Arlo - / The reason for this is, taking the example of salt in water, is that the salt separates into it's ionic components (for reasons unknown to me pending further reading) which then would repel each other...or only the like-charged ones would. Hm, I guess that too is pending further reading. / /-Arlo James Barnes/
Welcome to my world! *everything* seems to be "pending further investigation". I suspect most folks here have a similar story to tell.
From an early age, it was the damned dictionary and thesaurus, then later when I had access to encyclopedias, they consumed me with branching questions, leading naturally to yet-more. At about 12, I moved to a town where there was a "real library" and my mother would occasionally let me hang out there for entire afternoons. It had high ceilings, the sun streamed through the windows to excite the dust motes always hanging (despite very little activity), while I wandered from stack to stack following the leads and questions that kept multiplying.
High School took some of the wind out of my self-directed curiosity sails, with all that *directed* learning they tried to run my down with. But before I got out of that rat race I'd found ways to satisfy the "proof of directed learning" fairly efficiently and returned to slaking my addiction otherweis named curiosity.
I discovered the infinite rabbit hole of networked computers toward the end of my university time as time sharing systems started adding at least rudimentary networking (UUnet in particular). In my early career, I had access to a fantabulous scientific library (LANL) and by mid-career, even before WWW, the internet "proper" had emerged and as clunky as it was, the volumes of information online was overwhelming and sometimes even indexed. WAIS was "before it's time" but long before Google emerged to win the "search/index" wars, there were plenty of ways to bash around looking for information on the early Wild Wild Web.
On a philosophical note, I wonder at the difference between roughly "three types of people"... 1) Those who came enough before the indexed, online world who have not been able to effectively learn to use it for more than maybe a little shopping, accessing their bank account, or reading scholarly papers or gossip rags that others have referenced for them. 2) Those who came before (like myself) but who are now prone to an obsessive compulsive self-directed wandering in Luis Borges' "Garden of Many Forking Paths". 3) Those born somewhat into the era of ubiquitous indexed online information, probably such as yourself, who hardly know any other way... who might find it hard to imagine having to "order" a manual, wait weeks for it's arrival, etc. to merely answer a few mundane technical questions about some "made thing", etc..
I also have a (bad) feeling about the risks of "local" knowledge pursuit obscuring any quality "global" knowledge or context or dare I say "wisdom"? Perhaps an astute young man such as yourself might be able to see out from within the trees of your own forest to speculate about such questions? Do you perhaps feel a *qualitative* difference between the perspective on knowledge (and ahem... wisdom) of your own peer generation and that of most of the rest of us here? I don't know the distribution of ages on this list, but I am pretty sure you are near the low end, and I (at 55) am roughly near the median. If I had to guess, an important inflection point in the age curve is probably those who came of age (12-18?) with the public Internet (1992-1998)... such that it is roughly a divide between those under 30 and and those above (Logan's run anyone?)
- Steve
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
