Some people read because they are too lazy to think.

The quote in the title of this piece, by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (as quoted yesterday) is a great example of someone using the term lazy in an accusatory and derogatory manner even though he's spot on.

The first and most obvious point is that learning about something by reading another persons work is an absolutely fundamental requirement for human progress. If every person had to start from scratch and develop their own basic form of mathematics, engineering, chemistry, recipes to cook, sporting techniques etc. we'd never achieve anything. It's much faster to read someone elses conclusions than to perform experiments yourself.

As I mentioned before my job is in IT, specifically web development. It's an area where there technology is moving forward at an incredible rate, it's virtually impossible to keep on top of every new technology and every new development so you have to read about what other people are doing in the area you are interested in, and then if/when you find out that what you are doing is pushing the boundaries, you have to start working the last little bit out for yourself.

I find the same is true in almost every area. Computer games are another. I quite like RTS* games. These days with loads of games being multi-player online you have to devote a huge amount of time practicing to learn the skills to become competitive, I obviously can't be bothered with that though. You can learn as much by reading a couple of guides that someone has written online as you can learn by spending hours experimenting and pouring over statistics tables. Who wants to spend time doing that?

The one caveat of this is that you do have to think a little bit as you are understanding what you read, but that's not too hard as we know, you can't be truly lazy unless you are bright enough to get away with it. I think the second quote by Einstein is much more accurate, but anyone who's read anything about relativity knows that sometimes reading can involve a great deal of thinking indeed.

So saving your thinking energy for interpretation and thinking about the last little bit of a problem is a sensible and useful thing for everyone to do. We should really say, "Some people needlessly waste time thinking, when they could just read."


*RTS = Real Time Strategy. It's a stupid label, but I didn't make it up. Basically the genre involves building bases which you then use to build armies which then get slaughtered in 30 seconds by a 12 year old from Germany who laughs at you as he logs off.