Knowing where to look

"The world is full of revelations."

(Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World)

Here's Jorge Hillebrand regarding his encyclopedic Star Trek knowledge in Proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe, an interview by David Friedman on his blog Ironic Sans:

I think I know a lot about the visual aspects of Star Trek, but I also know where to look for additional information, so I haven’t memorized that all!

Knowing where to look (and how to look) is more important than just knowing things. Unless you're a Jeopardy contestant.

Put another way: You don't always have to know everything if you know where to look for the things you don't know.

Part of knowing where to look is knowing what you're looking for, sometimes long before you can name it. Here's Paul Graham in How to Do Great Work:

Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry around with you. But the more you're carrying, the greater the chance of noticing a solution — or perhaps even more excitingly, noticing that two unanswered questions are the same. Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before — in your childhood, even — and couldn't stop thinking about.

and

Tiago Forte in Progressive Summarization:

what you read is good and useful and very important, you’re just reading it at the wrong time. ... The challenge is knowing which knowledge is worth acquiring. And then building a system to forward bits of it through time, to the future situation or problem or challenge where it is most applicable, and most needed.

That's a lot of what this garden is for me: a place to keep the questions I'm carrying and the things I read at the wrong time, so I know where to look when a new line suddenly connects to an old one.

Science fiction keeps coming back to this too. Here's Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee:

"Rees, the secret of a Scientist is not what he knows. It’s what he asks."

and

Isaac Asimov in Foundation's Edge:

What counts is that I have discovered the question to ask and a good question is, of course, the key by which infinite answers can be educed.

but

Lastly a word of warning by way of Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness:

“Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.” “But you’re the Answerers!” “You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?” “No—” “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”

Asking beats knowing, but only if it's the right question. A perfect answer to the wrong one just sends you looking in the wrong place.

Paths from here

• On Writing to Understand: knowledge, ability and understanding
• Dive Deeper: what you find when you keep going