Found two great articles today. One by Gregory McNamee - reminds us of an outstanding quote given by a brilliant computer scientist Marvin Minsky decades before the Google era:

“You have to think about . . . your mind as a resource to conserve, and if you fill it up with infantile garbage it might cost you something later. There might be right theories that you will be unable to understand five years later because you have so many misconceptions. You have to form the habit of not wanting to have been right for very long. . . . You can read what your contemporaries think, but you should remember they are ignorant savages.”

And the second one by Ross Dawson listing a very strong framework of what Web 2.0 encompasses – a mechanism for sharing and recombining shared information in useful ways.

With those two thoughts in mind, I take one conclusion: just like neuroscience, unless one can grasp the big picture and use it to exercise discretion with details, one will get lost in the details. Despite MIT’s OCW, one of the most important lessons grad schools teach does not often get out there.

That is: One cannot know everything or be able to read everything at once, but if you really try, you can get pretty damn good and being able to find information fast, from the wrong sources…

Posted by: Diana Zink on Sunday, 13th Apr, 2008