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1-Thread on information & digital networks & personal/intellectual growth. I& #39;ll get around to it but this is mostly about how I& #39;ve used platforms like @MargRev to leapfrog knowledge & am starting to use ones like @interintellect_ to expand sources for info I& #39;d not otherwise find
2-Quick backgrnd: I spent my 20& #39;s & early 30& #39;s as a Naval Officer as a part of the Naval Special Warfare community. I was a founding member of the groups that expanded the capability of SEAL teams from purely kinetic operations to a fusion of kinetic and intel ops during OIF/OEF
3-It was loads of technology and data as well as kinetic operations & if you worked in that domain when I did you knew me and what I did. Usually ppl like me continue on in that life somewhere in the industrial military complex. My son got sick though so I had to quit cold turkey
4-After i left that world, my head was mostly filled with things that made me interesting in the domain of counter insurgency in one of two countries that were all classified. I wasn& #39;t permitted, by law, to express a political opinion publicly. I was a wiped hard drive circa 2015
5-Over the last five years I& #39;ve created a blog that& #39;s attracted a few million readers, written a book and been published in a bunch of major pubs. And I have to confess, I at first i mostly was scraping @margrev for terms I didn& #39;t understand, topics I had no experience w and....
6-..authors that had written new books on things I didn& #39;t know about. And then I wrote things about them. And something funny happened. When you write a book review or an essay on something you& #39;ve read, and you reach out to the author to ask a question something funny happens.
7-They respond. If you put together a thread and @ them, sometimes they RT and respond. And before you know it, you& #39;re talking to first person authorities on topics and trading knowledge. I can& #39;t tell you how consistent this is. If you put the time into reading...
8-...the work people put out, and engage them on it intelligently, they engage back. And u learn things from people that other people pay tens of thousands of dollars for a degree to say they understand them officially...
9-And so now, I& #39;ve been around a bit and have enough things written that it& #39;s a little easier. And now @TheAnnaGat has founded something like the @interintellect_ where there& #39;s now a
10-...infrastructure around connecting global intellectuals to create hosted online salons. And it& #39;s mostly scaling the bootstrapping knowledge I did over the last 5 years. And it& #39;s fantastic. At the moment in a salon zoom call hosted by @balajis, whose work I& #39;ve followed for yrs
11-...with a dozen other people I& #39;ve followed for years watching knowledge exchange and growth real time. And the acceleration of ideas is tremendous...and finally happening outside the world of academia or book tours....
12-In many/most domains I& #39;m still parroting. But in others, where I have firmer grounding like technology and politics, I& #39;m generative. And the knowledge acceleration continues. I& #39;m not @tylercowen yet...but I& #39;m gaining. & I can& #39;t help think how much better a place the world....
13...would be if more people with the energy and desire to do this...did it. So check out @MargRev ...and @interintellect_ ...listen to @cowenconvos and spend some time on the smarter parts of @twitter and fall in some rabbit holes... It& #39;s an amazing time to be alive........
