Why should presented concepts be of your concern?
We’re all influenced by a force of gravity in a physical realm and unusually intuitively handling consequences. Similarly, concepts selected here have their pull in an intellectual field. There’s a difference between being impacted by them unconsciously and being aware. Awareness allows for prediction, and prediction opens possibilities for us to choose. It’s, therefore, more about understanding* than it is about knowledge.
What is Coreconce.pt for?
Coreconce.pt is an experiment in learning. Learning of important, immobilizing concepts before their primetime requires a different from a traditional approach as the objective of learning is not yet defined. There cannot be a sequence to make us aware of something if the very thing we’re learning is fluid and flexible.
Hitting a moving target is challenging. To expand understanding about concepts that morph, evolve, and change with shifts in underlying technology a different approach is needed.
Toward conscious knowingAn accurate analysis of how influential forces that shape our lives requires thinkers to be at best consciously competent. Concepts that do influence us gradually build up in significance only to be realized when they are powerful enough to be made sense of by a mass media for a common observer. Coreconce.pt attempts to highlight selected ideas at their infancy, providing clues on how to expand one’s knowledge by following gathered sources and materials.
Multiple entry pointsThe fabric of our experience emerges from the interaction and integration of different means of perceiving. Learning about the novel, large, immobilizing ideas requires stitching together the dissimilar, drawing connections without a single objective view.
Enlightening concepts surface in books, articles, and podcasts. Core Concept accumulates multiple entry points to experiment how the discovery of essential ideas can be improved if those are handled to the curious one without a single narrative.
Adding fidelity with interestWell designed infographics designed by experts can provide high-level clarity on a subject for a common viewer. It’s an example of a top-down approach: an expert making sense of phenomena by laying out well-categorized knowledge in an accessible form. Evolving, novel concepts pose a different challenge as there might be no expert, to begin with. Therefore a crowd-sourced sense-making is needed, that would allow for categorizing and recategorizing when growth in knowledge occurs. To make that possible high-level understanding needs to be provided for new participants and the ability to add fidelity following their interest.
Simultaneous instead of sequentialDocuments are ready sequentially in a chain-like structure, linearly proceeding from point to point. Stories, books, and movies follow the same principle. Yet their form constrains freedom of exploration. A good occasion to meet and match different perspectives is with novel concepts where gaps in existing understanding don’t allow to complete a full picture or a coherent storyline. Simultaneous access traverses the gaps between fragments to make it possible for participants to arrive at a meaningful whole.
Juxtaposing graphical and textualA limit of the form of expression was from the dawn of time imposed on thinkers. A text and limited graphical elements carried by a medium of paper currently morph into a more capable digital form. The digital stills remain in its infancy when compared to a thousand years of writing and pictorial symbols evolution, however beings to be mature enough for experiments. What would happen if an unlimited sheet of ‘digital paper’ were accessible for learners providing that their interest to expand knowledge on novel concepts is genuine?
*To have an understanding of a domain, you need to have a significant body of beliefs about that domain, which fits together coherently, including assumptions about help to explain and predict future occurrences in that domain. Having such a body of beliefs is called ‘a subjective understanding of the field’. When beliefs about the domain are also mostly correct, we can say that an objective understanding of the area is achieved.
Understanding is distinctively epistemically valuable, and perhaps even as the highest epistemic value that there is. If one considers knowledge as a cognitive achievement, then the ability to understand is a kind of success.
Learn more by exploring all concepts.