I had been watching all the time but I didn’t notice when it happened… Now I know that the age of instant access to knowledge is here.
    There was no doubt when Google started digitizing whole libraries that the day when all the books and research papers will be downloadable from an online repository is near. Now this day has come, or has almost come.

What has just happened?

    Instead of talking about techincalities - how all those ‘evil people’ ‘steal copyrighted materials’ and ‘disseminate them’ for free and who’s business ‘sustains tremendous injury and suffering’ I will talk about the fact, namely: when I was growing in the Soviet Union in 1960-s I couldn’t get the books that were necessary for my intellectual development no matter how much I wanted, a 10 year old boy Today - can. Period, end of sentence.
    Any book is within instant reach today, - the books that are absolutely necessary for you, and you know it, the books that are not, the books that are un-necessary and counter your point of view in ridiculous ways; the books that are obsolete, the books that contain world views damaging for your intellect if you adopt them, but most of all, of course, the useless and hollow books, written for the money alone, you sure know what I mean. They were written and published because books were a type of merchandize in mass-demand and the businessmen that are in the content trade business were ‘satisfying the demand’… without thinking about the content of what they are selling, of course, as it always happens with drug dealers and Internet providers. And there were always crowds of liars for hire ready to write a book. This is to an extent the thing of the past.
    Today the two monopolies have fallen: the monopoly of the owners of printing presses and video pipes leading to your screen and the monopoly of libraries that sort, systematize and preserve the pile of knowledge of the humankind. Unlike the ‘businessmen’ from the ‘publishing business’ the librarians are probably totally happy, that their mission of preserving and disseminating knowledge and culture finally can be carried out to the physically possible extent. Our infrastructure is delivering required knowledge with the speed orders of magnitude higher than the speed at which it can be consumed by a human. Mission accomplished! The Librarians may be proud of themselves, we’ve reached this point because of them and it looks like only a few important parts of the paper culture of the past have been lost.

How did I react to it?

    Having been born in the information-deprived place I started reading like crazy wihout any system or direction the moment I bumped into this ‘brave new world’ of accessible books. And it was a lot of fun. Then I pretty much returned to the place where I stopped reading books (when I was 25 or so years old) and, with a little bit of excursion back to the parts that I only read in my childhood I walked through the topics and times of my professional career in physics. The conclusion was amazing: what I always felt but could not quite express in words - the fact that Physics was dying as a science and becoming something different, - proved out to be true. Moreover, it died in that country when I was a boy, soon after 1968 (and the Prague uprising that was a shock for the bolsheviks).

What do we do with this?

    So, as you’ve probably guessed I’m going to suggest something, namely: the way of looking at all this and dealing with this new problem of oversaturation with information…

Step 1. Do not let your natural curiosity carry you away.

Your curiosity developed in your brain as you were growing up. Chances are it was in a different age, of scarce information. The curiosity that you have is not your friend in this new era, it can even be your enemy in your present situation. Yes, your perfectly healthy interest in this magnificent world can distort your thinking and incapacitate you. You need to start monitoring yourself, then tame and learn to manage your natural curiosity. It should be on your leash at all times besides the moments when you are having a walk in the park of unknown, where you can unleash it and let it run freely.

Step 1’. Deside why do you need knowledge.

Yes, I understand how paradoxical it sounds, but that is where we are in an unchartered territory full of paradoxes. There may be several reasonable motivations for knowledge acquisition:

  1. You may want to acquire a marketable skill throught knowledge, teach yourself something that will benefit your career growth or let you change the profession that you have altogether.
  2. You can have doubts about the interpretations of scientific data or opinions that are being circulated in the society which are reasonably important for the livelihood of the society, the World in general or yourself personally.
  3. Lastly, learning new things may be entertaining for you by itself. Knowledge acquisition brings you a sense of intellectual pleasure and that is the desired state of mind - learning as a passtime.

In any of these cases you need to identify for yorself why you are doing it. If you don’t - you will be lost in this forest in no time, if you do you will be able to say to yourself: “Today I allocate 2 hours of my time to learning, because… I need to know this for that / I want to know more about climate change / I’m tired of all these complicated everyday situations with unpredictable humans and want to study a little bit of mathematics where the problems are well defined and you can calculate.”

Step 2. Deside what your real interests are. Limit the scope.

There are questions that for one reason or another have captured your imagination and demand your attention despite all the measures of self-control that you are using (the leash of your curiosity, remember?). Make a list of them, you will need it later. For now just say to yourself (broadly): “I’m interested in physics and mathematics” or “I’m interested in the History of Roman Republic and the history of Dutch seafarers”, that will be sufficent.

Step 3. Learn how to always remember what you are doing.

It’s a paradoxical task, I know. Your head should be busy with doing what you are focused on and at the same time some part of it should remember where you are, what exactly is happening around you and what is the prediction about this situation in the foreseable future. Notice that you have the mechanics of this ‘background monitoring’ process, you only need to discover it and program it for your needs.

Note: I wrote about it much later and inclided this link here.

Step 4. Learn how to control your sense of being puzzled.

Most importantly, you are going on a life-long journey, you will learn a lot and forget a lot, the circle of your knowledge will expand dramatically, so will the circumference of your ignorance. Every now and then you will step over the imaginary boundary between the known and unknown and feel puzzled, lost and overwhelmed. This is a state where you are semi-paralyzed by the new information that you are ingesting and can not understand how to attach it to what you know and understand. There are couple of techniques that you will need, I developed them for myself and am using them routinely whenever I feel lost and confused.
First of all ask yourself: “what language is this in?”


Later.