# How to be less ignorant?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-be-less-ignorant/649972>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [February 11, 2013, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-be-less-ignorant/649972 "2013-02-11T14:51:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 33

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**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\
**Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-be-less-ignorant/649972/33 "2013-02-11T21:55:35Z")

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**Frylock** had some good advice in [another thread you started](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=680597):

> [@What does Socrates mean by this quote?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-socrates-mean-by-this-quote/648709/35):
>
> You can’t treat Socrates’s words as aphorisms. Every word we have from him is part of a more or less extensive dialogue with all kinds of complex background informing the meaning of what he said at any particular moment in the text. You need to at least read large passages, if not (for whatever reason) the works as a whole. Socrates simply wasn’t an aphorist. He didn’t deliver one-liners. He engaged in dialogue, and he has to be read that way.

> [@What does Socrates mean by this quote?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-socrates-mean-by-this-quote/648709/36):
>
> But anyway, the main point is–Plato is best read at the long passage or even the book level. One-liners do not really explain what’s going on in the Socratic corpus. The way you’re reading him reminds me of how people used to treat the Bible in my churches growing up–as a series of pick-and-choose “bible verses” that you can pull out for this occasion or that. Works in a pinch, I guess, but is fundamentally missing the point.

I would generalize this to say that the way to be less ignorant is **not** just to memorize a whole bunch of isolated facts and aphorisms and bits of knowledge, but to learn about things in context and see how things fit together.

The more you learn about a subject, the easier it becomes to learn yet more, because you have something to link your newly-gained knowledge onto, a framework to fit it into.

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