How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
newyorker.com
How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
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Re: How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
#2Re: How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
#3How to really be a "know-it-all": be curios, ask questions about the information you come across in your life, especially if you come across it multiple times in your daily life.
Having an idea about the birth of the universe, dinosaurs, etc is not bad to have and you certainly can spend your time in worse ways than reading pop science books. But most of the time you will take almost nothing from these books as the information does not come as an answer to a question that bugged you, so you value it close to worthless. Water tastes the sweetest when you are thirsty and so on.
Re: How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
#4>[...] it’s a profound relief, these days, to press our collective feverish forehead against the cold steel of actual information.
Beautiful.
Re: How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
#5How to really be a "know-it-all": be curios, ask questions about the information you come across in your life, especially if you come across it multiple times in your daily life. Having an idea about the birth of the universe, dinosaurs, etc is not bad to have and you certainly can spend your time in worse ways than reading pop science books. But most of the time you will take almost nothing from these books as the i…
Alternatively, possibly for some, these little introductions are the first, albeit imperfect and incomplete step toward answering those recurring pesky questions. By developing a skeletal cognitive framework on a subject that relates to a relevant question I have, I can better map a route to the answer(s).
Re: How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
#6How to really be a "know-it-all": be curios, ask questions about the information you come across in your life, especially if you come across it multiple times in your daily life. Having an idea about the birth of the universe, dinosaurs, etc is not bad to have and you certainly can spend your time in worse ways than reading pop science books. But most of the time you will take almost nothing from these books as the i…
Once you've read a couple of those pop-science and "big history" books, every other such book tells you the same story. It always starts with the Big Bang, the forming of the stars, the Earth, life, agriculture, writing, the Industrial revolution and the modern era. You can certainly do better than spend significant amounts of time on books with that narrative.
Re: How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
#7It’s fun to learn facts, especially when presented well, indeed, but this article feels like it is really just an ad for the Very Short Introduction series, a project of Oxford University Press.
Re: How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
#8people tend to forget that the very process of knowing is as important as the thing known. no one can be a know it all aiming for a collection of "the most important things to know". You are a know it all by being curious, attentive, willing to study and learn. It's the form, the process, the way of living. The separation between form and content has reached an all time high
Re: How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
#9people tend to forget that the very process of knowing is as important as the thing known. no one can be a know it all aiming for a collection of "the most important things to know". You are a know it all by being curious, attentive, willing to study and learn. It's the form, the process, the way of living. The separation between form and content has reached an all time high
You have to start with an attempt to define knowledge. It is rooted in observation and experience, and has the ability to invalidate itself in the face of new observations and experiences. In that sense, it is transient and ephemeral in the temporal domain. You can try to derive laws and models which have practical utility here and now, but those laws will always erode with the passing of time.
Re: How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)
#10How to really be a "know-it-all": be curios, ask questions about the information you come across in your life, especially if you come across it multiple times in your daily life. Having an idea about the birth of the universe, dinosaurs, etc is not bad to have and you certainly can spend your time in worse ways than reading pop science books. But most of the time you will take almost nothing from these books as the i…
IMHO facts "come to life" with more context, e.g:
* How do we know that fact / how was it measured or determined? How sure are we that the fact is true? How accurately / precisely do we know it?
* Who figured it out / generated / measured the fact? Why did they do that?
* What is the "distribution" the fact is drawn from? e.g. for "height of highest mountain", what are the next 3 tallest mountains, etc, what is deepest trench, how far to space? etc.