Taking the Time
This essay, by Jillian Hess, delving into research habits of the “Greatest Biographer,” made me want to do the same thing. (Also to read his book.) But what struck me most was the time Robert Caro invested in learning about his subject—each book took nigh on to a decade.
That time was spent going deeply into the life of the person he was researching, and all the lives they touched. (It made me wonder how he managed to support himself while writing these huge books—or at least, the first book.)
There’s an anecdotal story, made popular by Malcolm Gladwell, about needing 10,000 hours to be an expert in something. Although there has been some pushback on the exact number, the point is similar to this essay—it takes time, and lots of it, to become an expert on anything.
One of the problems in our microwave society is that we our seldom willing to take the time to get to know a subject better. If fear one of the big temptations of AI right now is to make this worse. We can ask an AI for knowledgeable essay on a subject, and it will spit out something that looks knowledgeable, but might have some problems—and if we aren’t knowledgeable, how will we know?
I have been experimenting with ChatGPT. One of my approaches has been to try to ask it questions to break a particular topic into categories that I can further investigate through other sources. Another approach is to ask it for a summary of a topic, then copy-paste that into another ChatGPT window and ask it to evaluate the summary, looking for biases and errors.
Regardless of those experiments, I have become somewhat leery of something that seems to cut short the time it takes to gain knowledge. I did a series of deep dives into certain regions a few years back, and one of the things I found: it took a dozen interviews before I started “hearing the same things over again.” You need to talk to several different people, and read several different books, to fully consider all the angles.
This means that deciding what you will spend the time on, becomes even more important.
Roundup
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