A story about reaching peak research.
Research equilibrium
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You reach domain saturation when you keep bumping into things you already know.
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Link dive endlessly until you start reading the same thing over and over again
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Write down the obscure connections. Research these last. after you have reached domain saturation.
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Write down original connections between sub-domains. these can be vital in discovery of un-discovered ideas.
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Write down the most important sub-domains of the domain your trying to research. Group these as best you can. to easily access them after sometime where your knowledge is not fresh.
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I believe reaching domain saturation is a more useful utility than mind-maps. it’s better at deriving interesting connections and analysis. forging real connections in your brain. Mindmaps are more shallow and does not forge deep connections in your brain. You can chase rabbits down rabbit holes when you do domain “saturation oriented research” if you do that with mind-maps it just gets to unwieldily too broad. You can always create another subfolder in your tree list with out obfuscating the important sub domains.
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Doing your own research is also important because you more easily forge the brain connections need to analyse further. as oppose to reading someone elses compendium.
You are biased
The major reason that people do not become aware of black swans is because people more often than not wish to confrm what they already believe, instead of what the truth actually is. If you look hard enough, it is easy to find sources that confirm what you believe to be true. Unfortunately, this is the wrong way to view things. You should look at the evidence and then reach a hypothesis, instead of the other way around. As soon as you formulate a hypothesis, you should immediately try to find evidence to the contrary of your hypothesis to test it. Ask yourself, “what evidence would prove me wrong?
and here lay the important key, finding black swans are costly. They don’t appear on mindmaps, they appear in deeply nested subfolders of domain research. And the only way to find them is to complete saturate your domain. only after will you be able to find anything that is related to blackswan events. Schools are contrary to this, they want you to remain on the surface, to have broad strokes, but never deep knowledge.
Random vs chaotic
lottery numbers are random. price of future stockmarkets are chaotic. Chaotic systems has predictable properties telling the difference is key.
Positive black swans:
it is recommended that you instead spend your time looking for areas where there is a strong possibility a positive black swan could exist, even if you don’t know exactly what it is yet. Seize anything that looks like an opportunity, because they are much, much rarer than you think. Remember that to feel the effects of positive black swans, you must be exposed to them first.
Multiple black swans:
Remember that usually there will be periods of calm and stability punctuated with massive change (for better or for worse) concentrated from a small number of black swans. Those black swans are the ones to look out for, and the ones you least expect.
Benefit of having an empty mind
with mindmap’s you have to mentally soak up everything at once, leaving less bandwidth for analysis. with structured based research you can dive into singular snapshot and ignore the rest. Or jump back up a few levels to derive context.
Black Swan
– An extremely rare and unpredictable event which offers great opportunities to those few who spot it and who take a small, calculated gamble.
Final note
When you reach “research saturation”. You are often left with a feeling that something is missing. Something sticks out more than other subjects. Try to investigate this subject more. It may be nothing. But ignoring it could be a mistake. How much would it really take to research that particular subject. Probably way less than the domain research you just conducted. Most people leave this part out, feeling content. Thats the angle. Thats where you can find information of great worth.