THE QI MANIFESTO

Ten steps to making your

life more interesting.

1. Everything is interesting You just have to look at it the right way. At the beginning of QI, we set ourselves the Quite Boring challenge, to se if we could turn up anything that was intrinsically dull. We failed. Allow yourselves the luxury of looking closely and patiently at anything —a turnip, the history of Chelmsford, a letter from an insurance company— and new layers of detail come into focus. 2. Ask more questions QI is one long string of questions. Six year-olds are full of questions, before school and busy parents teach them that you get on quicker by pretending to know things. Socrates asked lots of difficult questions. He might have ended up dead (who doesn’t) but he was never bored and he never bored anyone else. 3 . We all know less than we think we know That’s what “general ignorance” means. Cultivate humility and a sense of mystery. “The wise man knows that he knows nothing” (Socrates, again). Despite what some scientific fundamentalist tell us, we still don’t know how or why the universe began, what consciousness or light are, or even the best way to bring up our children. 4. Look for new connections We always tell our researchers to only write down things they don’t already know. They find this hard, because formal education is all about recycling and repeating other people’s knowledge (some wag once defined education as the process by which the notes of the professor appear in the notebooks of the student, without passing through the mind of either). Interestingness is a lot like humour— it can’t be defined or taught, it’s a spark which arcs between two previously unconnected things.

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THE IDLER

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SUMMER 2008