Anyone who wishes to make advances in a particular intellectual area have essentially two options:

1. Be an uber-deathgod-genius like Newton or Einstein, or:
2. Learn everything that came before you in that field, and then work to advance it.

Wait, scratch the first one–both Newton and Einstein studied existing work extensively before making their contributions.

Anyway, there’s one situation to avoid: Being the brilliant idiot. You know the guy…the one who always has these “awesome” ideas that his three friends think are proof he’s an undiscovered gem of an intellectual.

What neither he nor his fans know is that the brilliant insights he keeps having are mere glimpses of fully thought-out concepts, and that they already have names and books written about them. And those books were written hundreds of years ago.

So this person who could have contributed something to the world instead goes through life partially discovering old things, yet thinking he’s on to something new.

What’s his crime? A lack of education–that’s the crime. One can argue about who’s fault that is, but it matters not. There is only one solution to the problem, and that is to teach budding intellectuals a very basic concept:

Don’t automatically assume that you’re brilliant little idea is new or interesting. In fact, assume the opposite. Learn all you can about the work that has been done in a given field before you attempt to advance it.

Failure to do this ensures that as you attempt to stand on the shoulders of those before you, you’ll only end up around the belly button. ::

High quality intellectual output comes from high-quality intellectual input. People who don’t consume ideas tend not to have any. And if they do have some, they tend to be either 1) poor ones, or 2) good ones that someone they’ve never heard of had hundreds of years ago.

Simple take-away: If you want to have ideas, you need to read a lot. ::

So I have an idea for a project. The idea is to document the core concepts taught in the major classical works. Phase two would be to build some sort of concept-normalized mindmap. Here’s the impetus:

When I read my favorite authors I am constantly struck by references–too many of which I don’t have a strong command of. So my goal here is to continue reading voraciously and to document every single reference I come across. Then I’ll take those references, find the original work, and create this type of summary for it.

The first task of the effort will be to come up with a format for the summaries, which I want to be extremely clean, i.e. brief. I’m thinking perhaps:

1. Title
2. Author name (with Wikipedia link)
3. Date of publish
4. A 1-3 sentence summary of the work
5. 1-10 bullets of key concepts and pioneering words or phrases

An example:

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[ Many of the summary sentences will probably come out of Wikipedia, as they have high shoulders. ]

1984

Author: George Orwell
Published: 1949

Summary

Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes written 1984), by George Orwell, published in 1949, is a dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of the Party, an oligarchical collectivist society where life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control, and the voiding of citizens’ rights.

Concepts

• Big brother looks attractive and ends up being evil
• Watch for political talk that promotes pervasive surveillance
• Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that is almost purely propaganda. It is described in the novel as being “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year”.
• Be extremely weary of giving power to someone who says they’re protecting you.

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This is, of course, an obscenely simplistic summary. But I think capturing the major works in this way might still be of use to many–not the least of which is me. It doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t read the works themselves, as many are classics for the beauty in which the concepts are presented in addition to the concepts themselves, but I believe there is value in distilling the wisdom as well.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Keep a learning log.

I’ve talked before about mind mapping software. Here’s an other example, this one from XMind.

My favorite thing to do is try and understand how the world works. This is what gives me go, and it’s the purpose of this website. Whenever I have something shown to me, or I “discover” something I add it to my ever increasing body of knowledge that I use to analyze the rest of the world. Ultimately, the goal is to find the unified theory of everything (trite, but true).

I am sometimes rather lumbering when attempting to express myself, and it bothers me greatly. I’ll think I’ve assembled something worthwhile only to find that it collapses under the scrutiny of “many eyes”. This is embarrassing, and it hurts my ego when it happens. The common-sense approach is to simply not overextend — to be very careful with every word, research extensively, and don’t post anything if you aren’t 101% sure. That’s safe. That’s professional. That’s mature.

Meh…I can’t do it. My obsession with learning is so compelling that I simply must share what I “think” I know about the world. I do this for selfish reasons that may seem counter-intuitive, i.e. I do it to learn just as much as to teach. In other words, I am actually sort of gaming the system by putting forth my ideas framed as “lessons”, while simultaneously hoping someone will come along and show me why I’m wrong.

This is no attempt at manipulation or gesture of false humility. I truly want to be shown the flaws in my viewpoints. Here’s what I wrote on the matter back when I first started this *log:

Being right is boring, not knowing is through-provoking, but being wrong is absolutely exhilarating.

The unfortunate consequence of the fervor with which I put forth my ideas and viewpoints is that I occasionally often overextend and come off looking dumb. As I said, this irks me immensely, and because of search engines my bouts with stupidity will haunt me forever.

But you know what? I say fuck it. I’d honestly rather overextend and fall over than never make the attempt. I think the debate is worth it. I think what we all learn from the discussion is worth it. If I have to look stupid sometimes just so I can put a thought onto paper, so be it.

So to you who are reading this, I ask that you forgive me when I stumble. Please don’t confuse my strong assertions with arrogance or the belief that I really do have all the answers. I don’t. I’m looking for them, I want them badly, and I’m willing to occasionally look like a fool to get them.

The difference between me and a typical evangelist is that I have no loyalty to my opinions. I just want to be right. I truly don’t care if I’m right when we start the debate or if I’m right after it’s over. Either way, I’ve either learned something or helped someone else do the same.: