Think first, look up second.

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Casual research is unnecessarily looking up factoids. It’s trying to be accurate in a casual context where accuracy isn’t needed. If someone asks “I wonder what the weather in France is at the moment?”, Googling the answer kills imagination. And imagination is important.

By imagination, I don’t mean mental images. I mean all the background mental processes that lead to creativity.

When thinking about utility of background thought, I like Henri Poincaré’s essay “On Mathematical Creation”. He describes how you need rest time for ideas to form in the brain.

Casual research disrupts this rest. Looking up facts is useful when you are doing real research. When you need to be accurate because you are doing a job. Otherwise, I don’t think looking up facts is worth the disruption to the thought process.

What about being original?

Off-the-cuff thoughts without research are often generic. Most ideas are plebeian. But trying to be sophisticated by doing a lot of research does not necessarily lead to originality. If you don’t spend the time thinking for yourself, mutating your ideas in silence, your ideas can only be derivatives of others. They will not be yours until you devote time to yourself.

A quantum analogy

Coherent thought requires isolation

An imperfect analogy is to quantum mechanics. Exposure to an external environment can broaden the scope of internal (in our case, mental) dynamics, which is why it is useful. But repeated exposure can kill the internal coherence of your ideas. When you measure your ideas against an external standard at every single moment, you also freeze the evolution of your ideas (like in the quantum Zeno effect).

Isolation enables a different sort of evolution, one that is valuable. That coherent evolution, punctuated by only occasional injections of outside ideas, is what leads to original thought.

On free recall

I started thinking about casual research while re-reading my last entry, which contained a section on practicing the free recall of information. It feels like allowing casual research damages the free writing process. But can I justify that notion without casually researching how free recall works?

I’m not sure I can. But I can try to recall what I do know and work out a story in my mind. The ability to work out stories based on existing knowledge is a skill that has to be practiced. Knowing facts does not imply the ability to wield them.11See for example, the character of Brooks in The Paper Chase.

There are some scattered facts and names I can recall:

• spaced repetition
• Ebbinghaus
• forgetting curve
• mastery learning
  • Bloom
  • graph of dependencies of prerequisites

But on the whole I think if I tried to write a full attempt it would just be bullshit, in the specific sense of Harry Frankfurt. If I recall, his definition is that bullshit is communication done without regard for its veracity.

A little bullshit is okay

I guess my conclusion from my failed exercise above is that if we are going to avoid casual research, we must accept a degree of bullshit in our communication. We must accept that we aren’t going to get it perfect.

The important thing is that even with casual research, you still don’t get it perfect. You still speak with a degree of bullshit. It is thus a matter of careful choice how much you are willing to diverge from “truth”22“What is truth?” Pilate retorted. in order to achieve the ends of better thinking.

Real research comes after thinking

I don’t think you can do real research unless you have first searched your mind. Free recall and other idle thinking, Poincaré-style, lets you do that. Casual search—let’s not call it research anymore—stops you from searching your mind, and therefore stops you from deep, serious research.

Casual search is the good that distracts from great.