Face Melting Action

Yesterday, my co-developer and fellow Back to Work fan Matt informed me that he and another friend of his have started analyzing conversational and professional relationships in terms of who is the Merlin and who is the Dan Benjamin.

I’m still not entirely sure what this means¹, but congratulations to Merlin and Dan on ascending from being people to I guess some sort of nigh-Jungian archetypes. I think this is gonna break big and be the “are you a Carrie or the skanky one or one of the other two” question for the new decade²

After a few years out of school in which no one is forcing me to read primary sources anymore, I’ve really started to become cognizant and concerned about the effects of that on my mind.

Stuff like most blog entries and Wikipedia are knowledge pointers, which are useful. I can look up a Platonic dialogue and the perfunctory summary cues my mind to dredge up the tripartite soul or the theory of knowledge or the fascist kingdom of grabass philosophers which I have spent days of my life actually putting the work in to read about. The dangerous part however, which I have increasingly noticed happening to me, is making the category mistake where a pointer towards knowledge is mistaken for knowledge itself. You make this mistake and you’ll start to find that as you become a mighty Sage of Wikipedia, your knowledge seems to spread wider and wider but get shallower and shallower until you know nothing about everything.

This is actually something I’ve started thinking about thanks to Back to Work. Merlin, being the trained liberal arts graduate that he is, cites his sources as he summarizes and synthesizes. He’s not doing this to conform to APA formatting standards or avoid lawsuits or anything though, he is doing this because he wants me to read those sources, as perhaps they might have even more to offer me that the concepts he drew from them.

Inspired by that idea, I’ve started reading actual texts again, not just pretending that summaries are information. Me and my co-developer have started a nerd book club to actually read some primary sources (sidebar: David Allen is not actually funny, but he is slightly funnier than I would have expected, which I appreciate), and I am also putting foundational philosophical texts back in my reading queue (got Kierkegaard lined up right after I finish this reread of Slaughterhouse Five).

I’m doing a few productivity nerdy things as well, but I think I’m actually more excited about getting back to acquiring actual knowledge.