I think you owe it to yourself to find out. I took a similar approach to you for quite some time, spending lots of time at the library researching subjects ins

I think you owe it to yourself to find out. I took a similar approach to you for quite some time, spending lots of time at the library researching subjects instead (if you are looking for high quality sources, a good library is worth it's weight in gold.) When I became the sysadmin for a next-gen genetics company though, I found myself daily reading journal articles, at first for learning the subject matter I was dealing with, and later I found it useful even for normal sysadmin work. For example, I recently was debating a private MPLS network vs flat internet using IPSec for interoffice communication. Searching google for MPLS vs IPSec brought up a handful of opinion pieces that were light on data and facts. After a few searches in one of the scholarly databases though, I found a paper with actual testing and benchmarks, which helped me make my decision. (MPLS won, if you are curious) I find that if you are looking for an erudite and lucid thinker, you need to find the right book. If you are looking for data and statistics and scientific method, papers can't be beat. Be wary though, I feel as if the scrutiny process has gone downhill, and a lot of questionable science makes it though, so be skeptical. I also find the history of scientific papers very interesting, particularly The Royal Society and how, originally, it was purposefully used to control the flow of information to the proletariat. I think this pattern has never fully been broken, and it is why we are seeing/will see an increasingly overt attempt to balkanize and paywall the internet. It must be brought under "control", because it's anarchistic freedom of thought model is a threat to TPTB. This was also a passion of A Swartz.