But you pretty quickly learned that the chances of the answer being in an adjacent book were higher, and in the meantime, you’d look in the book you found and end up with some different stuff that made you ask the question differently.
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Also, the journey to the shelf with the book that didn't have the answer, but was near the other book that did, took you past many other books. Opening them revealed answers to questions you hadn't considered.
This process forced you to learn in pieces: first, what were you looking for broadly, where the information was contained, then pieces as you flipped through the book looking for the right thing, and finally the information, now contextualized.
The same thing happens on line, in slightly different ways. You’ll find a Reddit forum where people are arguing about (my recent obsession) the best way to treat or not treat wood for a raised bed garden.
They will not agree! Some people will go with pressure treated wood and others will say “but that leaches off into the soil, you’re gonna eat that food!”
You’ll figure out after a while that you need to dial down to your locality, and if you really drill down, you’ll find out that there is in fact a great answer for a thing that minimally rots and also doesn’t leach into the food but it’s stupidly expensive and takes forever.
And in the meantime, you’ve learned about the properties of seven different kinds of wood, you’ve read about nineteen kinds of wood treatment, you’ve searched for follow-ups for people who did different things.
THIS. People always ask why I know so much stuff. I read a lot. I look(ed) up stuff and get/got distracted by all the tangential information. I'd look up a word in the dictionary and see all these other interesting words and next thing you know I've been "reading" the dictionary for an hour.
This is exactly why I frown upon my few work colleagues that use the Copilot LLM. Looking the problem up on a search engine (no, not the enshittified Google) is more rewarding and leads to more knowledge. Just get out of the code editor and explore. Convenience leads nowhere good.
YES. The other thing this does (if there are enough titles) is gets me a broad overview and solid starting point on a new-to-me subject by scanning (TOC, index, intro, bibliography, etc) multiple similar works. I can see what's held in common and where there's controversy or differening opinions.
One of my middle school teachers (maybe history? could have been geography) taught this as a relatively quick way to establish what you do and don't know about a subject and to clarify what you're actually looking for.
Great thread! It reminds me of Bates’ berrypicking model from 1989, which I learned at uni and never forgot. It describes how people refine their information searches and adapt it based on the results they get, even changing their retrieval strategies as they go. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/berrypicking.html
This is why I have a library at home, and why I used the London Library which has 100% open shelving. Adjacent shelves, books, chapters and paragraphs have information you need but that you weren't aware about in advance so could not ask for.
This process is what I missed terribly in law once Westlaw, etc. became everyday tools. I used to come up with some of my most creative arguments by “wandering” the digests.
Even the process of looking up a case in bound case reports, then abstract in adjoining case drags you in…
Or even just reading the dissenting judgment…
One of my favorite parts of doing research papers in college was exactly this. I loved finding books I hadn’t even known existed, and had such great information. And the libraries at UIUC were amazing. I still do this when I’m in the nonfiction section of my local library-see what else is nearby.
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Also, the journey to the shelf with the book that didn't have the answer, but was near the other book that did, took you past many other books. Opening them revealed answers to questions you hadn't considered.
Cedar? Redwood? (I know, look it up myself 😀)
Or even just reading the dissenting judgment…