Sunday, June 12, 2011
“You don’t really care about knowledge; it’s not a priority. For you, the books containing knowledge, the classics and old-fashioned scholarship summing up the best of our knowledge, the people and institutions whose purpose is to pass on knowledge–all are hopelessly antiquated. Even your own knowledge, the contents of your mind, can be outsourced to databases built by collaborative digital communities, and the more the better. After all, academics are boring. A new world is coming, and you are in the vanguard. In this world, the people who have and who value individual knowledge, especially theoretical and factual knowledge, are objects of your derision. You have contempt for the sort of people who read books and talk about them–especially classics, the long and difficult works that were created alone by people who, once upon a time, were hailed as brilliant. You have no special respect for anyone who is supposed to be “brilliant” or even “knowledgeable.” What you respect are those who have created stuff that many people find useful today. Nobody cares about some Luddite scholar’s ability to write a book or get an article past review by one of his peers. This is why no decent school requires reading many classics, or books generally, anymore–books are all tl;dr for today’s students. In our new world, insofar as we individually need to know anything at all, our knowledge is practical, and best gained through projects and experience. Practical knowledge does not come from books or hard study or any traditional school or college. People who spend years of their lives filling up their individual minds with theoretical or factual knowledge are chumps who will probably end up working for those who skipped college to focus on more important things.”

These are sadly the exact ideals some of my friends in CS express. They are extremely intelligent people. But this mindset frightens me. Getting things done (GTD) is an important mindset, it makes things happen. But understanding the collective knowledge we posses, and using it to focus change and the things you do is also important.

Neither approach on its own will get you anywhere as a community. Too much focus on academia and knowledge makes you too frigid to move and prevent you from getting anywhere. But at the same time, too much of a focus on GTD, and you wind up getting lost along the way.

The best minds will be the ones who can effectively balance the pursuit of knowledge, and the pursuit of results. 

Geek Anti-Intellectualism.
Talk amongst yourselves. (via mudl)
Posted at 8:50 AM 4 notes Reblogged from mudl