About mixing the information from the viewpoint of others and plowing again, you may think that mixing the information from books is equivalent. However, as a real feeling of me, it is quite difficult.
There are three elements to that difficulty.
First, we can’t teach something to books. Therefore, we are in a position to receive one-way information from books.
Next, we can’t ask questions to books. We can not ask the meaning of words, such as “What kind of time machine is the time machine?” We try to understand what the author has written, but it is difficult to verify that our understanding is correct.
Finally, books do not actively speak. It is not possible to focus on a part of the book’s content to elicit more detailed information. When the person listening to the lecture asks a question, he or she focuses on the part of the lecture that is important from his or her point of view. When answering this question, information from two perspectives is naturally used: yours and the questioner’s. When you pull information out of a book, you pull out what you think is important from your perspective. This is just an observation from one perspective.
Putting all three together, in other words, there is a problem that we can not do two-way communication to books.
I think it would be beneficial to explain the process I’ve been using KJ method for.
First of all, I read Jiro Kawakita’s book and felt KJ method is a useful method.
Next, I used KJ method for undestanding the structure of various books, the feeling of being useful approached convince. I felt that I want to tell other people this useful method. Therefore, I did the KJ method for the other books by Jiro Kawakita. By breaking down the content of the books once and then rebuilding it by myself, I developed a model of Jiro Kawada’s thinking process. I called this process “To make emulator of Kawakita Jiro inside of me”. At this stage, information from Jiro Kawakita was more than information from myself. *1
Whether I can answer other people’s question depends on whether I have the emulator. With knowledge just copied from books, I can not answer questions that are not written in books. If I have an emulator, I can answer questions that are not written in the book by letting the emulator think instead of myself.
While using the emulator, I lectured to observe the reactions of others, and improved lecture materials. Then, in the expression of the original book it is found a place that is hard to make undestand. Expression such as “bottom up rather than top down” or “putting things that seem to be related near” was difficult to undestand. I start thinking about how to describe them better, and the emulator start making new descriptions based on my experience. For example, I added a lot of commentary in (5.2.3) Make related things close for the words “putting things that seem to be related close by”.
So what does that mean? When I read those books, I didn’t mix the author’s thought with my own thoughts. I first plowed information from the author alone. Because I can’t ask the author questions. I may not know the meaning of the words, or I may interpret them incorrectly. So I tried to extract information as little as distorted. The advantage of not interpreting things on your own is written in (6.3.5) A customer want a time machine.
And then I tried to teach the author’s thought to others. It was a verification of understanding based on whether or not I can give a consistent explanation. If I don’t understand, my lecture material will be nothing but a collection of fragmented quotations, and I won’t be able to answer questions about things not written in the book. If I developed understanding, I will be able to give consistent answers to questions that are not written in the book. That is the emulator. With the emulator, I can mix the questions of others and my own experiences to cultivate and create new explanation.
In this way, I got the information that “this is difficult to understand” from others, mixed and plowed them, seedled, growed, and then I got a fruit in the form of a book.
I expect our learning accelate by many people read the book and tell information from their viewpoint.
*1: Imitating the behavior of one machine with another machine is called emulation, and the machine to imitate is called an emulator. For example, some game consoles offer a feature that allows you to play games from older consoles. This is possible because there is an emulator of the old console inside the new console. Similarly, an emulator of an old person in a new person enables the execution of the old person’s thoughts.
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