Mind your knowledge
The internet and world is full of charlatans. Perhaps we all are in some way. It is very easy to be knowledgeable with a google search bar.
When many people speak these days, the same phrases come out that are heard in a range of 'at the moment' topics. It is very easy to regurgitate an amalgamation of news articles that are made to be repeated.
They are filled with easy to remember, clever phrases that make them ripe for quotation. It used to be only politicians that spoke in sound bites but now everyone does because they have more chance of 'going viral' and they do go viral obviously, because everyone repeats them.
Often, the people who copy these phrases and ideas have also accepted them without critical or deep thinking. This means that 'their' view, is actually someone else's words and there is little depth to the knowledge. Perhaps there was depth behind the original source's knowledge but repeating the conclusions does not carry the ocean with it.
This is easy to pick with a simple question or two. It is like putting a stick into dark waters to see if it is deep enough to dive in. The stick often hits the bottom just below the surface. This doesn't mean you have to know everything, it means, don't speak as if you do. We are likely all guilty of this at some point.
There is no shame in being inspired by others words though, no shame in agreeing with an already held position or furthering the idea into your own words. The problem comes when it is blindly accepted and then repeated as if it is knowledge.
Whenever something amazing comes out of CERN, suddenly everyone on the street is a physicist and talks as if they oversaw the design of a particle accelerator. A report on Syria hits the front page and they switch and become experts on international diplomacy. These are talented people, I must say.
There is no problem with talking about many topics but understand limitations and acknowledge them. When listening to or reading these types, if they are speaking as if they actually know, take an extra caution pill and be sure to investigate deeper before buying in.
The bigger problem I see with this behaviour is the spread of information that crowds out the space for variation and through repetition and social proof, starts to get widely accepted without thought. The thinking may be that, if there are so many people that believe it, someone must have fact checked it. Right?
This can mean that large swathes of the population can essentially be indoctrinated with a few simple ideas and once on the pathway of acceptance, the next step becomes easier. It is like the sales technique of only asking questions where the answer is a yes. Are you ready to sign the contract?
But the biggest problem I see with this behaviour is that through thoughtless acceptance of other's positions, we move. We change our thinking, our speaking and our actions. Pretty soon, we do not actually have a clear understanding of who we are anymore or where we are and this scares us. We live in conflict and fear. However, the voices that led us to this point are continually saying, 'don't worry, we know the way' and we are accustomed to follow their voice.
This is not the blind leading the blind. Those in front have very good vision and know exactly where they are going.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
My favorite phrase that almost every one i know uses is i want my xyz idea to change the world i always tell them to aim a little more at a specific problem because the world has complex parts and in one way or the other it might end up causing more harm than good without it being intended to do so.
However great ideas that can impact the world ought to be embraced and cheered to thrive but how to go about ut should be important too
Even embracing and cheering an idea is only the first step:
Truly world changing ideas are HARD:
take time to develop, and testing out and need to be confronted with reality to go through revision, fine tuning and allow them to remix. The original idea might be too abstract to be useful.
A great example is the Global Village Construction Set : a project by the opensourceecology.org, I wrote an article about it
If you think about it the GVCS, it is truly, truly profound: create an open source catalogue of plans for machines designed so that users can build their own production tools from scratch (or almost) from the plans and bootstrap an ENTIRE local economy with it.
It was founded in 2003, and featured in TED.com in 2012: everyone was raving about it. But turns out you can't buy the execution of this idea. It is an incredibly hard grind to prototype, document and distribute these designs and then get users to adopt them. They have made massive progress and it looks like a great community but they haven't quite reached escape velocity yet!
Turns out that it is extremely hard to turn such an idea into reality.
They are making great progress though, wish I could support them from Steemit.com !
I am a little bit tipsy right now (coming home from a wine festival in my hometown) but I am definitely going to read this again when sober. And I will think about this thorough. It seems to be a very interesting text worth reading it twice or more and think about it deeply! Very good job!
A wise man once said nothing Taraz. :)
Beautiful photo!
Perhaps it is just my eyes but the hair on that beautiful baby looks almost like the steemit logo! :)
that's a wise man... or the complete opposite :)
I am not wise :)
And yes it does look like the logo. Oh oh, I am raising a Steemian.
¡Veracity! that's the key word and main thought here.
