- Sep 2021
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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Geniuses are not so much people with extraordinary brains as people who have found particularly good ways to work within their limitations and to extend their brain beyond itself.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that most "famous" scientists, writers, etc. all kept some sort of significant notebook, commonplace book, zettelkasten, other.
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- Apr 2021
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, educators train medical students in slow looking to hone their observational skills, but as West notes, it’s not just about noticing small physical details that might inform a diagnosis.
I'm reminded of the research implied by Arthur Conan Doyle's writing about Sherlock Holmes. We hear about the time and effort spent studying the smallest things, but we don't see it, instead we see the mythical application of it at the "right" times to solve cases in spectacular fashion.
No one focuses on the time spent studying and learning and instead we mythologize the effects at the other end.
Another example of this is the fêting of Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem, while simultaneously ignoring the decades of work he poured into studying and solving it not to mention the work of thousands before him to help give him a platform on which to see things differently.
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