I was thinking about to early game modding.
I made the most and best progress when I “just made stuff”.
If in doubt, the second best thing to do would be to complete tutorials, e.g. coding tutorials, mapping tutorials, etc.
The worst thing to do ever was to print/read manuals.
There are two clear cases in my memory of doing this:
- Printing the DEU editor manual/guide (on my dot matrix printer)
- Print the Quake III Arena Shaders manual (in colour!).
I never read them all the way through, and they never helped.
In both cases, I should have “just started”, or followed tutorials, or developed my own mini curriculum and executed it.
I learned this lesson well, and later on at school/uni/research, I never tried to buy/print my way into a new skill/field.
I did instead of read. And only read to supplement the doing.
I was talking to grok3 about this and he called it:
- “consumption fallacy”
and:
- “gear acquisition syndrome” (GAS)
Cool! There’s a name for this.
Other candidate names: Procrastination by Preparation, “All the Gear, No Idea”, Gear Fetishism, Resource Hoarding, Learning Trap, Toolset Fallacy, and on.
From grok3:
It refers to the tendency to believe that acquiring tools, equipment, or resources (like manuals, high-end gear, or expensive courses) will automatically lead to mastery or progress in a skill or hobby, without putting in the actual work or practice.
It seems like gear acquisition syndrome is more a music industry term.
I’m sure it happens in all fields all the time.
I’m also sure it motivates purchasing most information products sold online.
That the consumer really wants to learn a topic (e.g. LLMs or Neural Nets or Machine Learning, or some tool or whatever) and rather than starting with tutorials they search for and buy books/courses, then fail to read/complete them.
This is a reminder to self. Always do over buy, and if you really want to learn a thing, design a series of mini projects to complete or at worst, work though some free public tutorials.