the payoff of additional knowledge is distributed over a large number of years … if you expect your career to last less than a decade … each difficult course takes entire percentage points away from your remaining productive thinking time
Depends on the balance between how useful work of median vs. outlier quality is for your level of talent (and how much ability to carry out that work depends on your position, such as the state of your career), so it can make sense to maximize probability of occasional outlier outputs. In which case spending half of all of your time studying obscure theory of uncertain relevance might be the way to go, and college years certainly won’t be presenting enough of this, as it’s feasible to end up understanding much more than you are capable of learning in a few years.
Depends on the balance between how useful work of median vs. outlier quality is for your level of talent (and how much ability to carry out that work depends on your position, such as the state of your career), so it can make sense to maximize probability of occasional outlier outputs. In which case spending half of all of your time studying obscure theory of uncertain relevance might be the way to go, and college years certainly won’t be presenting enough of this, as it’s feasible to end up understanding much more than you are capable of learning in a few years.