Welcome to my personal learning and knowledge management site!
Here I try to learn and organize what I think I know, what I think I don’t, to what extent and how I think I came to know. My professional experience lies between international development and the management and interpretation of data and inforrmation, and I have particular interest in discussions of how we think and build our knowledge, how certain we can be about what we know, how we deal with uncertainty or simply not knowing, what is our criteria for accepting or rejecting something as more or less true.
The figure below is a map to this site. It also describes how I try to ingest data and information collected from the internet, books, colleagues or my own experience, and process that data and information in the pages of this site.
The page titled Fan contains blog posts intended to be analytical and researched. It is my attempt to question myself and make sense of the available evidence and literature, to separate the grain from the chaff. The page titled Engelberg Huller has a similar role but is focused on quantitative data analyses. Fan and Engelberg Huller are the engines driving my learning process and this site. They are my search for evidence and causal argumentation.
The research and analyses done in Fan and Engelberg Huller result in selected lists of resources (Barn), facts and stylized facts (Cupboard), which I expect to use again in future posts or generally rely on.
The page titled Kitchen Table contains blog posts that are a bit more freewheeling. I give myself the liberty to make associations – sometimes rather far fetching, ask questions and develop working hypotheses or draw tentative conclusions – sometimes quite questionable ones. The topics also tend to be more philosophical and personal. Use your own judgment and a grain of salt in reading the posts in Kitchen Table. But also do not judge them too harshly: I see these posts as necessary steps in my learning process, even if also the most likely ones to be just plain wrong. For my own amusement, and if helpful to you, I rate these posts with 1, 2 or 3 bottles of beer, the more bottles the more of a stretch I feel they are.
For more about me, this blog or the criteria and approach I adopted here for my personal learning and knowledge management, please visit the About page.
Thank you for visiting! I hope you find something of use to you.
– Alex Uriarte Somaglino