8 ms·

This resembles how I feel about digital reference vs. hardcopy - the serendipitous accumulation of knowledge that comes from having proximity to the information

This resembles how I feel about digital reference vs. hardcopy - the serendipitous accumulation of knowledge that comes from having proximity to the information you're looking for... For me, it lends to an understanding of "why" rather than "how". I might forget some bit of esoteric syntax and I can look it up and move on with my life, but if I'm flipping through a book (or books) to find the information, I might better understand why that syntax came about. (I'm struggling with a particular instance of this which is why it comes to mind right now.) Accepting answers instead of discovering them... maybe it doesn't scale anymore. (Insert get off lawn joke as necessary.)

eadmund 9y ago
> the serendipitous accumulation of knowledge that comes from having proximity to the information you're looking for Back in college I used to use the card catalogue (or the computer, if I had to — but the card catalogue was better for serendipity!) to look up a few books on my topic, then I'd walk to the shelves and thumb through every book on the shelf above and below the book I'd found. I'd then check out every book I thought would be relevant to my work. It turned out that this was an excellent way to research topics. Rather than assume I alone knew the words and concepts to search for, I put myself in the hands of those who had classified a bunch of books similarly — and magic happened.
- pjscott 9y ago
  I tried this a few times in the CS sections of a university library, and it was shocking just how ephemeral most of the topics were. There were books that got VERY EXCITED about systolic arrays. There was a small but persistent geologic stratum of books from the 1990s which all had to involve XML, Xpath, XSLT, Xforms, or some other revolutionary new technology beginning with the letter X. There were books with names like "Proceedings of the 89th conference in high-performance algorithms" which would have article after article talking about yet another kind of n-ary tree that performs ever-so-slightly better than another kind on a hypothetical computer without a cache. For some bizarre reason there were some of those "learn how to click the buttons correctly in MS Access 97 in only twenty days!!" books that had been mistakenly shelved in the CS section instead of the dumpster, and had never been checked out since. And very occasionally, once in a long while, there was something that would actually continue being relevant for multiple years after its publication.
GFischer 9y ago
You do get quite a bit of serendipity through following hyperlinks though :) .
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  Wikipedia does have that (pleasant) effect sometimes. I can't say I see it much elsewhere though. On HN for example, sometimes a linked article contains links to other, sometimes unrelated, articles that attract my attention, but I rarely wander off along a chain of distinct sites.
- ranit 9y ago
  Relevant https://xkcd.com/214/ https://xkcd.com/214/

eadmund 9y ago

> the serendipitous accumulation of knowledge that comes from having proximity to the information you're looking for Back in college I used to use the card catalogue (or the computer, if I had to — but the card catalogue was better for serendipity!) to look up a few books on my topic, then I'd walk to the shelves and thumb through every book on the shelf above and below the book I'd found. I'd then check out every book I thought would be relevant to my work. It turned out that this was an excellent way to research topics. Rather than assume I alone knew the words and concepts to search for, I put myself in the hands of those who had classified a bunch of books similarly — and magic happened.

pjscott 9y ago
I tried this a few times in the CS sections of a university library, and it was shocking just how ephemeral most of the topics were. There were books that got VERY EXCITED about systolic arrays. There was a small but persistent geologic stratum of books from the 1990s which all had to involve XML, Xpath, XSLT, Xforms, or some other revolutionary new technology beginning with the letter X. There were books with names like "Proceedings of the 89th conference in high-performance algorithms" which would have article after article talking about yet another kind of n-ary tree that performs ever-so-slightly better than another kind on a hypothetical computer without a cache. For some bizarre reason there were some of those "learn how to click the buttons correctly in MS Access 97 in only twenty days!!" books that had been mistakenly shelved in the CS section instead of the dumpster, and had never been checked out since. And very occasionally, once in a long while, there was something that would actually continue being relevant for multiple years after its publication.

GFischer 9y ago

You do get quite a bit of serendipity through following hyperlinks though :) .

Freak_NL 9y ago
Wikipedia does have that (pleasant) effect sometimes. I can't say I see it much elsewhere though. On HN for example, sometimes a linked article contains links to other, sometimes unrelated, articles that attract my attention, but I rarely wander off along a chain of distinct sites.
ranit 9y ago
Relevant https://xkcd.com/214/ https://xkcd.com/214/