no particular known-in-advance bits of info... (read more)
I studied bioinformatics at the Free University of Berlin. Just like we had weekly problem sheets in math classes we also had them in biology and biochemistry. It was more than a decade ago. There was certainly a sense of not simply copying what biology majors might do but to be focused more on problem-solving skills that would presumably be more relevant.