How I Got Smart
Aspiring Generalist is an Understandary project.
How I Got Smart
There are a lot of gems in a piece scribed by multiple-day Jeopardy-winner Amy Schneider entitled "How I Got Smart," but my favorite is tucked into this snippet:
"How could I know such a random fact? Well, if that definition was really just a bare, unadorned fact, then it wouldn’t interest me, and thus I wouldn’t remember it. But in reality, there are no “bare” facts. Everything is a strand in the infinite tapestry of possible knowledge, and I want to explore as much of that tapestry as I can, in the pleasant knowledge that I will never, ever be done."
I tend to visualize knowledge in a similar way, sometimes pointing at Ted Nelson's term intertwingularity as an apt description of the things-to-know landscape, sometimes just describing the visual I use to map out things I've learned and what I may decide to pursue, next: a giant, never-ending web of interconnected information I can explore as enthusiastically as I choose, because I'll never run out of new nodes and threads to discover.