Serendipity and Research: judsongreene.micro.blog
@JudsonGreene I stumbled on (what I still think was) the most interesting idea in my dissertation because I took a wrong turn in a library and was not sufficiently focused on my task not to pull a few books off the shelf. So, yes. But of course there are many time-honored ways of closing off serendipity that don’t require high-tech help. It’s a question of, as you didn’t quite say elsewhere, whether you want to be a scholar or a producer of papers.
@dwalbert That’s great.
And cutting off serendipity can happen without tech, it’s just one seems much more likely to find what you weren’t looking for over coffee hour, in the library, looking at archives/manuscripts, etc. (in the world of atoms space and live humans) than using technologies that are designed to give you what you are looking for. During Covid lockdown, my bro-in-law noticed that he missed spontaneous interactions that he would have never scheduled time for but were valuable parts of life.