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In PlayStation’s 2022 instalment of God of War, Loki is attempting to assemble a primordial mask which he’s assured will reveal the ultimate explanation of the universe.
Loki: If that mask has all the answers–
Kratos: –then it will surely exact a price. Be wary of shortcuts to knowledge.
Practically the same idiom appears in a letter Carl Jung wrote to a Catholic priest on the topic of psychedelics: ‘Be wary of unearned wisdom’.
This is an important lesson. It means there are consequences to not doing things properly.
Unfortunately, the online world is replete with learning fads that promise easy ways to gain important things. To name a few:
- Book summaries, which should be used to help decide if a book should be bought, not to understand the book. If the bulk of a book’s value can be summarised in a few pages, it should be an article.
- Online courses, specifically in business growth and trading: there is some useful content in the space, but if the marketing promises discrete and specific metrics (‘How to triple revenue in 1 month’), it probably won’t deliver.
- Elaborate memory techniques, like Sherlock Holmes’ infamous ‘mind palace’, are typically contrived and unsucccessful.
