Knowledge Acquisition
Knowledge Acquisition
Knowledge acquisition should come in 2 forms - deliberate and free-flowing.
Deliberate knowledge acquisition in 3 fields
- Personal: Observe our patterns of behavior, and understand whether or not it aligns with goals one has set for himself. Observing oneself also inevitably brings to light one’s strengths and weaknesses, and allows the opportunity to experiment with them.
- Professional: In real life, one must earn a living. Whether you view your profession in materialistic terms or philosophical terms, It behooves us to do it better. Find your Circle of competence and expand it.
- Spiritual/Philosophical: Everybody should deal with questions like what is my purpose, what is my life philosophy, and a tangential set of why’s. It is not necessary to find answers to these questions. However, completely avoiding tussles with them might lead to finding ourselves having mislived. See Living in bad faith
What separates knowledge acquisition different from deliberate knowledge acquisition is the portion of time dedicated to Metalearning. In addition to acquiring knowledge, one should also evaluate the methods, reasons, and progress of knowledge acquisition ideally at fixed intervals.
Free-flowing knowledge acquisition is important because we do not know what we do not know. For a single human, it is impossible to master every nuanced perspective and knowledge generated by humankind. However, this impossibility should excite us rather than discourage us. It means we will never run out of things to explore. (See a parallel view regarding purpose of life in Existentialism). See Infinite buffet approach