Lately, I’ve come to realise that there are not that many good sources of information on internet unless you’re willing to go through the motions of distinguishing what’s good and what’s not.
This is a generalisation, and with all generalisations there exist exceptions. The exceptions to the rule are the uncommon gems of information we all covet and treasure. I’m sure you, as I, have come on embarked into the crusade to find some information and once in a while have came across a blog, page, article, share or whatever thing is that accumulates information - and the quality was so high you were blown away.
The reason of why that happens is fairly obvious and it has to do with rankings and the business of search. But in of brevity and a biased view on the state of finding information is…
…there is too much noise out there for every signal.
This is especially true for general interest concepts, curious facts and the like. This has also permeated the scientific and technical community in many ways. When you give freedom to produce and publish to people you get a normal distribution of quality of information produced - with the bulk being average.
Today the average is below the threshold of what’s good - or at least it seems to me. And every time I set myself onto learn something I find more and more noise, even on scientific papers, than good stuff.
If we reason though, there are a few well-known papers (usually) within each field. These papers are all signal and if you follow on from these you’re much more likely to get to know all that you want and get to find the edges of knowledge for a given field. As well as the frontiers and goals, since this papers usually include what else they would like to do or what’s the bigger picture they are trying to prove.
To do any sort of relevant work in an inventing field (even on technical building) the time to signal - or time to paper being the time it takes you to get to these and the steps is what determines the time you can allocate to the outcome.
…And we are all short on time…
So, for my own benefit!, I have launched ntsratio.com where I’m adding all signal papers for all the fields I get my hands on. Some of which are highly specific.
The important bit is I will also be adding there notes on the papers and highlights. I want to take submissions from people (and especially researchers!) for new papers to add. The unique rule for a paper to be published is that it needs to be all signal and no noise.
Current innovation, in the sense of continuous improvement, and study and proving of small bits will not cut through this requirement.
So - send across anything that’s good (it can have your notes in it!) - and put together a place for everyone to find all the signal they need when doing meaningful work.