And since everyone through these last years have had and still have way more abundant, easy, and in a democratic way, access to exponential huge amounts of the exact same shared info and supposedly knowledge simply & barely at the very lazy reach of their own hands. Every piece of that content gathered thru the very same informational/educational media outlets.. Well, everyone suddenly has been transformed into an Instant Knowledgeable Expert about everything & all. Yet, though, an ¡Instant Parrotable Expert!
However, in fact, nothing of this are exactly news. These human attitudes & behaviors always have existed before also, without us really noticing. Because before of the internet era it simply was way more hard to stumble upon and end up in front of the very same info/knowledge/truths/facts that exist and were/are happening out there every second. Before internet, we needed to individually chase, forge & gain info, knowledge, expertise, experience and real wisdom invariably through reading the right books, science journals, specialized magazines, digging and diving down into forbidden, unknown, arcane & underground sources, socializing and networking physically and in real time with the supposedly true fountains of knowledge to which not everyone and their dogs had access to, etc, etc, etc. In summary, a good chunk of years ago this all was harder to find info, accurate & veracious info, not common massive infoxification ¡that is!, true knowledge and actual wisdom before dare to open our big mouth to repeat or assert anything at all. Unless.. you actually did your homework first and wearing your daredevil questioning, inquisitive, renegade and maverick hat, you went ahead to look for and search, research, contrast, experiment, chose & pick up the damn correct pieces of the knowledge puzzle and luckily grab and put all that shit together with only those pieces which at the time looked like perfectly shaped to fit in before you were entitled to say you knew something at all. You actually needed to hold a very tangible handful of hairs of that Knowledge Hairy Beast in your hands and show it in an indisputable material way before claim you know something and were an expert about anything.
I'm afraid, after the invention of internet and this current ubiquitous mobile access to uniform, endless & infinite highly homogeneous infoxification at any time and from everywhere you are, simply in your pocket at the reach of your own lazy hand, anything is gonna get better any time soon as for what you've written in your article. The era of the viral lazy-ass knowledgeable experts has been born already and trying to separate the wheat from the chaff to find the true fertile seeds is going to be harder and harder if you take those only from the hands of any of these current Parrotable EXPERTS. :)
i love the "instantly parrotable experts".
If you think about it, most of them have not earned their ideas the hard way: they are indeed parroting things that sound like they might work but often aren't applying them. (And I will put my hand up to doing that sometimes. But then again I am really hesitant to call myself an expert except in very few obscure fields.)
I like the definition of an expert as :
"Someone who has made all possible mistakes in a very narrow field" I think someone who has done this probably has a shot at acquiring true knowledge. Provided they are willing to learn of course.
I think that the value of being an expert, except for some perennial fields like human related subjects (communication, persuasion, psychology, coaching etc.) is going to fade fast unless you can combine your technical expertise with other relevant fields and skills.
As a society we have been told that we need to specialise and gather more and more knowledge of an ever narrower field.
I think most progress is going to come from the intersection of different fields, combining disciplines by people who are willing to look over the fence of their expertise and remix their ideas with others to generate truly valuable ideas. "Experts" who remain in their technical box might find that all of a sudden their expertise became worthless or abundant.
Exactly @the-traveller! You actually went developing further the core of the general idea of my comment giving the definitive hit on the mere nail's head here to explain it brightly.
Because since my comment already looked long and boring enough, I had to stop it somewhere. LoL
I'm glad you like it and that it has motivated you to round it even better.
Cheers!! :)
:)
As always your delivery is impeccably @por500bolos.
I especially like infoxification. I haven't heaed that before.
Separation of the wheat from chaff is indeed difficult until you meet them face to face.
Hahaha my dear friend @tarazkp. I'm really glad that from my long weird spanglish comments It could be possible to extract something of value, coherence and rationality out of the inspiration produced from your very well written, eloquent and brightly thought provoking articles in true english. Since as you know, english is not my native or primary language.
But as long as you keep pulling my tongue with them, I will always try to contribute with something new and valuable in them, although in principle, they may look a little bit cryptic to be deciphered at all on this Infoxification age. LoL
meep
Finally!! a valuable meep reply on my comments & stuff by this Highly Eloquent-Meaningful and appreciated bot opinion. ¡Now I'm done! LoL
meep
But how do you know they haven't done any research? Have you "tested the waters" or are you presuming? Maybe some like to be lead like sheep in a heard.
:D
Ok, I'm just jesting. I agree with your thoughts.
I don't know if they have done their research so I will work under the assumption they haven't.
