(2016-05-26) Rao How To Take Your Brain Offroad

Venkatesh Rao: How to Take Your Brain Off-Road

thought, from Corey Robin, that intellectuals create a public through their writing, where the term “public” (noun) indicates a group with an awakened, cohesive, political consciousness (Public Intellectual)

By analogy, heavy readers in general, and disorderly readers in particular, create a territory through their reading that demands a map. These territories are more or less unique to individual readers,

The term “intellectual” really only applies to orderly readers and writers, and necessarily implies an associated public.

Everybody can see the intertwingled. It is not a skill but mere accumulation. It is how the brain works. All you need to do is feed the brain enough stuff and it will begin to see intertwingling.

To a certain kind of excitable, somewhat vain, and tasteless reader, the intertwingled bank is all “good.” They like to say things like, “wow, everything is so interconnected! I love to see the interconnections across disciplines!

To a different kind of dour and humorless, but equally vain and tasteless reader, it’s all “bad” chaos.

If you want to be deep, you have to go deep. Which means you either have to tame the intertwingling, or dive in and get lost in it

if you don’t like the weasel, cactus, hedgehog, and fox typology (Hedgehog Concept), think instead of drifters, settlers, colonizers, and explorers.

Orderly readers reject the variety of ambiguous ways things can be intertwingled, preferring instead to prune connections down to a few operationally useful categories like older versus newer, or supports versus contradicts. These categories immediately suggest things to do, such as backtrack, falsify or verify. Curiously enough, Ted Nelson, who coined the term “intertwingled,” appears to have thought about hypertext in these tame-the-wilderness terms. The fact that he was among the hypertext pioneers who saw that information could be organized via networks rather than hierarchies obscures the fact that he had a rather autocratic view of networks.

The difference between orderly and disorderly readers is that orderly readers want to use the territory, while disorderly readers want to see the territory.

Orderly readers, in other words, are colonizers, civilizers, and consumers.

An orderly reader tends to relate to the idea environment through a library metaphor, or better still, the Big Book (or God’s Book) metaphor

Inevitably, orderly readers end up being tribalized by their reading. Publics they have joined constitute home tribes.

It’s tempting to manufacture a justification for taking your brain off-road, like connecting it to innovation, discovery, and new wealth. That’s a bit like justifying space exploration by connecting it to things like new kinds of materials and drugs. It seems better not to bother.

it is very easy to do

You just collect stuff (no need to be particularly diligent about that either; stick whatever wherever, or don’t, and trust you’ll run into it again). You pick stuff off in any old order, mixing parallel and serial readings, abandoning and picking things up again, reading some things instantly and greedily the moment you encounter them

The second thing to realize about disorderly reading is that it is never just a consumption behavior

You are producing primarily to consume right away, not to give or sell. All disorderly readers are necessarily nascent writers as well, whether or not they actually write. Because they are creating territory even if they are not creating maps. (SenseMaking)

To be a disorderly reader, you may have to hack away at stuff, build bridges, move logs out of the way, weave a net of creepers to tie back unstable rock formations

But you probably won’t bother paving paths, putting up signposts

great paper (apparently a classic) by Karl Weick

when something is in a state of superposition between truth and falsity, you can’t actually tell it apart from bullshit a priori.

To the practical doer, there is no difference between ontology and epistemology.

To the impractical thinker, there is all the difference in the world

Do I know what am I looking at? is an ontological question. Can I do something with it? (such as “test for truth” or “use to poke Superman”) is an epistemological question

I like to use the term ambiguity for unclear ontology and uncertainty for unclear epistemology

My current tentative, working theory is that praxis is orderly reading/writing/doing, particularly in the shallowly lost quadrant, while poiesis is disorderly reading/writing/doing, particularly in the deeply lost quadrant.