A23
Public Record
Excerpt From article.

Inherent Rewards in Learning by Interest: The importance of self-driven discovery.

Self-driven discovery occurs exclusively while one is following her or his inherent interests. It has proven to be the most reliable resource for finding personal passion and fulfillment — self-driven discovery causes one to enjoy what they are learning, and has even proved to make one more aware of one’s self. […]

Teaching is most effective when it fosters students’ tendency toward self-driven discovery. […] In his memoirs, Doublass In The Looking Glass, Stegan Doublass describes how self-driven discovery allowed him to develop his own intuition:

I remember several times that my dad had tried, very calmly, very lovingly, to help me figure out a problem, and I remember several times telling him that I wanted to solve it out on my own. He’d sit there and watch me quietly, or walk around pretending not to watch me, all the while knowing each mistake I’d make before I’d made it. Changes in his breath informed my decisions. Every time I took a misstep, I would hear him grunt quietly. I became so tuned to it that I’d hear him hold his breath as I inched toward what he considered ‘errors.’ He taught me his way while actively trying not to. […] When I’m working on something now, I do the exact same thing; I breathe the way he did while he watched me. But my timing is different because it’s based on my experiences, not his. […] Somewhere inside of me I know when I’m about to make a mistake. I know that because I always remember in hindsight, the little voice that told me I was about to f––– something up. But if I listen for it, I can hear my dad’s breath coming out of my nostrils, pausing as I inch toward future regrets, which causes me to take a step back to reassess my strategy. I can’t count how many mistakes I’ve avoided from just listening to that. […] It’s a great way to remember my father, so many years after his passing. Without trying to he taught me to teach myself. […] I don’t know what most people mean when they say it, but that’s what I mean when I use the word ‘intuition.’ […]

In an interview, actress Karleen Wayett defined foresight as follows:

In the context of creation, intuition and foresight are the same thing. […] I develop intuition and foresight by experimenting with the form. During that time I sort of try everything I can think to try, and every one of those experiments is guided by the fact that I’m interested in what I’m doing, otherwise I’d be doing something else. The more results I see from experiments, the better I can accurately predict future experiments. […]

If you see how someone else solves a problem, you’re given the choice to either a) repeat their solution or b) find one on your own. […] The popular solution to common problems are just the ones that are the most widely known; they aren’t necessarily the “best” or “most efficient.” More than anything, they are repeated because they have been tested. But I believe wholeheartedly that a society cannot grow if it continues to recycle solutions. […] Since the inception of the Public Record, there has been a remarkable decline in unique solutions to common problems. Now that all of our collected solutions have been compiled and made universally accessible, people are more likely than ever to repeat the outcome of somebody else’s work than to find their own solution. […]

If interest is the most frequent contributor to self-driven discovery, and if self-driven discovery is the most frequent contributor to finding unique solutions and, by extension, progress, I believe it is fair to say that interest can be blamed for most of human progress. […]

Debruh Vernt, M.T.