Lamb is delicious ;)
Here is another post that shows the confusion between the value of good ideas and the charlatans that promote indiscriminate accumulation of knowledge cough Tai Lopez cough Djeezes, reading a book a day how superficial can you get? I will repeat my comment here since the original thread does not seem to be willing to engage in much discussion so far, unsurprisingly. I really want some intelligent pushback Original thread: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER! 📚... Does Reading Books Make You More Successful?
My comment to that:
Yes and no... books are vehicles for ideas. Ideas by themselves don't have much value. They are tools, if you are not applying them to something they are in fact useless. Don't get me started on Tai Lopez he is a charlatan... his advice of reading a book a day is not going to do much for you. Ideas need to be learned, used evaluated and discussed to fully understand them.
Derek Sivers has a great quote:
If information was all it took, we'd be all billionaires with 6-pack abs.
Same with seminars. If you don't act on the ideas, which most people don't do by the way, you are not getting ANY return on investment other than a temporary good feeling.
Some ideas require DEEP thinking: you need to stick with it for while to internalise them and then ACT on them. Better to deeply understand only a few and apply them consistently than hundreds you know superficially.
That said, it is always useful to have more tools at your disposal. The more useful ideas you know, and are able to apply, the better.
But you need to revisit ideas from time to time to get to the hidden, more advanced layers.
Take a book like Dale Carnegie's "How to make friends and influence people".
From the first reading you may take away say 5 ideas.
If you apply just one or two ideas consistently in your day-to-day life you might get amazing results.
But to extract the full value of that book, you have to come back to it and evaluate the ideas in it again WITH your newly gained experience, it is only then that the deeper meaning and consequences of the idea begin to reveal themselves.
Or you might actually find out these ideas are not as robust as they looked on paper, so you need to critically re-evaluate them.
A book like this you probably could/ should re read every YEAR and learn more and more sophisticated lessons from it each time.
Yes books can be great but it takes time and application of ideas to get value out of them.
Obviously there are also a lot of crap books so good curation is essential;
check out https://sivers.org/book for a great list.
Most of the books on this list are worth a read. But be selective, reading his notes might help you to decide if it is worth buying. His notes are awesome but by themselves are not always enough to really extract value, that requires mental and physical WORK.
Like the ideas?
Buy the book; read it absorb the ideas and apply them! Then later revisit when you have some experience...
For me, knowledge and understanding are very different things.
As an example, I may know what I should eat and why, what exercises I should do and why - but if I don't do them, I do not actually understand.
It doesn't matter how many books one reads on surfing and how much one knows, the first time on a board, you are going to get dumped (if you can even paddle out to the waves that is).
All information is good information when considered. Sometimes it is information you can use directly, sometimes it is information you can use to avoid, sometimes it can be manipulated to do something the information was not created for.
Information is just information. It is what one does with it that is important (if anything is actually important in this world)
It is also possible that pure action need no knowledge at all. Some of the best dancers in the world, do not know enough to teach.
A useful construct I find is that of Data-information-knowledge-wisdom
ultimately it is about how it impacts your day to day decision making:
In my classes I give the following example:
DATA
I see a brown block of something on my table, it is square smells nice (all data points)
INFORMATION
putting the data points together, I can be reasonably certain that is a piece of chocolate
KNOWLEDGE
from my experience, when I ate chocolate before I liked it alot, but chocolate is energy dense (another data point)
WISDOM
Given that my goal is to lose weight, I should not eat this piece of delicious chocolate.
It is only when you incorporate information into your knowledge and experience framework and then ACT accordingly, that it becomes useful.
If the data information and knowledge are in your head but you do not make your decisions in accordance with that, all these are USELESS
Strictly defining USEFULLNESS in this case as at an individual level as something that will help YOU achieve your goals by making informed decisions that will lead to ACTIONS that get you closer to your goals.
Every time I regurgitate an amalgamation, I tend to disseminate any such rumination with disdainful enlightenment
:)
Great post my friend, like you said it's important to draw inspiration from others, but that doesn't necessarily mean everything they say has to be line with what you believe. It's a major issue in almost all areas of life these days, but personally I think it's shown the most in politics, unfortunately.
I have a feelinh these days that fields are much closer to politcs and vice versa that is is almost too difficult to separate them. Better treat them all as people who promise but don't deliver :)
Unfortunately that seems to be the only solution..