Today Rob brings part 2 of The Quest Revisited, exploring how we engage with knowledge and inviting us to become "curiouser and curiouser"!
Rob recaps his most recent talk at Q which you can watch again here: The Quest Revisited: New Ways of Believing and begins our exploration into sources of knowledge.
As this clip from Blackadder demonstrates, it's easy to talk about things that we have no actual experience of.
As we continue our quest for curiosity, Rob summarises 4 principles that can help us have critical curiosity:
1 - Engage with the primary source.
2 - Remember that sources of knowledge are not neutral.
3 - Seek out diverse sources of knowledge.
4 - Engage with sources of knowledge together.
How can we broaden our horizons and expand our world view? Karl Pilkington becomes a hilarious guinea pig for this question in the show: An Idiot Abroad.
Rob explores how we can engage with diverse sources of knowledge without getting entrenched in dogma and refers to the philosophies of rationalism and empiricism, the descent of science to scientism and how the examples of Polymaths might inspire us to become Poly-dabblers!
In this clip from The Love Bug, we see Herbie and friends taking shortcuts.
When there are so many different sources of knowledge and such diverse perspectives, how do we cope? Rob explains some simplifying strategies that have been used as shortcuts to reduce this complexity and what the trade-offs of these might be.
We finished with a song that reminds us of the power of first-hand experiences.
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