"Wikipedia’s real innovation was the idea of radical collaboration. Instead of having a small group of people work together, it invited the entire world to take part. Software has been written by communities, but typically someone is in charge."Aaron Swartz
"Conversation is the only tool for collaborating in a truly open-ended way."Sam Harris # 9 1:14

Professionalism

Curiosity

“Whatever the book, a reader reads.” Education of a Wandering Mind by Louis L'Amour
"Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity." Aaron Swartz on How to Get a Job Like Mine
"The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting." Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures 46 AD - 120 AD
"What I hope we appreciate more because of him, is to value diversity and individual creativity in our science base." Dr. Dawes said. "We need people who we allow to be driven by their curiosity, and we also need people who will take those basic science ideas and turn them into useful technology." Alan Turing
“Flexner and Dijkgraaf argue that basic research—driven by curiosity, freedom and imagination is a proven and essential seed for the revolutionary technologies that fuel the economy, transform society, and provide solutions for the world’s problems. A thoughtful appeal for long-term thinking in a time full of short-term distractions.” Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc. Review on The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner
"Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times." The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner p. 545

Question

"There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there are questions that make us feel stupid." Michael Stevens
“Knowing the answers will help you in school, but knowing how to question will help you in life.” Warren Berger, Educating an Original Thinker
"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates
"One thing I said he could be sure of, namely, that they had done their work without thought of use and that throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.
"Curiosity?" asked Mr. Eastman. "Yes," I replied, "curiosity, which mayor may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking.
It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon, and to Sir Isaac Newton, and it must be absolutely unhampered." The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner p. 545

Edit

"With the time people waste reading a news every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the news." Aaron Swartz
“Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and planes. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?” Education of a Wandering Mind by Louis L'Amour
"Aaron believed that you literally ought to be asking yourself all of the time: What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now? And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?" Aaron Swartz: > Internet's Own Boy

Apply

"The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level as the level we created them at."
Albert Einstein, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Volumes 1-4, p. 144, 1969

Reason

"We need an education system that cultivates the capacity to tolerate an idea that you don't like, to think about that idea, and respond to that idea.. requiring training [doesn't come naturally and when this occurs, we will > > >
realize our differences are not as large as we think they are.]" Nicholas Christakis
"The ability to construct a mental model of a house comprising of bedroomed disciplines in one's own mind that oppose and seemingly contradict one another's idiosyncratic truths and values, work around to manipulate and wrestle with the relational views of the house as a wholistic omnipresent living thing from the objective, is something we must all learn to do in our daily studies and understandings. The ability to camp and entrench ourselves in deep abstract thought in one bedroom of thought and then decamp out into another, is how we gain the intellect of reason." Sam Harris Faith in Reason #41 10:59

Invent

"The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented." Inventing the Future by Dennis Gabor

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Last updated 4 years ago