High Cognitive Minds

“When starting one’s private intellectual journey the question often come up: what shall I study? Sometimes it isn’t even clear which subject area a person wants to pursue. Generalists like Your Humble Correspondent find this a persistent, nagging, and fiendishly frustrating issue.

“Add to this puzzle the otherwise sage and sound advice of P. B. Medawar who, in his wonderful little volume Advice to a Young Scientist, insists that the budding seeker of knowledge spend his or her time on problems that matter.”

This post from Cogito! considers what it means to find problems that matter. And how do we decide what matters? The question is quite different from the point of view of a scientist whose career depends on the right answers, and that of the intellectually gifted amateur who may want nothing more than to find something that matters on a personal level.

I’m not sure there is or should be a hard and fast dividing line between the two. Given the availability of modern research tools, particularly the internet, there’s no reason why a topic that’s chosen for its personal meaning can’t become an exercise in independent scholarship, with the possibility of being published.

I suspect that what holds potential scholars back is not so much the difficulty of finding a topic, but a feeling of intimidation in the face of scientists and scholars with academic credentials, membership in professional associations, and the regard of colleagues. Lacking all those qualifications, who would dare offer their amateur observations and ideas to the world?

What we need to remember is that until very recently most of the world’s great discoveries came from people who would today be considered amateurs. And academics and professionals have no exclusive lock on ideas. The world is becoming both more specialized and more complex. This means that new niches for research and innovation are constantly opening up, niches which the specialists may not even notice. There are infinite numbers of unsolved problems which don’t require a laboratory, or grant money for their pursuit. Neither do they require anyone’s permission.

The Agony of Beginnings