Steven Den Beste: “We engineers have a saying: A man whose only tool is a hammer sees the entire world as nails needing to be pounded. I can't say that I'm surprised to see a professor of Political Science making the claim that the decisions of political leaders are exclusively responsible for establishing the course of history, and that nothing else mattered. ¶ I'm deeply bothered by such a claim from a professor of Political Science, but I can't say I'm surprised. After all, the evidence contradicting that claim could only come from a study of History, and History is a different department.”
Yesterday I was reading an article in a magazine about John Kerry and his "surprise" candidacy (a surprise especially to those who read and write weblogs for a living), and had to stop mid-way because it occured to me that I wasn't learning anything. That's not to say there wasn't anything new to learn in the article, but the subject matter, on the more general level—i.e. politics—was something I've been not only reading about for years, but studied as my major in college. It was a subject that I naturally, when reading tables of contents of magazines, look for. This is a problem.
There weren't any magazines on the rack that had a subject matter of anything new to me, except for the fishing magazine. I have no interest in fishing, which is really too bad, because there are many, many people who do it not to catch fish but for the serenity of the outdoors as well as to just pass the time. There are other things that are more important that, while I have no interest in, are things that will probably come in handy somewhere down the line. Like how to fix a flat tire. It's a little funny that I'm learning a lot from weblogs on subjects I know relatively little about (like ancient history and regular expressions), so it's probably time to learn something about something I know nothing about, like car repair or girls. There are enough weblogs about the latter, but that seems to be knowledge where either you got it or you ain't. I've done fairly well for myself in things where I no formal training (e.g. computers), but yeah, that's as if knowlege about computers were marketable these days. The point is that, to strain the analogy, sometimes we need to study in a totally different department from the one we're used to in order to stretch our minds.
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