On Being Ignorant

I’ve been reflecting, in these days of relative calm, on my own ignorance. On how little, inevitably, I know, if anything at all, about an infinity of things.

Awareness of one’s own ignorance is a powerful tool, the spur that drives us to read, study and think things through, to move beyond mere rote knowledge and, passing through one ignorance after another, to push our understanding forward.

My secret dream, as a self-confessed ignorant, is in fact to devote myself almost entirely to reading, research and study for the rest of my days. But that’s another story.

One must then distinguish between the silent ignorant, who keeps quiet about what he doesn’t know, and often about what he does know too, and the chatty one, who shouts his ignorance urbi et orbi.

Silence would do us good. It is precious, and by now almost impossible to find in this world of ours, dominated by verbal incontinence and by a rampant narcissism that finds both its stimulus and its natural outlet in social digital spaces.

This, it seems to me, is what the human being of our time has become. He talks, he writes (as indeed I am doing myself), he puts himself on display because he craves an audience. He wants a following and is forever seeking approval, at all costs, even at the cost of publicly displaying, and demonstrating, his own crass ignorance.

We are ignorant. We would do well to start admitting it to ourselves.

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Essere ignoranti

Riflettevo, in questi giorni di relativa calma, sulla mia ignoranza. Su quanto, fatalmente, poco o nulla sappia su un’infinità di cose.

La consapevolezza della propria ignoranza è uno strumento potente, il pungolo che induce a leggere, studiare ed elaborare per superare il nozionismo e, attraversando ignoranze successive, spostare in avanti la nostra conoscenza.

Il mio sogno nel cassetto, da ignorante conclamato, è infatti di potermi dedicare quasi solo alla lettura, alla ricerca e allo studio per il resto dei miei giorni. Ma questo è un altro discorso.

Occorre poi distinguere tra l’ignorante silenzioso, che tace su ciò che non sa e spesso anche su ciò che sa e quello ciarliero che urla la propria ignoranza urbi et orbi.

Gioverebbe il silenzio, prezioso e ormai quasi introvabile in questo nostro mondo dominato dalla incontinenza verbale, dal narcisismo dilagante che trova stimolo e sfogo naturale negli ambienti digitali sociali.

L’essere umano dei nostri tempi mi pare sia ormai questo, parla, scrive (lo sto in effetti facendo anche io), si espone perché ambisce a un pubblico, vuole un seguito ed è in perenne ricerca di approvazione, a tutti i costi, anche a costo di mostrare e dimostrare pubblicamente la propria crassa ignoranza.

Siamo ignoranti, è bene iniziare a dirselo.

A new hope

What am I doing here?

Invecchiare

Quando diventi vecchio e gli anni cominciano a passare veloci può capitare di perdere interesse per le sorti del mondo, e questo è un bene e dovrebbe essere nell'ordine delle cose, cioè che vi sia un tempo in cui possiamo avvizzire senza che ci venga chiesto nient'altro, come le piante, un tempo in cui coltivare l'irrilevanza e l'inutilità per ritornare alle cose essenziali, per non perdere altro tempo prezioso e diventare finalmente quello che siamo.

Formamentis

Diventare inutile è una mia aspirazione. Coltivo l'illusione che divenire inutili significhi avere fatto un buon lavoro, che il (mio) mondo può andare avanti anche senza di me.

Quando lo dico ad Anna lei sorride.

Tools

Can you still function when the tool is gone? If yes, the tool serves you. If no, you serve it.

Joan Westenberg

A new hope

What am I doing here?

Features

Here MacRumors lists 12 new features of the upcoming iPhone 17.

Number 12 made me scratch my head, improved cooling. Is that really a feature?

You are the algorithm

This post from Louie Mantia resonated with me, RSS is how I mainly use the internet since years. I do have social network accounts but I’m not really a social network person, my RSS reader is my personal social network where I aggregate the things I’m interested in.

No algorithms, only my choices.

Building an RSS flow takes time and work, you need to do some research in order to find something that seems relevant for what you want to understand, and you have to read it in order to understand if it is really relevant and if the source is worth to be on your feed aggregator.

Search engines results are algorithm driven so you will not be totally algorithm immune. But doing your own research is a good starting point, you will likely find content generated by humans, you can read it and go deeper. And if there’s other linked within you can go further and read the linked content, this is how dicoverability is improved.

Quoting Mantia:

As for discoverability? Link generously. Link to people you like who say and make things you like. That’s how everyone discovers more people like that

This is how zettelkasten works, the method I use for my personal knowledge management system.

Internet is a huge opportunity, it is an almost infinite container of informations, surfing it with the RSS approach takes time, work, curation, but to me this is the only way to build your own personal knowledge using the web.

It’s the old way, blogs, original content, it is the active way not the passive offered by algorithm driven social platforms.

You are the moderator.

You are the algorithm.