You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think-and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it. But I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart. And that there’s stuff that TV and movies- although they’re great at certain things- cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, you know, to get these other kinds of art.
DFW in ”Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”.
I think services like Quora and Tumblr are teaching us that people fundamentally want to share their knowledge and creativity with the world (instead of just passively consuming)— the challenge is to enable them to do so as easily as possible. I’m trying to keep this in mind when building Polymath.
