Comments on Enhanced Critical Curation

Today’s short reading talks about the changing value of knowledge aggregation over the timeline of human history. For example, in the era of the ancient Greeks, accumulating and cataloging literature amounted to something more than the sum of its parts (not just a simple laundry list of book titles and essays).

Reading the chapter I had two primary thoughts.

First, in the modern day we are forced to become curators of our own knowledge collection. The internet has put dozens of human lifetime’s worth of random information in front of us and we slowly learn to parse our way through it.

Secondly, we really need to start asking what knowledge is worth keeping, duplicating, and presenting and what can simply be left as is. There’s just so much knowledge out there that we can no longer act as aggregators - one of my math professors once said that [in his opinion] the most valuable scientific results are not necessarily completely novel ones, but rather the ones that condense valuable information and ideas and help connect the body of human [mathematical] knowledge.