The serendipity factor
Jun. 22nd, 2008 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarkerOne of my amusements is to scan a set of random quotes when I start up the computer. Today's list included "I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way." Franklin P. Adams.
Which reminded me of the way that looking up a word in a dictionary or thesaurus almost always lead to incidental discoveries. This is the old paper dictionary or thesaurus, mind, not the online ones. Search engines and similar applications provide quick access to the desired information, but we often miss the serendipitous discoveries of the older hand searching methods. Although it might be argued that Google, for example, provides a rich bed of some related but often rather twisted materials. Still, it's not quite the same.
It's also interesting to think of this in terms of students, who often want to be told where to go to get the right answer, without having to wander around and look at other stuff. How can we teach them that the search, and the odd stuff that one stumbles across on the way, are often more exciting and interesting than actually finding that "right" answer?
Serendipity, syncronicity, the knowledge that we discover when we don't know what we're looking for -- the intuition that we find by letting go of our goal oriented focus? Interesting to consider that our changing technology may be making it more difficult for people to remember this kind of expansion of our ideation. Perhaps Google could add some of Amazon's collaborative filtering abilities? People who have searched for this also searched for this, and this, and this? People who looked at this link also looked at this?
Oh, now that's interesting. I was going to toss in our pet phrase for wandering down a path of somewhat related tasks to the point where you don't really remember the original task -- aka yak shaving, from my days at MIT. But when I decided to check it, Google provides at least two flavors of commentary regarding the term. One is as I remembered it, where one sets out to do one thing, finds something else is needed and starts to dig into that, and then . . . 12 layers of incidental tasks later, one looks up and says, "What the heck did I start out to do?" However, there is a variant which assumes that the apparently minor task in fact is critical to the main task -- something along the lines of the old "for want of a nail" the war was lost reasoning.
In any case, Franklin's point seems to be that yak shaving, and other wandering around the main focus, often are worthy parts of our learning and experience.
Keep an eye open as you head for that goal - and stop and sniff the flowers on the way, too?
Which reminded me of the way that looking up a word in a dictionary or thesaurus almost always lead to incidental discoveries. This is the old paper dictionary or thesaurus, mind, not the online ones. Search engines and similar applications provide quick access to the desired information, but we often miss the serendipitous discoveries of the older hand searching methods. Although it might be argued that Google, for example, provides a rich bed of some related but often rather twisted materials. Still, it's not quite the same.
It's also interesting to think of this in terms of students, who often want to be told where to go to get the right answer, without having to wander around and look at other stuff. How can we teach them that the search, and the odd stuff that one stumbles across on the way, are often more exciting and interesting than actually finding that "right" answer?
Serendipity, syncronicity, the knowledge that we discover when we don't know what we're looking for -- the intuition that we find by letting go of our goal oriented focus? Interesting to consider that our changing technology may be making it more difficult for people to remember this kind of expansion of our ideation. Perhaps Google could add some of Amazon's collaborative filtering abilities? People who have searched for this also searched for this, and this, and this? People who looked at this link also looked at this?
Oh, now that's interesting. I was going to toss in our pet phrase for wandering down a path of somewhat related tasks to the point where you don't really remember the original task -- aka yak shaving, from my days at MIT. But when I decided to check it, Google provides at least two flavors of commentary regarding the term. One is as I remembered it, where one sets out to do one thing, finds something else is needed and starts to dig into that, and then . . . 12 layers of incidental tasks later, one looks up and says, "What the heck did I start out to do?" However, there is a variant which assumes that the apparently minor task in fact is critical to the main task -- something along the lines of the old "for want of a nail" the war was lost reasoning.
In any case, Franklin's point seems to be that yak shaving, and other wandering around the main focus, often are worthy parts of our learning and experience.
Keep an eye open as you head for that goal - and stop and sniff the flowers on the way, too?
