I started off researching an angle on intelligence for a blog post and ended up down the rabbit hole.

Sometimes you can’t find the line between indulging yourself and researching something. Learning things. And that’s oddly very important. Sure, you may be exceeding the limits of what you have to do, but you stand a better chance of doing whatever it is better because of it.

You find new tools along the way, part of that lost art of browsing. Indulging my innate curiosity is a lot like how I browse. “Oh, what’s that for?” “Oh, that could be useful, let me make a note of that!”

You also get the, “that’s a terrible idea!”s and “I think they’re smoking crack laced with LSD again”.

So you dig deeper. If I agree or disagree something too much and can’t explain why, I’m just not done with it, I haven’t learned enough to consider anything I write to be good enough. As a layperson, you can get away with a lot, but you shouldn’t. As someone who likes finding the truth rather than spamming out posts, it’s an exhausting conflict at times.

Indulging that curiosity means I miss internal deadlines, then I feel bad about it because I had this plan that had to change with all the new knowledge. It took away from my main writing project too.

But… I think it will actually make that project better too. I feel it. See, that’s the trick for me, even if it’s a technical topic with references and links with footnotes and diagrams. I have to feel it, and while AI is supposed to be making it easier, I find dodging all the AI generated articles with no references to be increasingly tiresome.

This is why we’re supposed to use that grey matter encased in that imperfect helmet atop our necks. To experience other ideas, perspectives, and whatever else – so that we can improve our knowledge of a topic rather than being shoveled it like coal into a steam engine – as the media tries to do, as AI has done to it.

It’s good to get lost now and then. It means you’re seeing a new part of a map, or an old part of a map in a new way.