The poverty of stim­u­lus the­ory argues (some­thing along the lines) that lan­guage must be innate, not learned, because a child could not develop know­ledge of com­plex gram­mar and lan­guage based on the lim­ited input they receive from adults. It’s also some­thing that keeps pop­ping into my head as I get frus­trated by myself and my inab­il­ity to write.

I read A Year of Magical Think­ing by Joan Didion, and came out think­ing that if I could write like that I could really write. And I think of incid­ents I could write about, how I would write about it. And then I get to the com­puter and instantly turn to Google Reader to catch up with the latest Lolcats before switch­ing my atten­tion to Twit­ter to see what know­ledge I can glean in 140 characters.

And then I beat myself up because I order a copy of Didion’s non-fiction from Amazon since the lib­rary doesn’t have it and it seems to be hard to get. Because tech­nic­ally, I can’t really afford it.

And I beat myself up because I sign up for two courses I really want to do. Because tech­nic­ally, I can’t really afford it.

Lolcats? Lolcats are free.

But in this case, is free neces­sar­ily good? Is free healthy? It’s the cheap but bad for you food versus the expens­ive but good for you food argu­ment, but in know­ledge form.

Is inform­a­tion worth pay­ing for? Can the stim­u­lus be made richer simply by invest­ing in it? How to tell the dif­fer­ence between what’s worth pay­ing for, and what you wouldn’t (shouldn’t) use, even if it were free?

You can be an expert on any­thing on the inter­net. Pick a topic, make some lists, wait to be inter­viewed on other blogs — cha-ching, pop-up Expert. This is not neces­sar­ily expert­ise worth listen­ing to. This is unlikely to be expert­ise worth listen­ing to. That may be an unjus­ti­fi­able com­ment, to assume that someone who blogs their know­ledge knows less that someone who write journal articles.

What really mat­ters is the proven­ance of the inform­a­tion. I trust Didion on grief because she has been there. Do I trust her more because she can write well about it? Because she has been pub­lished on the sub­ject? If I wrote about grief, would I trust myself as a source? I have a degree in lin­guist­ics, but there are so many more places I would send you for inform­a­tion on lin­guist­ics than my brain, which can barely recount the poverty of the stim­u­lus argu­ment. I would send you to books. I would refer you to other people’s brains. Does that mean they’re experts? Or just that I trust in the proven­ance of the inform­a­tion? I trust them to tell you what they don’t know as well as what they do know.

I don’t know.