I find this a rather fascinating thing to think about, but take a gander at these two quotes belonging to two of the greatest minds of the 20th century:
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who read too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
~Albert Einstein
“Do not read so much, look about you and think of what you see there.”
~Richard Feynman
...I've had interesting discussions with people before about two major forms of learning that seems to exist today: learning on your feet, through experience and doing, or learning passively, through study and intense reading. This has particular interest to me as a software developer because in the world of computing knowledge changes so fast, that one of the main ways you actually get to keep up with it all is to read, read, read; that is, subscribe to blogs, subscribe to RSS feeds, and read other people's comments on doing things and so forth, and then to reimplement them (thoughtlessly). Interestingly enough, I believe one of the things this has created is the copy-and-paste methodology of coding (which we all know leads to ugly, unmaintainable, often times buggy-as-hell code). People no longer present the energy needed to faithfully understand the technologies at their fingertips on their own first because, quite honestly, if they were to fully understand them they would lose out on 98% of the other knowledge that is out there. So, as a result, it becomes a never-ending, self-perpetuating fight against the inevitable.
What is the solution? The problem is how they're learning, I believe: watching too much and thinking too little about what they see in front of their eyes, and instead trying to figure something out from the "if it breaks, then I thinks" mentality (yes, I made that up, if you use it, please quote me!). You see, this type of activity takes longer in the end run and requires one to end up reading a hell of a lot more as he/she frantically hops from one newsgroup thread to another, or one poorly written article to another, trying to find an answer to the immediate problem (and when one finds it, they often just patch the problem with something that "just worked" for someone else). Lazy makes Crazy! The thought occured to me today as I started playing around with some of the provider models in ASP.Net and went about learning how they worked. I had two options - just throw controls onto the page and expect it to work, or take a few moments and think about how they all tied together, understand the provider model behind them, and create some portable knowledge. I bet you can figure out which path I took. How many articles have I read on the topic: 1. How many could I write?
