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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

NEW IDEAS. To walk in the shoes of another is to see the world from another perspective. To glimpse, even for a minute, however superficially, the mind of a mathematician, a quantum physicist, an astrophysicist, a botanist, a geologist, or a paleontologist, is to enrich our experience in ways that cannot be counted. View in LinkedIn

SILO-LAND. The greatest challenge to accessing this treasure trove of original thought is that specialization has created deep dark silos with their own impenetrable languages and inaccessibility. The age of the polymath is long past. This means that cross-fertilization between fields is much harder today. The wonderful hybrid vigor of cross-pollination has led to hothouse fragility and inbreeding. View in LinkedIn

NUMBED. The majority of workaday lives are occupied with numbingly dull tasks that leave the body weary and repeat endlessly in this fight against the Theatre of the Absurd. The Mind is reduced to a litany of shopping lists, muted by media obsessed with the lowest common denominator, and what remains of curiosity and wonder is squashed into oblivion. View in LinkedIn