TITLE: The Joy of Scholarship
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 23, 2018 10:45 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 This morning I read Tyler Cowen's
<A HREF="https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/paul-romer-tyler-cowen-economics-education-growth-979315047773">
   conversation with Paul Romer</A>.
 At one point, Romer talks about being introduced to C.S.
 Peirce, who had deep insights into "abstraction and how we
 use abstraction to communicate" (a topic Romer and Cowen
 discuss earlier in the interview).  Romer is clearly
 enamored with Peirce's work, but he's also fascinated by
 the fact that, after a long career thinking about a set of
 topics, he could stumble upon a trove of ideas that he
 didn't even know existed:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 ... one of the joys of reading -- that's not a novel -- but
 one of the joys of reading, and to me slightly frightening
 thing, is that there's so much out there, and that a hundred
 years later, you can discover somebody who has so many things
 to say that can be helpful for somebody like me trying to
 understand, how do we use abstraction?  How do we communicate
 clearly?
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 But the joy of scholarship -- I think it's a joy of maybe
 any life in the modern world -- that through reading, we can
 get access to the thoughts of another person, and then you
 can sample from the thoughts that are most relevant to you
 or that are the most powerful in some sense.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 This process, he says, is the foundation for how we transmit
 knowledge within a culture and across time.  It's how we grow
 and share our understanding of the world.  This is a source
 of great joy for scholars and, really, for anyone who can
 read.  It's why so many people love books.

 Romer's interest in Peirce calls to mind my own fascination
 with his work.  As Romer notes, Peirce had a "much more
 sophisticated sense about how science proceeds than the
 positivist sort of machine that people describe".  I
 discovered Peirce through
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018-03.html#e2018-03-06T16_11_48.htm">
   an epistemology course</A>
 in graduate school.  His pragmatic view of knowledge, along
 with William James's views, greatly influenced how I thought
 about knowledge.  That, in turn, redefined the trajectory by
 which I approached my research in knowledge-based systems
 and AI.  Peirce and James helped me make sense of how people
 use knowledge, and how computer programs might.

 So I feel a great kinship with Romer in his discovery of
 Peirce, and the joy he finds in scholarship.
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