08 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
Trivia VS Knowledge
Have you ever met anyone with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure rock bands? I knew a group of people in Los Angeles who spent their time browsing the used bins at record shops back in the days when music was recorded on vinyl (which is making a comeback these days, even though most kids have never heard anything other than compressed 128-kilobite-per-second digital recordings). Some of these people were so obsessed with obscure bands that they deserved the moniker "vinyl vermin." They coll...Graffin relates the story of "Vinyl Vermin" who collected trivia about music rather than cultivating opinions on what was good or bad. He relates this to amassing taxonomy knowledge without a theory.