Check out this comment from Kevin Kelly’s blog:

I don’t need a 3G system and ugly cell towers to outsmart the gaggles of texting, lane-swerving scatterbrains–I just need a good book, pad and pencil, natural light, and a calm, focused mind. It’s more noble to deny technology’s claim to life’s center, more sane to breathe deeply once in a while in actual reality, as opposed to somebody else’s fake pixel representation of it.

The aim of this sort of work is a state of mind where holes in the knowledge start to become blatantly obvious.

That’s what I was trying to get at with my old iceberg essay, closing up the holes in the knowledge of self. Didn’t really realize those connections at the time, of course, but still.

The aim of this sort of work is a state of mind where holes in the knowledge start to become blatantly obvious. Some things will niggle and refuse to make sense. After a while, you have to trust that your intuition knows where to dig. That’s when a good investigator first begins to bring the big guns of Method to bear. This kind of digging requires a certain calming of the monkey-mind; first, to read-around in more detail to analyse the disconnect precisely, then to stare really hard at the gap until something becomes apparent.

I think you may have just described meditation, turned outwards instead of inwards. Take that exact same approach to your own awareness and that’s exactly how to meditate. Or at least, that’s how I’ve experienced it. “Turn the light back on itself”, as the Buddha said. The scientific method applied to the self…

There’s a balance. When you’re first introduced to a subject, this is the thing to do. It’s also something the Net is quite good at (shock! horror!), finding things around a topic. It’s what new postgraduate students are encouraged to do (or were, back when I was in that world) – though undergraduates tend to be steered away from this kind of enquiry. Part of the reason for that is that the Net is /so/ easy to dredge that most modern students enter University with the notion that reading Net-dredge is the ONLY form of learning. Many even leave with this idea. (A lot of them get a passing grade, which is a national disgrace.) Another reason is that you get a LOT of sludge in the Net, through which it takes a certain amount of experience to sift for the buried treasure.

The aim of this sort of work is a state of mind where holes in the knowledge start to become blatantly obvious. Some things will niggle and refuse to make sense. After a while, you have to trust that your intuition knows where to dig. That’s when a good investigator first begins to bring the big guns of Method to bear. This kind of digging requires a certain calming of the monkey-mind; first, to read-around in more detail to analyse the disconnect precisely, then to stare really hard at the gap until something becomes apparent. I find modern I.T. very poor for this calm kind of thought. Pencil, paper, a good book and frequent walks round the block is the way to go at that point.

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A friend of mine is a University lecturer. For several years now he has had trouble with students answering essay questions by copying out the Wikipedia page verbatim. In recent months he has hit upon a solution: with every problem, he presents the students with all the relevant Wikipedia entries /as a starting point/.