Category: Uncategorized

NEW FRIENDS. Your parochial village can now be transcended. Your dinner guests can be great philosophers, scientists, writers and artists in a virtual community of friends you become intimately acquainted with during your readings. View in LinkedIn

UNLIMITED VOLUME. The sheer volume of original thought contained in these virtual libraries is essentially bottomless for all practical purposes. You can expand your intimate knowledge of extraordinary thinkers to the limit that you have the time available. A perverse twist on Parkinson’s Law. View in LinkedIn

PRESCIENT. And now we have Google searches at our fingertips to answer every obscure question. “Take the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself. Described as an electronic guidebook and emblazoned with the words 'DON'T PANIC' on the cover, it is the go-to reference material for any universal traveller. The Guide is described in the book as being “a small, thin, flexible lap computer”. https://lnkd.in/ein_3_MX View in LinkedIn

TURNING POINT. But now we have at our fingertips these unlimited libraries of original and extraordinary thought. A click away. From the comfort of our own couch without needing to navigate the Stacks with Card Catalogs that barely cross-referenced and felt more like a warren of rabbit holes. A true turning point in access to ideas. https://lnkd.in/emRkF86a View in LinkedIn

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. Our education systems have generally done a good job of creating a babysitting service while the adults can service capitalist machines, as we have seen during COVID confinements, and rather less of a good job at generating enquiring minds. That any such minds survive such a system is in itself rather a wonder. View in LinkedIn

EDUCATIONAL DEADENING. William Blake raged against the deadening of original thought in children by the brutal clumsiness of one-shoe-fits-all education systems designed to keep orderly classrooms and squash originality or curiosity. We have had the curiosity systematically leached out of our minds. View in LinkedIn

THE NORMAL VILLAGE. During our lives, most of us mortals are rarely personally exposed to these extraordinary thinkers. Even those who display unusual curiosity, moments of great insight, or who march to a different drum are rare. Our narrow circles are predominantly filled with perfectly nice ordinary people with compliant normal thinking. We effectively live in parochial villages. View in LinkedIn

GESTALT TRICK. A trick I learned in learning Spanish at an older age is to let go the editorial pen and go with the flow of a sentence. It does not matter if you miss some of the words, go for the gist. Until this happened, my learning was constantly hijacked by my ignorance. The gestalt is the key. The same applies to glimpsing another way of thinking. View in LinkedIn

UNTOLD RICHES. For the last 2,000 years there has been an abundance of extraordinary thinkers who have committed their curiosity to lasting paper records for future generations to enjoy. During this time there has accumulated a greater bounty of riches than a person can expect to read in a single lifetime. This is a gold mine, just a click away. View in LinkedIn

CURATION. A curated journal club is an entity from my past experience. The method of curation is to carefully isolate key and provocative original thoughts and try and draw the dots between them. And, like the best of Chinese cooking recipes, in bitesized pieces that can serve as nodules of meditation about that world view. View in LinkedIn