The Butt Ugly Weblog

Passive research for the win

People sometimes ask me how do you keep up with news in this fast-paced world, since I seem to be "in the know" most of the time. All this new AI stuff happening every hour of every day, there's no way to read it all!

Yeah.

They're right. It's not possible to read it all. What I practice is just following my nose and reading whatever smells interesting to me. (Note: I read. I don't in general listen to many podcasts, because they're linear and hard to just skim and browse. I prefer to use my time to think, and I find that reading allows me to think. I just pause, lift my eyes, process the thoughts the text gave me, daydream a little, then continue simply by lowering my eyes back on the book. None of that pause-rewind -cycle that podcasts make you do.)

So, as you see, I just basically cheat and skim a lot. You see - if something is important, it will surface in so many places that it probably passes by my eyes at some point. And I trust my instincts on whether it's worth my time or not.

And – this is important – I don't need to know everything. I don't need to even read full articles. I don't need AI summaries. I just skim, read a sentence here and there and piece together an idea. And if that idea is interesting, then I read more. I wrote earlier about bead curtain shaped people. That's how you get one.

It's a version of "passive research" - that's when you turn on the TV and learn about whatever happens to be on. (In the old days you could learn about giraffes; these days you learn a lot about the social behaviour of young adults in zero clothing. It's interesting too, in its own way.) If I recall correctly, Esa Saarinen (a famous Finnish philospher) does a version of this method too where he just opens a book randomly and just reads a few paragraphs and then closes the book. Just enough to get an idea.

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