Here’s a semi-serious example of the usefulness of collectors. An “OOT” artefact was found somewhere in the US. It was obviously man-made, but couldn’t be placed. Hence speculations about ancient technology, forgotten civilisations, etc. An organisation of spark plug collectors (yes, they exist) recognised it for a broken spark plug of a type made in the 1920s. Thus one path of useless speculation was cut short by (not quite) useless collectors.

1. An obsession with knowing how things work.

2. An obsession with knowing why things work the way they do.

3. An obsession with finding uses for things.

The Law of Attraction is mainly true in a negative sense: it’s hard to find something if you’re not looking for it. Even if it’s right in front of you, you won’t see it if you’re not looking for it. Too much visual clutter everywhere.

Collecting stuff has always seemed pointless to me. Building stuff has always seemed much more worthwhile. The only thing I deem worth collecting is information. Information tends to be useful in unpredictable ways. Train tickets aren’t much use at all in the US. The only conceivable use is to ride a train, and AMTRAK is not worth it.

This demonstrates my basic point from above–You can have the demonstration of principle before you, but if you cannot comprehend the potential uses of it, that means nothing at all. How many times did someone walk past oil seeping from the ground, before they thought to use it as fuel? How many times did someone dig up coal, and completely ignore the potential for it to be used as fuel…?

You have to be cognizant of the potential, and be observant enough to connect what you observe with what you could do. I would wager that there were dozens of people who saw what effect penicillium mold had on things around it, but who did not connect the lack of bacterial life with anything useful. If I remember rightly, Fleming had several encounters with it “contaminating” his test agar Petri dishes before the significance of what it was doing registered with him. No doubt similar things happened to dozens of other researchers who subsequently discarded their work, failing to recognize what they were observing.

The critical thing is the insight connecting the observation with the understanding and use. If you look at something, and fail to see the significance, then you’ll miss what you might do with it entirely. This is true of everything in life.

What’s likely to matter can be judged in advance. Someone who obsessively collects dryer lint is not a promising candidate for future greatness. It’s entirely possible that a cure for cancer can be found in dryer lint, but that’s not the way to bet.

Anyway, so long as he’s not a danger to others and isn’t creating a fire hazard and isn’t a drain on the welfare system, let him collect his lint.

I’ve no doubt that there are some hidden intricacies and insights to be found in even the most prosaic things; to a degree, it is possible to know the universe through examination of the minutiae that underlie everything around us. Bus tickets may seem to be ineffably prosaic, but how certain can you be of that fact…?

I don’t think that the issue is the question of what “matters”, but the question of recognition of the significance of things. Lots of people walk right by the evidence of something new, especially in science, but it takes either a genius or a new insight to recognize the real significance of things. How many researchers go along, looking for something, and dismissively ignore anything that doesn’t conform to their idea of what they’re looking for?

Reality is not conducive to rigid preconceptions; you have to be loose, flowing, adaptive–Move and think like water, not stone. You cannot move the universe to conform to your prejudiced and preconceived notions of what the nature of things really are.The key insight is that you have to be observant and mindful of the actual implications of what you’re observing.

This is what separates an eccentric and difficult genius from a nerd.

The difficulty is: unless you know how to tell what matters, you can’t tell a genius from a nerd.